What is a discipline and why does it matter?

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Knowing about our disciplines is more and more important given the increasingly generic demands of teaching and assessment, the proliferating ‘lethal mutations of research findings’ in education, the boom in well-meaning but often painfully under-researched books on teaching, and the 2022 Ofsted research review for English which – certainly for secondary education – fell well below an acceptable professional and intellectual standard.

How we understand our disciplines matters because student outcomes are improved not by ‘the amount of knowledge’ a teacher has but by ‘how teachers see the surface and the deeper understandings of the subjects that they teach’ (Hattie, 2012, p. 28) – that is, how profoundly teachers understand their disciplines. For us in English, it’s lovely to read in the national saudi arabia email list curriculum that our subject has ‘a pre-eminent place in education and in society’ because it develops students ‘culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually’ (DfE, 2013, p. 3) but this doesn’t in fact tell us much about what it is.

It is an everyday experience to chat with colleagues from different disciplines, and then to reflect that people from different disciplines do, in fact, see things very differently. This everyday experience tells us something significant about disciplines: they are not simply collections of different data – this is an error propagated by the extreme enthusiasts for cognitive science and by the overused and inaccurate metaphor that our brains are like computers.