Signature Pedagogies in the Professions

Daedalus Summer 2005 The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries, in this case, their forms of professional preparation. When you do, you will generally detect the characteristic forms of teaching and learning that I have come to call signature pedagogies. These are types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions. In these signature pedagogies, the novices are instructed in critical aspects of the three fundamental dimensions of professional work –to think, to perform, and to act with integrity. But these three dimensions do not receive equal attention across the professions. Thus, in medicine many years are spent learning to perform like a physician; medical schools typically put less emphasis on learning how to act with professional integrity and caring. In contrast, most legal education involves learning to think like a lawyer; law schools show little concern for learning to perform like one. We all intuitively know what signature pedagogies are. These are the forms of instruction that leap to mind when we 1⁄2rst think about the preparation of members of particular professions–for example, in the law, the quasi-Socratic interactions so vividly portrayed in The Paper Chase. The 1⁄2rst year of law school is dominated by the case dialogue method of teaching, in which an authoritative and often authoritarian instructor engages individual students in a large class of many dozens in dialogue about an appellate court case of some complexity. In medicine, we immediately think of the phenomenon of bedside teaching, in which a senior physician or a resident leads a group of novices through the daily clinical rounds, engaging them in discussions about the diagnosis and management of patients’ diseases. I would argue that such pedagogical signatures can teach us a lot about the personalities, dispositions, and cultures Lee S. Shulman