Surfacing disciplinarity: Citation as a site for integrative learning

Abstract

Despite nearly ubiquitous general education requirements for students to take courses across disciplines, disciplinarity itself is often invisible to students and taken for granted by professors. We argue that surfacing these divisions and demystifying academic structures is, paradoxically, a key step in educating students toward the crossing of intellectual borders. In this article, we engage current Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to discuss the challenges both faculty and students face in navigating multidisciplinary general education programs, and we offer a practical resource for facilitating such integrative learning and pedagogy. This resource, a two-page handout outlining the disciplinary values behind the research processes and citation practices across several academic domains, can be used in a variety of settings—including classrooms and professional development workshops—for both student and faculty audiences, to achieve multiple purposes, including teaching and learning disciplinarity; demystifying disciplinary writing conventions; and assignment-, course-, or curricular redesign.