No Student Should Be an Island: A Peer-Approach to Decoding and Disrupting

his article describes a new student-based approach to Decoding and Disrupting. This approach consists of an educational programme that works with a multidisciplinary group of undergraduate students, so-called Culture Fellows. In the programme, the students learn about theories on disciplinary cultures and their practices, Decoding the Disciplines, and communication. The programme focuses on the implicitness of disciplinary practices and how to explore them, i.e., it seeks to address the importance of making disciplinary practices, norms, and values more accessible to students. Within the programme, the Culture Fellows use a student-based variant of the Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm that we call ‘Culture Quest’. The Culture Quest supplies students with the tools to question, explore, and decode their respective disciplines and practices. Disciplinary practices often remain implicit because lecturers, with their wealth of experience and expertise in their discipline, may be operationally blind and thus no longer aware of the fact that certain practices might need to be explained. This lack of explanation or explicitness can lead to students feeling bewildered, confused or puzzled. The Culture Fellows and in particular the Culture Quest can encourage dialogue about and exploration of disciplinary cultures and their practices and can thus allow students to grasp the implicit cultural norms and expectations within their respective disciplines more clearly. The Culture Fellows and the Culture Quest provide students – and maybe even lecturers – with opportunities to engage with and reflect on teaching and learning strategies and practices.