Re-disciplining generic attributes: the disciplinary context in focus

This article discusses the findings of a recent study which demonstrates that generic attributes are highly context-dependent, and are shaped by the disciplinary epistemology in which they are conceptualised and taught. Generic attributes have, for a long time, been viewed as super-disciplinary, and hence as separated from and overlayed onto disciplinary content. There has been considerable interest in generic skills or attributes over more than a decade, and there has also been interest in disciplinary culture, and yet there has been little research which has examined the importance of disciplinary epistemology in shaping generic skills and attributes. This study brings together these two strands of research.