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Getting Down to Fundamentals
What are the Domain-Specific Principles of your subject?
I very much enjoyed reading “Difference Maker”, Christian Moore-Andersen’s recently published book on his implementation of systems theory in his biology classes. I’ve e-known Christian since back when Twitter was an actually useful, relatively nazi-free, space for educators, and his way of approaching his pedagogy has always resonated with me. A lot of what he has established with much more rigor than I ever cared to runs throughout my own instructional design and thinking about teaching. We also share the same involuntary haircut (😂).
Towards the end of the book, Christian gives some discussion around what he calls metacontent (roughly defined as the internal organizational schemas that are used to organize and understand how to think about a body of knowledge). There’s a lot in that section worth considering, but for this piece, I’m most interested in his delineation of domain-specific principles: The fundamental organising conceptual threads that run throughout a body of knowledge. Drawing from biology, he offers the following from his own thinking (p.108–109):
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Things in the universe tend towards disorder — to disintegrate, dissipate, diffuse, etc.
