ABSTRACT
In the past two decades, many disciplines that have historically taught in traditional lecture formats have increasingly sought to incorporate active learning pedagogies – as a way to increase retention, strengthen the “STEM pipeline” and improve student learning outcomes. In this process of curricular augmentation (or in some cases, transformation), it has become commonplace to adopt instructional innovations from other disciplines, often with little understanding of the original context of the instructional approach – resulting in a fragmentary adoption of instructional practices that are more holistically conceived and practiced in the originating discipline. When viewing this appropriation through the lens of Shulman’s signature pedagogies (2005), it is evident that the origins of problem-based learning in medical rounds, exploration of case law in law classrooms and critique in art and design studios all have some resonance in contemporary approaches to active learning. But rather than a signature pedagogy being adopted in a wholesale or monolithic manner, many instructional techniques from diverse sources are being brought together in a sort of bricolage. The adoption of studio practices has resulted in a similarly fragmentary pattern of adoption, which I seek to describe in greater detail in this chapter.
