To be sure, there are many issues that cut across disciplines. But while historians, psy­ chologists, and mathematicians may all explore how best to foster “deep understanding” in their college classrooms, teaching and learning are, in the end, not the same across the fields - nor, for that matter, are inquiry and exploration into these processes. p. 2

For good or for ill, scholars of teaching and learning must address field-specific issues if they are going to be heard in their own disciplines, and they must speak in a language that their colleagues understand. This language, which we are choosing to call a discipline's “style,” comprises, at its core, what Joseph Schwab so elegantly distin­ guished as substantive and syntactic structures: the “conceptions that guide inquiry” and the “pathways of enquiry [scholars] use, what they mean by verified knowledge and how they go about this verification” (1964: 25, 21). p. 2

During discussions with the first two classes of Carnegie Scholars at the Foundation and in Campus Program colloquiums held at AAHE's National Conference, Carnegie Foundation senior scholar Mary Huber (a cultural anthropologist by training) was struck by the extraordi­ nary efforts of individual participants to find a common language and to negotiate and talk across their different disciplinary styles. p. 4

The orienting essay claims that these disciplinary styles empower the scholarship of teaching by guiding scholars to choose certain problems, use certain methods, and present their work in certain ways. But these styles also constrain one's willingness to read literature on teaching and learning from other fields, and they can limit pedagogical and scholarly imagination. p. 4

In the social sciences (communication, management, sociology, and psychology), the scholarship of teaching and learning draws on, and even contributes to, core areas of these fields' theoretical and applied concerns (Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8). p. 11

In addition, the quan­ titative and qualitative research methods with which social scien­ tists are most familiar are more obviously adaptable to the study of teaching and learning than are the typical methods of scholars in the humanities and sciences. p. 11

A gap exists, however, between the interests of these researchers, who are trying to understand basic issues such as the nature of mathematical thinking, and the interests of teaching faculty, who want to know what works. p. 14

This story is, of course, about the strength of disciplinary styles in shaping the scholarship of teaching and learning. But it is also a story about the emergence of a “trading zone” among the disciplines, where scholars are busy simplifying, translating, telling, and persuading “foreigners” to hear their stories and try their wares. In this zone, one finds scholars of teaching and learn­ ing seeking advice, collaborations, references, methods, and col­ leagues to fill in whatever their own disciplinary communities can­ not or will not provide. Their goals are to do better by their stu­ dents, and they are willing (within limits) to enter the trading zone and buy, beg, borrow, or steal the tools they need to do the job. p. 19

References p. 22