Schwab did not write his essay for this class. It's not a particularly "readerly" text, but the ideas it contains are central to this course and to others in the TEP. He describes an approach to teaching that is quite different from what many of us experienced in school as we learned about our disciplines. It may take several readings, discussion, and some writing to really get a handle on these ideas, but they are well worth it. We'll work on them over time, and you will use them again in the Assessment class, as well as in many of your methods classes. These reading notes may help you make connections to what we've been learning thus far in the course, and should point you toward some of the more essential arguments.
In this essay, Schwab argues for teaching students the structures of the discipline by having them use those structures, much in the way an expert in that field would use them in the real world. On p. 241, he writes "It is not that... "inductive" learning is better or more efficient than "expository" learning but because what is learned in the two cases is quite different. "Expository" teaching inevitably tends toward summary and the hiding of variation. "Inductive" learning tends toward summary knowledge by way of the variables involved." (Remember Duckworth's plea for complexity?)
The first part of the essay gives examples of how knowing the something about the structures of a discipline allows students to evaluate statements in that discipline. Knowing something about how history is written (comparing multiple perspectives on an event, evaluating trustworthiness and agendas of various witnesses or other writers, etc.) and using different disciplinary frames of reference (knowing the political, intellectual, social contexts in which the event occurred, and the ways historians have interpreted them) helps students evaluate the "facts" presented in a textbook. As he states on p. 236, structures permit us to "discover what kind of statement" it is (verifiable, opinion, designed to move our emotions, etc.); the degree to which an informative statement is "true," and "to discern more correctly the meanings" of statements.
The next section elaborates on these claims. He makes the argument on p. 242, "...we will need to face the fact that methods are rarely if ever neutral. On the contrary, the means we use color and modify the ends we actually achieve through them. How we teach will determine what our students learn. If a structure of teaching and learning [and assessment] is alien to the structure of what we propose to teach, the outcome will inevitably be a corruption of that content. And we will know that it is." Compare this idea to Bruner's "intellectual honesty."
The next section (pp. 252-266) is an interesting digression to those interested in the analysis of disciplinary structures, but is not so relevant for most teachers and educational psychologists. Feel free to either skip or read this section.
The final section is very important – some folks have found it is helpful to read this section first, then start at the beginning. In this section Schwab discusses how and why disciplinary structure should inform both the content and the methods a teacher uses. Compare his arguments to the first paragraph in Chapter 3 of Bruner, and to the kinds of teaching you have experienced and observed in secondary schools (or even college).
The question for WL teachers is, "what discipline are we talking about?" There is a tendency to think about language instruction as the imparting of basic skills: syntax, vocabulary, pronunciation. There are a couple of ways you might want to think about using Schwab's ideas. One is to use the disciplines English/Language Arts teachers do: Composition, Communication, Literary Criticism, etc. They apply to WL as well, though often at a rudimentary level in secondary school. You'll have to take Bruner's notion of "spiral curriculum" and "intellectual honesty" to heart! You could also use the discipline of Linguistics, the study of language (pragmatics, syntax, semantics, morphology). Which one you use may depend on your own disciplinary background – did you major in Spanish Lit, for example? Spanish linguistics?
There is a reading later in the course (Bialystok & Hakuta) that we will all read, but it may be particularly helpful for WL folks to read for disciplinary ideas related to second language learning. See especially pp. 180-189.
Because the connections
to WL are not as obvious as they are to science, history, and the like, I'd
be happy to meet with you as a group to talk about these things. I'm an old
ESL teacher, and I've taught American Sign Language to native English speakers,
so I have some background to bring to the discussion. SN