About 10 years later, I had shifted my attention to the inves­ tigation of teaching and teacher learning. What does someone need to know and be able to do to teach something he already understands to someone else who does not? Once again, I was working in a field that assumed the existence and central impor­ tance of universal principles of general pedagogy. Instead, we found that teaching and learning, like medical diagnosis, were domain specific. Yes, general methods did exist. But the same teacher who taught one subject well did not necessarily have the capacity to teach another well. Indeed, there were dramatic sub­ ject-specific differences in the pedagogical substance and method. p. 2

These studies required us to invent the concept of pedagogical content knowledge, the idea that teaching is itself domain and sub­ ject specific. Pedagogical content knowledge became an important idea in teacher education and eventually penetrated higher educa­ tion circles. In retrospect, the concept of pedagogical content knowledge appears obvious, even inevitable. We should have understood the powerful idea that if different disciplines value par­ ticular forms of evidence and argument, narrative and explanation, then their pedagogies should reflect the same forms of representa­ tion and exposition. Disciplines have contrasting substance and syntax (to use Joseph Schwab's valuable distinction) - ways of organizing themselves and of defining the rules for making argu- p. 2

ments and claims that others will warrant. They have different ways of talking about themselves and about the problems, topics, and issues that constitute their subject matters. Since teaching and learning a subject are themselves ways of talking about and “doing” the discipline, those consistencies should follow. More generally, if domain specificity is likely to be the hallmark of inquiry, learning, and teaching in a discipline, it also follows that we should expect the discussion and investigation of teaching and learning in that discipline itself to be domain specific. p. 3

And thus we arrive at the contents of this book. Our experi­ ence with domain-specific diagnosis and pedagogical content knowledge leads us to expect that when we investigate teaching and learning for understanding, we should expect that there will be reasonable differences among domains in the ways in which inquiry is conducted, arguments are presented, and evidence is offered. And indeed, that is precisely what we have discovered in researching and putting together this volume. In this collection of essays, the authors report on their investigations of what has been going on in the scholarship of teaching and learning in their dis­ ciplines. p. 3

At the heart of differences among the disciplines lie two key concepts that are central to understanding how inquiry proceeds in any discipline - method and metaphor. Inherently ambiguous, the word method is used to character­ ize both the approaches and techniques employed in teaching and the strategies and tactics employed in investigation. Thus we ask about both teaching methods and research methods. With regard to teaching, we ask, “Are you using case method or lecture, small­ group discussions or individual computer-based interactive tuto­ rials? Do you teach using Socratic methods or direct instruction?” Method also refers to the techniques, strategies, and operations used by scholars to conduct inquiries. Thus, empirical research p. 3

articles nearly always include a section on method that describes how the study was conducted. Historians and anthropologists both employ methodological appendices to offer the details of how they went about their work. What references did they consult and where? Whom did they interview and how? Similarly, all research proposals are expected to offer detailed accounts of the investigatory methods. p. 4

Classically, both senses of method were the same - they converged. Your research method was how you organized your evidence into a powerful and persuasive argument, which was also your teaching method. Method described your form of argument, and it was clearly domain specific. The study and teaching of ethics called for a different method from the study and teaching of natural science, or mathematics, or politics. One issue that this collection of essays explores is the methods employed to investi­ gate the efficacy and character of the methods employed to teach and learn - the methods of methods. How do we go about study­ ing the ways we go about teaching and learning in a variety of dis­ ciplines, fields, professions, interdisciplines, and the like? p. 4

Inquiry, however, is not only about method: It is also about substance. What are the key concepts, principles, and ideas that animate your work? What are its problems, topics, and issues? What is it really about? This kind of discussion places enormous demands on our capacity to represent our ideas in terms that oth­ ers can comprehend or to use representations that are themselves generative for understanding the essential features of our concep­ tions. Metaphor refers to those tools we employ to clarify and con­ nect the substance of our ideas. Here we find, in all fields, the cen­ tral roles played by that family of representations we call analo­ gies, metaphors, and similes, as well as narratives and examples. The role of these devices is to connect matters we already under­ stand to others we understand less well. The role of metaphor and narrative in the history of ideas is well documented in many places. Its role in pedagogy is less well understood but no less important. Another central question we ask in this volume is what the metaphors are, broadly speaking, that we use to represent the substance of our work in teaching and learning the disciplines. And here again, as with method, the value of representations in inquiry is highly domain specific. p. 4