Surfacing disciplinarity: Citation as a site for integrative learning

“I teach our general education humanities requirement,

but I don't think I’ve said the word ‘humanities’ all semester.”

This confession pivoted a recent faculty meeting from a typical discussion of assessment results and capstone assignments to a breakthrough moment in how we teach. Like other campuses, we want our students to become integrative thinkers, capable of invoking different and even divergent ways of knowing to help them understand the world with agility and complexity. This is the purpose behind general education and liberal arts programs in the United States. These programs almost always carry breadth requirements in the humanities, social sciences, arts, and natural sciences. On our campus, a recent curricular redesign included two innovative components: first, an integrative and developmental structure that should make explicit to students how their courses would equip them with multiple disciplinary lenses for understanding and responding to real-world problems and, second, regular meetings of all faculty teaching in the program, a community of practice formed around teaching students across the curriculum. But our program’s reimagined architecture—however innovative and inspiring—was not enough to make students aware of distinct disciplinary lenses, much less able to connect and apply them meaningfully. As we were reminded, after committees disband and the faculty implement a new curriculum, there’s often a gap between this strategic architecture and the tactics of an individual course.

In this confessional moment around disciplinarity and the classroom, we were learning that our curriculum and its goals of graduating integrative thinkers “are only as effective as the pedagogies that support them” (Gale, 2013: 119). We needed to change the way we were teaching. “Students in my class,” said another colleague, “can barely hold on to what they learned in the first-year course in our major. How can I expect them to make meaningful connections between my class and whatever else they’re taking? And how am I supposed to know what they’re learning across campus?” The room lit up. “I’m trained as a historian. How can I teach, and how can you expect me to teach, with an eye toward what’s going on in a psychology class?” Others in the room agreed: “And I’m a physicist. It’s enough work for me to keep up with trends in my own field; I just don’t have the expertise to integrate other disciplines in any real way.” This discussion was animated by real academic structures and concerns. In addition to a commitment to teaching, our colleagues brought lived experiences of the limits in student learning in a single semester, pressures to teach course content within neatly constructed disciplinary silos in conflict with our integrative program goals, anxiety about moving away from our expert domains, and wariness of adding more to our pedagogical plates. Would we need to reinvent ourselves as scholars and teachers in new fields? Where would we find the time? Would there be professional development support for such radical changes?

A first-year composition instructor accustomed to working with students headed toward many different disciplines offered a potential breakthrough: “What if it’s not about becoming an expert in something else? What if it’s a matter of being explicit about our own expertise, speaking the unspoken things that define who we are and that define the implicit borders between us?” As she noted, we often take for granted the norms of our disciplines and teach our individual courses from an implicit conceptual framework unknown to our students and without reference or relationship to disciplinary perspective, a tendency that perpetuates the “mystification of academic culture” (Graff, 2003: 3) and unintentionally leaves students adrift in the “often-baroque college experience” (Gale, 2013: 119). Before they can integrate and deploy a range of disciplinary ways of knowing, our students need to be aware of them and see them in action. In this moment, the problem was reframed to something we could embrace: rather than needing to reinvent ourselves to teach across disciplines, we needed to more purposefully teach disciplinarity itself.

This call for attention to disciplinarity is often met with concerns that such discussions of identity and difference will lead to hostile and hierarchical distinctions, “tribalism” (Becher and Trowler, 2001: 44–47), or “essentialist assumptions that we’re bound by static, simplified disciplinary backgrounds” (Chick, 2013: 20). Additionally, within our specific conversation, wouldn’t focusing on individual disciplines foster dis-integrative learning? On the contrary, surfacing disciplinarity would be a key step in educating students toward the integrative thinking that intentionally crosses intellectual borders. This paradox is the argument at the heart of much writing about disciplinarity. Parker’s “A New Disciplinarity” celebrates such learning in the disciplines as the transformative engagement with a community of practice that “offer[s] far more than the sum of the commodity of education offered” (2002: 375). As Nowacek asks in “Toward a Theory of Interdisciplinary Connections,” “How do students recognize as disciplinary the knowledge they’ve gathered from years of subject-specific studies in college, high school, and even elementary school, and make connections among that disciplinary knowledge?” (2007: 371–372). Or, as the scholarship on signature pedagogies asks, “do psychologists teach in ways to make their students more likely to think like psychologists? Does the English professor teach her students to read literary texts as literary scholars do? Does the physicist employ strategies to ensure her student understands the world as physicists do?” (Chick et al., 2009: 2). These literatures challenge us to collectively surface what Shulman (2005: 55) calls the “deep” and “implicit structures” of our disciplines, so we teach our disciplines as disciplines. Significantly and again paradoxically, the work on signature pedagogies in the academic disciplines asserts that they should not be limited to classes for majors, as they provide important ways of thinking, reading, understanding, and acting—and become lenses framed by well-formed ways of looking at the world, making meaning, and solving problems (Chick et al., 2009: 12).

But given the challenges and concerns our colleagues voiced earlier, how could we manageably make visible for our students these fundamental ways of thinking that we so often take for granted? When others have argued for doing so, they have often called for laudable but daunting goals of teaching such things as “historical thinking” (Wineburg, 2001), “literary learning” (Linkon, 2011), “scientific literacy” (DeBoer, 2000), the sociological imagination (Fujieda, 2009), disciplinary ways of reading (Chick et al., 2009; Manarin, 2012), and the like. Where does one even start teaching a discipline’s “values, knowledge, and manner of thinking—almost, perhaps, its total world view” (Calder, 2006: 1361)? In the preface to her book Learning to Think: Disciplinary Perspectives, Donald (2002) rightly observes that past researchers have “proclaimed the task … an impossible mission” (xii).

“We could look at our different citation styles,” mumbled a colleague. Eyebrows peaked across the room. “In MLA, we start with the author’s full name—fully spelled out—and end with the publication date because we value the writer and don’t think about texts being ‘outdated.’” Another colleague responded: “I never really thought about it, but as a psychologist I do care about the recency of sources. I want to know when, hence my discipline’s development and use of APA style. In the humanities, it’s more about relevancy than recency—you want to know who, so you use MLA.” And just like that, big questions of disciplinarity, epistemology, and ways of knowing were funneled into the very specific and surprisingly mundane practice of citation styles. Mundane, yes, but also pedagogically complex in how citations confound students in their perceived arbitrariness and frustrate faculty in their perceived simplicity. In Nowacek’s diagnosis, “Disciplinary languages remain heteroglossic, and the differences among them are not consciously recognized, much less dialogized,” making “heteroglossic juxtaposition…a necessary and important aspect of interdisciplinary thinking” (2007: 373–374). Where better—and simpler—to juxtapose heteroglossia than the concrete practice of citation?

By using citation to ground the broader epistemologies of different disciplinary groups, and by using the broader beliefs and values of the disciplines to explain specific choices in citation style, we seek “learning with understanding” (Bransford et al., 2000: 236). Recognizing, for instance, the meaningful placement of the publication date in the various citation styles as grounded in a discipline’s values (i.e., recency or relevancy) is one way of “organizing information into a conceptual framework [which] allows for greater ‘transfer’” (Bransford et al., 2000: 17). Transfer is a coveted yet elusive outcome across programs and institutional types; it indicates students’ metacognitive ability to recognize, sort, and use content and methods in new situations. Fink classifies this kind of “learning how to learn” as “significant” because it helps students add “to their own knowledge in ways that are specific to particular domains of inquiry” (2013: 58). As students learn to see how different disciplines create and share knowledge, their potential to move among and integrate these ways of knowing increases.

This moment of epiphany in conversation among colleagues inspired us to develop a practical teaching and learning tool for metonymically linking citation to disciplinary ways of knowing. By distilling these larger issues down to one universal yet troublesome topic across disciplines, we hoped to create openings for colleagues to engage with the broad curricular goals of integrative learning at the level of instruction about citation. The minute focus on citation also made accessible the larger, often abstract comparative questions of disciplinary inquiry. We are a lecturer primarily teaching first-year writing, a tenured faculty member on assignment to direct general education, and a director of faculty development. The three of us are working together as part of a team to support teaching across the disciplines. In our conversations with colleagues, we realized that not just students, but faculty as well, could use a quick heuristic for articulating some of the central differences among our fields. While our context is a multidisciplinary general education program characteristic of liberal arts education in the US, a comparative frame by which the concerns of one discipline are made visible by contrast can be useful in more focused disciplinary study as well. The result of our efforts was a simple handout (Appendix 1) we drafted by drawing on our own disciplinary knowledges, looking to academic writing textbooks from specific fields and the Writing Across the Curriculum literature, ¹ and consulting with our campus colleagues. ²

In creating this tool, we imagined the challenges and possibilities of teaching and learning disciplinary ways of knowing from the perspectives of both instructor and student. Our experiences listening to these audiences, as detailed in the opening anecdote, were central to how we conceived of this practical classroom resource that would surface for novice learners the academic codes that experts in a field, including instructors, may take for granted and thus leave hidden. The table format simplifies and organizes this compilation of complex disciplinary values, beginning on the first side with “big” concepts, questions, and values. The second side compares the “little” or more concrete disciplinary conventions embedded in citation styles. The two sides of this resource can be used together or separately as entry points into productive conversations about the often-unspoken epistemologies of our various academic domains.

Side 1: Disciplinary ways of knowing, researching, and writing

What is missing in teaching disciplinarity?

Disciplinarity is central to course design but not often explicitly built into course instruction. This omission isn’t characteristic of any one department or division, and it’s by no means purposeful or malicious. Rather, disciplinary values and practices are so foundational to our professional bedrock that they’re also part of our expert blind spot, which unintentionally replicates a blind spot—without the expertise—in students. Additionally, some disciplines “cover a broader stretch of intellectual territory” and are characterized by such differing subspecialties that colleagues in the same field perceive little in common (Becher and Trowler, 2001: 106). As a result, they “‘don’t talk much shop’” (109) because they don’t experience their work as occurring within a shared “shop” and are less likely to intentionally describe that common disciplinarity as part of a local curriculum.

The first side of our handout makes visible these disciplinary ways of knowing by tracing four disciplinary perspectives through the research process from guiding questions, to methodology, to writing conventions. Essentially, it documents a simple interview with each disciplinary perspective, asking a set of questions to articulate the processes we want—but don’t often ask—students to follow:

What kinds of questions do scholars in your discipline ask?

How do scholars in your discipline approach and answer questions?

How do scholars in your discipline share their work with others?

What we gain through comparison

As Becher noted in his preface to the first edition (1989) of Academic Tribes and Territories, “the most interesting features of the investigation [of particular fields] lay in the comparisons and contrasts between different groups” (Becher and Trowler, 2001: x). This observation led him to reject his initial plans of writing about individual fields separately, a model which would have mirrored our problematic curriculum that presents disciplines discretely, with no explicit points of intersection for analysis. Instead, like Becher’s classic book on disciplinarity, our side-by-side comparison of disciplinary moves can foreground how scholars in different fields—and instructors in different classrooms—approach problems, engage in larger conversations, and assess student work. When teachers highlight and students see the defining and distinguishing characteristics of individual disciplines, coursework has the potential to become integrative, empowering the student to take first steps toward identifying and making connections across the borders that define the scope of faculty expertise.

Imagine for a moment a student attempting to navigate the disorienting experience of moving through a daily schedule that might include courses as diverse as sociology, biology, and literature. As the first side of the handout makes clear, in each of these courses the student will need to adapt not only how they’ll be assessed, but also—and more importantly—how to think. For example, in a literature classroom, they’re asked to make meaning of human experiences using cultural artifacts like a 19th-century novel as evidence for their claims, but in science class, they’re asked to observe the natural world with objectivity, guided by hypothesis rather than argument. Using this handout as a tangible entry point, faculty can illustrate to students that the discipline-specific work central to a particular course (a thesis-driven close reading, a hypothesis-driven lab report) is not arbitrary but reveals certain epistemological claims, or how and what we know, embedded in different streams of academic inquiry. Once students understand how the diverse content of their academic schedule is organized around these disciplinary structures, they can better understand their courses as individual and complementary units within larger curricula and begin to integrate learning across multiple sites within and beyond academic settings.

Our colleagues’ feedback on early drafts of this handout provided occasion to witness telling moments of self-reflection made possible only through such cross-disciplinary comparisons. A professor in the music department noted that, unlike his colleagues in other fields, he needed two ways to respond to the question, “How do scholars in your discipline share their work with others?” He admitted that, though he had not articulated it before, students in the arts need to know their process is entirely dependent on whether they're sharing their work through performance or through publication. Similarly, a colleague in English noted that seeing these disciplinary categories lined up beside each other forced him to rethink his first-year composition course. Though the course goal was to prepare all students to write well in all majors, the course assessments involved only humanistic argumentation, a misalignment in course design which only became visible when his own disciplinary values were surfaced in comparison to others.

Uses in the classroom

It’s one thing to help colleagues recognize the contours of different disciplines, but another altogether to support them in teaching these concepts to first-year students. We needed to provide sample activities for how the handout could support students in recognizing and integrating these disciplinary ways of knowing. Drawing on the ideas that bubbled up after we distributed the handout to our colleagues, we offer the following as possible examples.

Continually (re)frame course content and purpose

Use the handout to sustain semester-long conversations about course materials, assessments, and learning goals. During the first week of class, introduce the handout with the syllabus to discuss connections and distinctions among previous coursework and to alert students to new expectations. Throughout the semester, revisit the handout to help students unpack the tacit, discipline-specific requirements embedded in major assignments. During the final weeks of the semester, ask students to use the handout to reflect on the course as part of a larger curriculum (e.g., general education, major, or minor).

Connect course content to “real world” relevance

Ask students to find and unpack job advertisements using the handout, focusing specifically on how many careers draw on knowledge and experience in multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Course and assignment redesign

Create inquiry-based courses or assignments that ask students to work through a problem from multiple disciplinary angles. For example, a course on racial identity might ask students to examine the concept of race as a biologist, an anthropologist, and a visual artist. How would these examinations differ? How would combining these perspectives lead to more meaningful conclusions and real-world applications? Conversely, ask students to reflect on the disciplinary aspects of completing a real-world project, such as designing an application for a computer engineering course. What disciplinary tools proved useful?

In preparation for academic advising

Advisors can use this side of the handout to stage conversations with advisees about the purpose of curricular requirements. As students move through their coursework, advisors can help students track their academic progress in the context of disciplinary learning and real-world relevance.

Side 2: Citations and surfacing the principles behind the punctuation

What is missing in teaching citations?

Few professors outside of composition courses spend significant instructional time on citation style. In some courses, the preferred style may be simply named in a writing assignment or outlined in a disciplinary style guide. But some faculty are more likely to mark a student’s accurate adherence to citation guidelines than address the deeper structures undergirding its particular set of stylistic conventions. This focus on rule-following is perhaps unsurprising when we remember that faculty typically write and teach within a single citation style and have little occasion to look beyond their own field. Even many disciplinary style guides offer exhaustive prescriptions for how to cite any number of source types with very little attention to why the specific prescriptions exist in the first place. As a result, the rules governing citation have earned a reputation among students as being arbitrary and confusing, and among faculty as a lower-order concern that should easily be mastered.

While faculty members typically spend their careers writing in a single style (or a few closely related ones), students may be asked to move between several styles in the scope of a single semester, even within a single day—part of Nowacek’s “heteroglossia” (2007: 373). For these novice writers (to say nothing of faculty themselves), differences among styles can feel confounding or irrelevant. Strategic students will likely limit their understanding of the rules to a formulaic copying from a good web resource. Yet when the conventions of scholarly citation are considered comparatively, they become meaningful. By placing four major citation styles into a comparative framework, our handout serves as an occasion for students to uncover the principles behind the rules. Knowing the “why” behind the rules can support students’ ability to more deftly apply each style in its appropriate contexts. Additionally, knowing the “why” behind the rules reinforces and grounds the more abstract, epistemological shifts in disciplinary ways of knowing that punctuate their course schedules.

What we gain through comparison

This comparative framework immediately surfaces a series of important questions: why do some citation styles elevate publication dates while others elevate page numbers? Why do some fields require extensive footnoting while others seek the cleanest possible incorporation of quoted text? Hyland (1999) suggests that the hard sciences use fewer citations because the validity of their research is evidenced in the scientific method, while the soft disciplines achieve authority in the quantity of cited sources. Becher and Trowler’s interviews with a variety of academic staff reveal a more nuanced set of reasons for when, whether, and how much to cite: a mathematician’s explanation of using fewer citations to demonstrate a “freshness” of “unclouded” ideas, a biologist meeting the need to “‘prove’” widespread reading and “‘acknowledge the foundation’” for current research, a sociologist’s desire to “‘reinforce’” a position and “‘[keep] good intellectual company,’” and a historian’s protection “‘from reviewer’s criticisms’” of missing a relevant source (2001: 114–115). In isolation, these practices fall into our expert blind spots. But for the faculty we consulted in the development of this handout, discussion of these conventions was an occasion for both self-reflection on the priorities of their own fields and discovery of the priorities of their colleagues’ fields. For example, citation styles which foreground the date of publication (such as American Psychological Associate [APA] or Chicago Author-Date) express the scholarly currency attached to more recent research. By contrast, in the humanities (Modern Language Association [MLA]), older sources are accepted and often valued as foundational in the field. In the Chicago Manual of Style—often used by historians—thorough citation is the highest value; any text referenced by the scholar must receive a footnote, which is used instead of a parenthetical reference to allow space to expand on context. In the sciences and humanities, by contrast, citations that name secondary sources are considered complete, and elaborate footnotes are used more sparingly to focus and clarify the question under consideration.

Most profoundly, viewing these guidelines in conversation with one another makes visible the different disciplinary understandings of the role of the scholar. In our distillation, these roles ranged from serving as a reporter of facts and new findings (sciences); offering an original interpretation of a primary source (humanities and arts); and putting forth an argument in an ongoing debate, often through new data used to confirm or challenge a theory (social sciences). In each case, we were able to map these concepts to specific guidelines within the different citation styles, thus making concrete these abstract approaches to constructing knowledge.

Perhaps the most striking contrast came between the faculty in the sciences and those in the humanities and social sciences. Our science colleagues insisted on students minimizing quoted material as much as possible, as data are more important than phrasing in the source text. In contrast, in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, quoted material is itself the object of study, and capturing exact phrasing is essential. Our literature colleagues shared that a lack of quoted material in a paper would be an immediate red flag, but our science colleagues argued exactly the opposite. For students, hearing such conflicting instructions—without surfacing the why behind them—can be mystifying. Instead, the handout clarifies why good writing in these fields looks different and attaches these principles to concrete practices like using (or not using) authors’ full names, quotation marks and quoted material, and first-person pronouns.

Uses in the classroom

This side of the handout can be used to support a range of activities for learning citation styles. Unlike the usual methods of rote memorization and handbook practice, these activities can help students recognize the underlying disciplinary ways of knowing–and the meaningful differences of others.

Lead students through comparisons

Before distributing the handout, show students the example citations and ask them to identify differences. Ask them to speculate about the principles driving these distinctions. Then distribute the handout and walk them through the conclusions. Finally, conclude with a metacognitive conversation about how it feels to participate in these different forms of scholarly inquiry and why it’s important for students to have exposure to multiple disciplines.

Distribute with writing assignments

While we believe a short, rich discussion in class is a valuable exercise, some may only have time to direct students to the handout as a supplemental resource. A good time to do this would be upon the first mention of the required citation style. Highlight the specified style and remind students that these expectations will vary among courses for sound reasons.

Engage with scholarly work as writing from different fields

Give students excerpts from scholarly articles in three different fields but covering the same topic. For example, organ transplant research including ethical debates about savior siblings from philosophy, advances in immunosuppressant protocols from a medical journal, and a literary analysis of a novel about human cloning for the purposes of transplantation. Ask students: What is the central question of each article? What kinds of evidence do the authors use to make their case? What are some differences in the writing styles? How do they account for these differences, drawing from the handout? Ask them to pick two of the authors. How might the questions and evidence shift if they were co-authoring a paper? What if the third author joined the project?

In this project, we hoped to wade through our campus’s calls for interdisciplinary education and integrative thinking by offering a simple, discrete touchpoint for these lofty goals in the actual classroom. To this end, we focused on naming our disciplinary practices, tying them to the concrete forms of writing and inquiry that we require of students, and showcasing how these methods converge across some fields and diverge across others. As we began to introduce the handout to colleagues across campus, we were delighted to find that it became a catalyst for the same kinds of thoughtful reflection that had generated its composition. Our colleagues’ first response was often “where am I in this framework?” followed by a moment of realization about the deeper work of other departments or even the unspoken beliefs of their own.

In striving for concision, readability, and broad use, we didn’t aim for a comprehensive or authoritative source for all disciplines and subdisciplines, or all forms of disciplinary inquiry and citation. For example, readers of this article won’t find SAGE Harvard (the citation style of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education) in the handout, or a description of its similarity to the citation practices of the natural and social sciences. Instead, we encourage users to treat this version as a draft and to adapt it to their own teaching contexts. The value, then, of this handout is in its use to create an occasion for conversations, both among colleagues and between an instructor and students. It serves as an object lesson to spark the kinds of metacognitive reflection that are essential to the development of integrative thinking. These conversations and reflections would then be fruitful ground for research on these disciplinary ways of knowing, student learning, transfer, and whatever else happens when we surface what had previously remained hidden.