Exploring Signature Pedagogies

"Exploring Signature Pedagogies is an excellent resource that would be valuable to faculty at all stages of their career and to educational developers for their work with faculty and with graduate students.... Exploring Signature Pedagogies will be an excellent read for all involved in teaching in higher education. Experienced faculty will benefit if they are looking to re-energize their teaching by helping them reflect upon their own praxis. The book will also be of enormous benefit to anybody wishing to engage in SoTL research. Educational developers who need to work in disciplines different from their own will benefit from the overview of disciplinary pedagogies."

Educational Developers Caucus Resource Review

"This collection of essays as a whole will be most interesting to scholars of teaching and learning. It is more likely to be used as a reference book for those in particluar fields who want to examine their own teaching habits, both positive and negative, as aprt of a broader disciplinary culture. It will be particularly helpful to those who have recently left graduate education and are at the beginning of teaching careers."

Teaching Theology and Religion

“Exploring Signature Pedagogies advances scholarship of teaching and learning by providing foundational, discipline-based essays that unmask the assumptions, preconceptions, expectations, and implications of traditional knowledge-building practices in the college classroom. Coming from a wide variety of disciplines, the authors broaden current analysis of signature pedagogies beyond the preparation of professional practitioners and future college faculty to invite especially those teaching introductory courses and those in the arts and humanities. They challenge all of us to look carefully at our teaching, leading us in thoughtful questioning of inherited pedagogies and urging us to design intentional practices based on actual disciplinary priorities and evidence of student learning.”

Jennifer Meta Robinson, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, and President-elect, International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

"This volume sets out to create conceptual and empirical bridges between the scholarship of teaching and learning and the emerging study of signature pedagogies. Drawing upon the talents of gifted scholar-teachers from across the University of Wisconsin’s state-wide array of fine institutions, the editors present a pioneering extension of the concept of signature pedagogy from the professions to the academic disciplines. They demonstrate how faculty members from an entire state system can collaborate as a powerful community of scholars."

Lee S. Shulman, President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus

Stanford University

“Exploring Signature Pedagogies is a remarkable achievement that is sure to find its way onto everyone’s short shelf of essential books on teaching and learning. Here we see more evidence that the scholarship of teaching and learning can no longer be described as an ‘emergent’ field, but is well into its prime and yielding some of the most exciting and potentially transformative discoveries in higher education today. The ambition of the project is breathtaking: to give fourteen Cook’s tours of selected disciplines across the arts and sciences, highlighting each field’s distinctive habits of head, hand, and heart and how these habits form—or more often, fail to inform—how teaching and learning is done with undergraduates. But the real contribution of the volume lies in the authors’ recommendations for how disciplinary fields might develop signature pedagogies that enact and perform the disciplines’ core concerns. This linking of teaching practices to the specific disciplines being taught makes the concept of signature pedagogies an improvement on older pedagogical enthusiasms such as active learning. It also fully demonstrates the claim that teaching, when properly conceived, is exciting intellectual work. Thus, this is the perfect book to give to faculty members who are dubious of ‘faddish’ education research. It also belongs in the hands of every beginning teacher or anyone wanting a good road map to the problems and possibilities of teaching the liberal arts. Departments will want to discuss the chapters devoted to their discipline, while SoTL researchers will find the collection useful for imagining the next generation of research. In short, there is something here for everyone, making Exploring Signature Pedagogies one of the best portals of entry to the scholarly literature on teaching and learning in higher education."

Lendol Calder, Associate Professor of History at Augustana College, currently represents the Organization of American Historians on the board of the National Council on History Education.

“What does it mean to think like a historian? Like a mathematician? Like a sociologist? As we learn in Exploring Signature Pedagogies, scholars of teaching and learning across the disciplinary spectrum are designing strategies to help undergraduates experience the habits of mind that characterize expertise in particular fields. The engaging essays in this extraordinary book pull back the curtain on twenty years of work on college and university teaching in fourteen disciplines, and highlight innovations that are turning classrooms, labs, and field sites into spaces where students practice what in earlier days professors simply preached. Exploring Signature Pedagogies will be an invaluable resource for faculty and graduate students who are deepening and intensifying their own involvement with teaching as serious intellectual work. I really do love this book."

Mary Taylor Huber, Senior Scholar

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching