Table Of ContentKenneth Y.T. Lim E ditor
Disciplinary
Intuitions and
the Design
of Learning
Environments
Disciplinary Intuitions and the Design of Learning
Environments
The former elevator in the Gutman library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education before
the renovation of the latter in the fall of 2011
Kenneth Y.T. Lim
Editor
Disciplinary Intuitions
and the Design of Learning
Environments
Editor
Kenneth Y.T. Lim
National Institute of Education
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore, Singapore
ISBN 978-981-287-181-7 ISBN 978-981-287-182-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-182-4
Springer Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952890
© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2015
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection
with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifi cally for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this
publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher’s
location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer.
Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations
are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for
any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein.
Printed on acid-free paper
Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
To God be the Glory
and…
thank you, Granddad J
Foreword
I was especially pleased to receive the invitation by the editor and contributing
authors of this book to walk with them in this journey they have christened
Disciplinary Intuitions .
Academic endeavour is always a palimpsest of sorts, with succeeding genera-
tions of researchers and authors standing on the shoulders of giants. This is particu-
larly so when the endeavour in question is conceptualising, making the case for, and
illustrating examples of a fi eld of study hitherto uncharted. In this regard Kenneth
should be highly commended for fulfi lling his editorial responsibilities – it could
not have been easy to put together a team of academics and researchers representing
such a diversity of experience, disciplinary expertise, and sheer writing talent that
he has.
To say that he has pulled it off, and pulled it off with panache, would be an under-
statement. Together with his team, they have drawn from more than 300 biblio-
graphic references from a variety of disciplinary domains – ranging from cognitive
psychology, early Chinese philosophy, to the natural sciences – to make a compel-
ling case for Disciplinary Intuitions as a theory of learning. From the foundations
laid in Part I of the book, the authorial team responsible for Part II offers some very
practical and actionable pointers for thinking about existing curriculum structures
from the perspective of Disciplinary Intuitions, with a view to crafting authentic
experiences for learners of all ages.
In my own work, I have written a little about how the sociocultural dynamics of
the present century – mediated as they are through, inter alia, the Internet of things
and social media – are working themselves out through a collective substrate my
authorial colleagues and I have come to call the Networked Imagination. Through
the lens of the Networked Imagination, Disciplinary Intuitions offer some intriguing
vii
viii Foreword
provocations to looking anew at the assumptions, structures and enactions of much
of what constitutes curriculum design. It remains only for me to invite you to navi-
gate this exciting landscape with the authors of this book.
Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California John Seely Brown
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Independent Co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge
Silicon Valley, CA, USA
Pref ace
When I was a lad of about fi ve, my grandfather – God bless his soul – would take
me to the airport in the afternoons. This was in the early 1970s, and it was a wonder-
ful time to be exposed to the sights, sounds and smells of civil aviation. Pan Am had
just started Boeing 747 services to the Far East, and a highlight of my (almost) daily
visits would be scanning the horizon for the earliest indication that that wondrous
double-deck white and blue aircraft was on fi nal approach to Paya Lebar, Singapore.
These visits to the airport continued into my primary school years, and somehow
granddad and I would always fi nd time to sneak away from home to fi ll our lungs
with wafts of jet fuel. Things got really exciting when British Airways and Singapore
Airlines started joint services to London via Bahrain on the supersonic Concorde;
memories of that pencil-thin fuselage with its amazing delta wing and thunderous
afterburner-charged roar seem as fresh in my mind today as they were forty years ago.
Yes, on a busy day, the apron at Paya Lebar would be fi lled with all manner of
aircraft of different shapes and sizes – from the 747 to Concorde and almost every-
thing conceivable in between. As a young boy, these repeated visits to the airport
left an indelible impression upon me and left me wondering how each of these air-
crafts – regardless of their differing propulsion systems, wing shapes, fuselage
confi gurations, sizes and weights – could somehow all fl y .
So it was on a diet of Ladybird books and engaging granddad in conversation that
as a young boy I learnt about principles of chord design and fl uid dynamics way
beyond my grade level and about lift, thrust, drag and weight and about yaw, pitch
and roll. Through the pages of those books, these complex relationships were
explained in terms that I could understand, with nary a ‘Bernoulli’ or a ‘resultant
vector’ in sight. It wasn’t until I entered secondary school at the upper grade levels
that I learned about such codifi cations of canonical knowledge in mathematics and
physics lessons. By then, of course, it all made so much sense to me because I was
fi nally able to explain – using epistemically appropriate discourse structures – the
stuff that I had seemed to just ‘know’ all along.
I fi rst started thinking about the disciplinarity of intuitions in early 2011. The
ideas were precipitated through a series of discussions with teachers who were
refl ecting on lessons which they had been conducting using immersive environments
ix
