No factor is more influential in shaping our teaching and research perspectives than our individual disciplines. For most of us, almost our every word and thought about either teaching or research is grounded in our experience in the discipline. The research methods traditional in a discipline tend to influence the approaches faculty in that discipline take toward SOTL (and what journals in that discipline will accept for publication as SOTL).

An interesting experiment is to pose an issue for investigation to a cross-disciplinary group of faculty members. If encouraged to talk about approaches to the investigation, their approaches might be very different, reflecting their different disciplinary homes. Often each approach has potential to shed light on the issue. The scholarship that is most effective in advancing teaching and learning may be that which combines a variety of approaches.

But there is a danger. Rather than achieving synergy between different approaches, we sometimes tend to discredit or reject approaches which are not familiar to us.

I felt I was moving between two groups … who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common … literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists …Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension – sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground. C. P. Snow*

*Snow, C. P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press pp.2-4