Decoding the disciplines: creating mutual understanding in multiprofessional education

Decoding the disciplines as a pedagogical approach to overcome threshold concepts in student learning. The method focuses on a process of making discipline-specific thinking and acting more accessible to students in order to enhance their learning process. Students of any discipline have difficulties with discipline-specific contents, methods or ways of thinking or acting, the so-called bottlenecks. In addition, there are bottlenecks specific to each discipline, such as topics related to scientific work. Findings from a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning approach in a multi-professional group of students in an online seminar session during the corona pandemic are presented. A decoding process on how to find a theoretical approach to one’s research question was conducted. The implementation of the decoding method took place either in face-to-face decoding expert interviews or in a writing process using predetermined guiding questions. Students’ reflections on the use of the method were analyzed using normalization process theory to identify facilitating and inhibiting aspects for the face-to-face and written implementation of the method in interprofessional learning groups. The results show that students could experience a role change or a new role when the decoding topic changes. With the interview method in particular, students can take on the role of experts or novices depending on the topic and thus actively participate. Whether a role change happens or not always depends on the dynamics and the communicative exchange of the group. Decoding takes a lot of time, especially for reflective writing.