EVOLUTION
AND EMERGING TRENDS IN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES
“In education …, novelty emerges only with
difficulty, manifested by resistance,
against a
background provided by expectations.”—Thomas Kuhn
The education is in a
process of continuous changes. Myriads of changes and challenges are facing the
by the scenario. In teacher education, the modern trends favour for emerging of
academic disciplines and allied school subjects. The necessity of teachers with
proficiency in academic disciplines and professionalism in school subjects are
accounted as essential quality of prospective and ongoing teachers.
Teacher education
sector seriously focusing on the necessity of emerging academic disciplines.
Academic disciplines are in the making in the field. Some sort of new
disciplines like ‘curriculum development’, ‘technology of education’;
educational sociology and etc are emerged as new disciplines. Hence it is
relevant to have a clear understanding on the academic discipline and its
various factors by teachers and prospective teachers.
What
is Academic Discipline?
The
term academic discipline originates from the Latin words ‘discipulus’ which
means ‘pupil’ and ‘disciplina’ which means ‘teaching’. Related to it, there is
also the word ‘disciple’ as it is in the ‘disciple of Lord Budha’. The lexicon
will give a whole range of quite different meaning of the term; from training
to submission to an authority or to the control and self- control of behavior.
The term discipline as a verb means training someone to follow a rigorous set
of instructions and also imposing and enforcing obedience.
The term academic
(scientific) discipline can be defined as the academic studies that focus on a
self-imposed limited field of knowledge. It is the subject that one teaches and
researches as part of higher education is the academic discipline of that
person
It can also be defined
as form of specific and rigorous scientific training that will turn out
practitioners who have been disciplined by their discipline (subject) for their
own good.
Academic
Discipline: Special Features
The
term academic discipline becomes a technical term for the organization of
learning and the systematic production of new knowledge. Disciplines are
identified with taught subjects. But every subject taught at school or at
university cannot be called a discipline. There are more to a discipline that
the facts and concepts of a subject taught in academic setting. There are many
criteria and characteristics which indicate whether a subject a distinct
discipline (Biglan, 1973). Some of the essential characteristics of an academic
discipline are given below:
1.
Disciplines have a particular object of
research (eg: politics, society, human behavior)
2.
Disciplines have a structure of accumulated specialist knowledge referring
to their object of research
3.
Disciplines have theories and concepts
that can organize the accumulated specialist knowledge effectively
4.
Disciplines use specific terminologies
or specific languages adjusted to their research objects
5.
Disciplines have developed specific
research methods according to their specific research requirements.
6.
Disciplines must have some institutional
manifestation in the form of subjects taught at colleges or universities. It
means a discipline will have academic departments and professional associations
connected to it.
All these criteria may
not be fulfilled by all disciplines. But an academic discipline must be perfect
and should be able to accumulate more knowledge through the process of
research. It must be dynamic.
Academic
Disciplines: Classifications
Biglan (1973) has
developed a classification for disciplines according to the beliefs held about
them by the academic members. It most generally divides disciplines into ‘hard’
or ‘paradigmatic’ disciplines and ‘soft’ or ‘pre-paradigmatic disciplines’. Hard
disciplines mean they are difficult to transcend. They are developed with
certain peculiar academic area and may not be occurred any change from that peculiar
areas. Soft disciplines are able to change. They are in the making and give
birth to new academic areas. At the same time they will be able to keep their
own academic identity.
Another classification is that pure or theoretical
disciplines (eg: Mathematics) and disciplines that engage with ‘living systems’
(eg: zoology) and disciplines that engage with ‘nonliving systems’ (eg:
history).
Tony (1981) classified academic
disciplines as rural disciplines and urban disciplines. These classifications
are based up on the scope and applicability of the disciplines. He also
considered a classification of pure and applied disciplines to explain the
functions of the disciplines.
The details of classification can be
clearly read from the given illustration (figure. 1).
Figure
1. Biglan organized disciplines
across three dimensions, as shown, based on their
epistemologies,
applicability, and focus on living or never living artifacts.
(Adapted from Biglan, 1973a, 1973b)
Academic Discipline: Some Insights
Academic discipline is
vast accumulation of knowledge in a specific area. For eg: History is
discipline. It can also consider Medieval Indian History a discipline. Physics
is a discipline. Astro- physics is a discipline. Robotics is a discipline.
A discipline
incorporates experts, people, projects, communities, students, inquiries,
researches and etc that are strongly associated with the given discipline. For
Eg: Micro economics or Bio Informatics or Educational Psychology or Human value
education.
Individuals associated
with academic discipline are referred to as experts or specialists.
Educational
institutions originally use the term discipline to list and record the new and
expanding bodies of knowledge and informative procedure by the society or
community.
In 1980s there have an
explosion of academic disciplines such as media studies, journalism, women
studies, gender studies, black studies, pollution, oceanic pollution,
hospitality management, hotel management and etc.
The
Historical Perspective of Academic Discipline
Kenneth (1974) observes that like any other social
phenomena academic disciplines do have a history. Every discipline can be
analyzed by looking at its historical development. Historians of science can
look at the specific historical conditions that led to the foundation of an
academic discipline and at how it changed over time, or in other words, its
evolution. The historical perspective helps to understand the great continuity
of disciplines, but also the points of discontinuity or departure from obsolete
practices and ways of thinking. Sometimes this leads to the disappearance of an
older discipline and the creation of a new one that can replace it. In other
words, the historical perspective captures the great dynamics of the
development of science and the academic disciplines.
Historians will generally look for the wider
societal context and the overall conditions that influenced the development of
a specific discipline, for example the political climate or any particular
needs society had at a particular time, as well as internal factors that shaped
its development. For example, Julie (1990) has pointed out that the academic
discipline was an invention of the late Middle Ages. The term was first applied
to three academic areas for which universities had the responsibility of
producing trained professionals: theology, law and medicine. Julie argues that this early disciplining of
knowledge was a response to external demands, while the specialization into
disciplines that emerged in the 19th century was due to internal reasons.
The historical perspective shows that the
development of academic disciplines cannot be understood without reference to
historical context. It also helps understanding the evolutionary path taken by
specific disciplines. Often new disciplines have been set up to meet particular
political and societal needs. For example,
Roger (2002) has shown that the social sciences were set up and prospered
because of the political need of getting more information on the population,
which could be used for more effective government and which helped to stabilise
emerging political and societal structures. The new discipline of area studies
was set up in the US after the Second World War in order to train ‘area specialists’
who could assist in shaping the increasingly global US foreign policy of the
beginning Cold War era. Similarly, new disciplines like computer science and
artificial intelligence were closely linked to military applications and prospered
because of military funding. Once these new disciplines had been set up they
developed a life of their own, possibly freed from their original purpose if they
managed to diversify their funding and main stakeholders.
The formation of a new discipline thus requires
talented scientists who can take over the burden of intellectual leadership by
defining what the new discipline is about and by giving it a clear agenda for
research, which can inspire followers. In other words, founding a new
discipline needs adventurous pioneers who are willing to leave their original
discipline behind and to cover new ground, which always includes a certain risk
that they and their new discipline will possibly fail.
This means that practically every new discipline
starts off necessarily as an interdisciplinary project that combines elements
from some parent discipline(s) with original new elements and insights. Once
the discipline is established a new type of researcher is needed. The new
discipline needs people who can consolidate it by filling in the gaps left by
the pioneers. Without these consolidators and synthesizers a discipline will
never develop some stable identity and will eventually go nowhere. So in the
consolidation phase disciplines will start restricting too original ideas and
will become more and more focused on disciplinary coherence and orthodoxy.
Education emerged as a discipline
through the process of evolution. Education cumulated of knowledge from various
perceptive and acquired the status of independency in objective based research.
Bibliography
Biglan Anthony (1973), The Characteristics of
subject Matters in Different Academic Areas. Journal of Applied Psychology, 57. Pp 195-203
Hershey H. Friedman (2001), ‘The Obsolescence of
Academic Departments’, Radical Education 6:2, p. 116.
Julie Thompson Klein (1990),
Interdisciplinarity/History, Theory, and Practice, Detroit: Wayne
Kenneth
T. Grieb (1974), ‘Area Studies and the Traditional Disciplines’, The History
Teacher Pedagogy 3:2
Kuhn,
Thomas (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Roger Deacon (2002), ‘Truth, Power, and Pedagogy:
Michel Foucault on the Rise of the State University Press, p. 20.
Tony Becher (1981), ‘Towards a Definition of
Disciplinary Cultures’, Studies in Higher Education
http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/783/1/what_are_academic_disciplines.pdf
Sankaranaraynanan
Paleeri. Ast. Professor, NSS Training College, Ottapalam, Kerala.
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‘youtube’ with full name : sankaranarayanan paleeri
