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Preservice teachers are required to have professional knowledge of discipline-specific curriculum and pedagogical studies. Signature Pedagogies consists of concrete, operational acts of teaching and learning; reflects a set of assumptions about how best to impart a certain body of knowledge and know-how; and includes a moral dimension that comprises a set of beliefs about professional attitudes, values, and dispositions. The Lee Shulman model will frame the direction of this course and will provide a framework for preservice teachers’ development of their own signature pedagogies. This will help ensure that teachers have acquired the specialised knowledge and skills for research, an intellectual framework on which to develop their professional practice as educators, and for further learning (AQF 9).

The purpose of the course is to provide preservice teachers with an understanding of the framework of signature pedagogies and have them consider the characteristics for their discipline or teaching areas. Opportunity is provided for preservice teachers to consider the pedagogical basis of their own teaching and learning. Connections will be made with the philosophical basis for knowledge creation and the course will provide opportunities for preservice teachers to find their own alignment to this.

Preservice teachers will identify the distinctive (`signature') pedagogies that are relevant to their disciplines or teaching areas. Although there are some common pedagogical approaches across clusters of disciplines, there are also distinctive practices within specific disciplines. These distinctive practices are intended to do more than inculcate knowledge, they also set out deliberately to teach the ways of thinking about their disciplines, doing the disciplines and being a discipline specialist. Their purpose is to induct participants into the `profession' and its traditions and conventions.

Signature pedagogies deal with things that we as educators have to know and know how to do, and about the way we are in the world and the ways in which we orient ourselves to being and making meaning in the world. The combination of knowing, doing and being that are found in signature pedagogies is not separable into distinctive pieces which can be planned for and learned or taught separately, but must be experienced holistically.