Beyond Generic Knowledge in Pedagogy and Disciplinarity: The Case of Science Textbooks

This article addresses relations among curricular material, pedagogy, and disciplinarity. This article promotes the view that disciplines provide the bases for systematic variations in reasoning practices, logical structures, ways of establishing and representing knowledge, dispositions of inquiry, and ways in which teachers and students might relate and interact. In support, this article presents a summary of a study of high school science textbooks, outlining results of multivariate analyses of various linguistic and textual features and showing clear and interpretable distinctions between the disciplines of science–physics, biology, chemistry, and other subjects. The study concludes that these variations offer distinct programmes for understanding the world, just as these variations can underpin different ways of interacting in classrooms.