Decoding the Disciplines in European Institutions of Higher Education: Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Approach to Teaching and Learning (DECODING)

Teaching/Learning is a complex and challenging process where the ability of teachers to transfer their knowledge to learners and at the same time create new knowledge with learners is of particular importance. During lectures, teachers demonstrate their expertise and knowledge of the subject taught, but despite their efforts to present everything clearly and consistently, most teachers may notice that students find it difficult to assimilate, understand or learn certain things presented during lectures. It has been confirmed that an active involvement of students in the learning process helps them assimilate the learning material more easily. Recently, more different methods that are used to involve students or pupils in the learning process have emerged. One of such methods is the Decoding the Disciplines (DD) model. This model is innovative in that it increases student learning and specialist teaching by narrowing the gap between expert thinking and that of a complete novice. The DD method is based on 7 steps and they serve as a series of questions which help teachers reflect upon their experience and reveal how their expertise knowledge has been formed. The aim of this article is to reveal how the DD method helps to overcome bottlenecks in Human Ecology lectures.

The Decoding the Disciplines method serves as a guide for identifying learning and teaching bottlenecks, understanding reasons for the occurrence of these bottlenecks and finding different ways to overcome these bottlenecks. This article describes the process of the application of the Decoding the Disciplines method which was used to uncover the teacher’s expert knowledge on how a thesis statement should be written. The teacher’s in-depth reflections and metacognition allowed to uncover tacit knowledge and overcome a bottleneck of teaching and learning the writing of a thesis statement.

Proliferation of new technologies are changing the nature of the media and are creating a new cultural and educational environment, a lot more dependent on the media than ever before. Surrounded by all kinds of information, verbal, oral, visual, multimedia and mobile, we are more and more confronted with visuals of different types, including pictures, photography, films, TV, video games, podcasts, advertising, and social media. Visually saturated media demand for specific competences and social practices aimed at better understanding, critical thinking and practicing visual logic of meaning production. While conceptualizing the need for visual literacy in contemporary media environment, the paper reviews different approaches in visual media education and reflects on the use of Decoding method in learning to communicate through images.

The Decoding the Disciplines methodology aims to teach students to think like experts in specific tasks. The aim of the methodology is to identify a bottleneck in the course content. In various study programs, students mainly lack analytical thinking or independent study of the material. Due to this, students do not understand the material and are not able to recognize necessary aspects. Results of the Decoding the Disciplines methodology suggest that the application of this methodology may facilitate student learning.