A school is a named theoretical tradition within a discipline. Schools share the discipline’s subject matter but differ in how they approach it: what questions they prioritize, what methods they use, what epistemological commitments they hold, and who they cite as foundational thinkers.
Critical pedagogy and constructivism are both schools within pedagogy. They both study teaching and learning. But critical pedagogy (Freire, hooks) foregrounds power and liberation, while constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky) foregrounds the learner’s construction of knowledge. The difference is not just emphasis — it produces different methods, different questions, and different kinds of knowledge.
Schools have intellectual lineage. They are founded by or associated with particular thinkers. They respond to, extend, or critique other schools. This lineage is part of what makes a school a school rather than a loose collection of like-minded researchers: there is a tradition — a chain of intellectual influence — that connects practitioners across time.
In the ASR, schools appear in schools/ directories within
disciplines or topics. Each school directory may contain its own
terms, methods, and texts, reflecting the fact that schools develop
specialized vocabulary and methodology within their tradition.
The distinction between a school and a subdiscipline is one of relationship to the parent discipline. A subdiscipline specializes the parent’s methods for a narrower domain (all of epidemiology uses basically the same methods as medicine, just applied to populations). A school differs in method or epistemology while remaining within the same domain (critical pedagogy and constructivism study the same things differently).
Related terms
- discipline — the domain within which schools operate
- topic — an area of inquiry; orthogonal to schools (a school can work on many topics)