About David Pace

I have been working to find ways to bring more students into the learning process since I began teaching as an instructor in the History Department of Indiana University Bloomington in the fall of 1971.  I have received both the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and Indiana University’s and the Frederic Bachman Lieber Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching for my own teaching, and since the 1990s I have been involved in the development of the scholarship of teaching and learning, as a Fellow in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and, for ten years, as the President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History.  In 2019 I was selected as a Fellow in the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

In addition to three books on the scholarship of teaching and learning, I have authored or co-authored 28 book chapters and articles in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, Arts and Humanities, National Teaching and Learning Forum, History Teacher, College Teaching, American Historical Association Perspectives, To Improve the Academy, and in volumes published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany.

With Joan Middendorf I served as the co-director of the Indiana University Freshman Learning Project from 1998-2012, and in the process we created the Decoding the Disciplines approach to increasing learning in college classrooms. I helped develop the decoding process through my work as one of the directors of the History Learning Project, as co-author of Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking (2004), as author of The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm: Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning (2017), and through workshops on Decoding I presented in the United States, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, South Africa, and Sweden.

Although I am officially retired, I continue to do some teaching and to regularly offer presentations and workshops on Decoding, history teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and related topics.