Hallstead, Tracy. “Disciplines in Dialogue: A Learning Commons Perspective.” Double Helix 3:1(2015): 1-7. Web.  

Summary: 

The article opens with a common scenario at Universities, a student sits in the Learning Commons, or Tutoring center, and struggles to make connections between the class work she was forced to take, and the class work that she is interested and majoring in. As Hallstead is an academic working in the Learning Commons, she explains that she sees students struggling to make connections between what they deem as busy, waste-of-time work, and academia that they are actually interested in. Her duty in this scene is to “inspire a sense of purpose” in the student, and ask them how this course might add new values or insights into the courses that they are already knowledgeable in. She then proposes her radical pedagogy: to teach student writers as though we (as educators) are aware of the other disciplines in their course load.  

Hallstead isn’t suggesting the impossible: that we cater every lesson and assignment to be connected to student’s personal majors, but rather that we promote informal ways of discussing the intersectionality of disciplines with students.  

The divide between sciences and humanities was established, as Hallstead claims, in the industrialization of the Romantic period, but it was really in the late 1950’s when academics truly acknowledged the academic split of intellectuals into two polar groups: sciences and humanities. It therefore makes sense that students categorize information into right and left hemispheres, but more than this, students categorize information into “this is useful and relevant to my major and future career” and “this is useless.” Hallstead claims that this is where students struggle to succeed in courses outside of their majors- students are so worried with only receiving “relevant” information that they fail to search for connections between these “useless” lessons and their prior knowledge.  

One example Hallstead draws on is that of 1970’s athlete and amputee Van Phillips, who designed a new C-shaped prosthetic limb which provided a wider range of movement and durability. Phillips credited his new shape of prosthetics to East Asian weaponry; he understood his own situation through a historical lens and thus created a new product that would quickly surpass all the new prosthetics that scientists had been developing for decades.  

Phillips’ success in his crossing over of East Asian weaponry and prosthetics inspires Hallstead to prompt her students who struggle with new information to ask: “what other courses do you have?” and, “Can you recall a reading or concept from your other courses that bears upon your topic at hand?” As an academic in the Learning Commons, Hallstead is able to take the time to personalize her pedagogy, and tells her experience in working with a student, Nick, as he struggled to understand “McDonaldization” in his sociology class. Nick specifically struggled to incorporate the terms efficiency, calculability, and predictability into his essay.  

Hallstead then choose to share a story with Nick: she had been at Mcdonald’s recently, and saw an older, affluent, white male yell at a hearing-impaired worker, telling her she needs to get his order right and make sure his food is hot. He was incredibly rude and ignorant to the worker’s hearing disability. Nick then brought up something he’d learned about in his psychology course: bullying. He noted that the older and angry white customer was bullying the worker, and when prompted, he understood that the angry customer was yelling at the worker because he wanted quicker service with results- he wanted efficiency. Then Nick rationalized that the customer was likely calculating what he would pay the worker, and what expectations he had of his meal: for it to be exactly what he ordered and for it to be steaming hot. Lastly, Nick recognized that this scene was outside the realm of predictability that the angry customer was expecting at the fast-food eatery.  

Nick soon comprehended the terms he struggled to incorporate into his essay from one conversation that stemmed from a lesson about bullying that he had learned from a psychology class. And with even more prompting Nick understood that these aspects of “McDonaldization” were products of the socialization of Americans who demand efficient and affordable service. From this one conversation in the Learning Commons, a student struggling to understand his sociology class made a connection to psychology and learned to understand his assignment. This is the learning that Hallstead promotes, dialogical one-on-one lessons which draw on connections from other coursework to understand “new” information. And Nick’s F in his sociology class improved to a C+ by the end of the semester.  

Quotations: 

“I’d therefore like to propose a radical pedagogy: that we teach student writers as though we are aware of the other disciplines in their course load…since learning begins when students connect new material to what they already know, why not explore the intersections between one’s own discipline and those in which the student may not have prior expertise?” (1) 

“I am promoting an informal, incidental way to talk to students about the other subjects that might bear upon an assignment” (2) 

“Because I work mostly in a one-on-one setting with students, I have the luxury of fostering these intersections between disciplines” (5) 

“A dialogical model not only clarifies difficult disciplinary discourse by allowing students to examine it in terms of material they more readily understand. It can also create refreshing diversity of perspective in the classroom” (6) 

“It would be interesting to witness the ‘surplus of seeing’ that poetry might lend to medicine, or that mathematics might lend to history” (6)  

Analytical Reflection:  

I love this idea of including other disciplines in teaching student writing, and as someone who worked at my school’s peer tutoring center, I can attest to the value of disciplines in dialogue. I cannot agree more with Hallstead that students today are stuck in this stigma of rationalizing new information as either “useless” of “helpful” to their major. It’s critical that we as educators find connections and segways into what students already know and what new knowledge we are presenting and challenging them with.  

But it’s easy to say that this is important and valuable, and more difficult to actually carry out in the classroom. As Hallstead claims, a personal one-on-one conversation between educator and student provides for disciplines in dialogue, and in a class of 24 students, it’s challenging to find the time for those one-on-ones in class. Still, the importance of naturally bringing other disciplines into conversation in the classroom and encouraging students to find these connections while completing their assignments, is incredibly valuable.  

For my own pedagogical research study, I’d be interested to see if I could cater most lessons and activities in my class to the theme of “disciplines in dialogue,” and then create an extension project that encourages students to take a big project or assignment from another class and have them write about how the idea of that assignment relates to genre or dialogic learning. I would predict that if I’ve been referring to disciplines in dialogue throughout the quarter, that many students would choose to do that specific extension project. This is definitely a research study that I would be interested in and could provide a new level of understanding for my students in Winter quarter.  This study could also provide students with majors outside of humanities to take more interest in English 101, as many science and business students tend to come into ENG101 with the presumption that this course is a “useless requirement.”  

Hallstead’s proposed pedagogy is worthy of trial, I believe that drawing connections between opposing dialogues helps students achieve a higher degree of learning and encourages them to see English 101 as useful and relative to their education.  This was an awesome article and incredibly relevant to teaching first-year writing and composition.