At its heart, Disciplinary Intuitions is fundamentally phenomenological (Husserl, 1936) in its orientation. To elaborate, the central problematic articulated by Disciplinary Intuitions is that between phenomenology's 'lived experiences' and curriculum design. A curriculum designed from the perspective of Disciplinary Intuitions recognises the diversity of such lived experiences and attempts to facilitate greater intersubjectivity among learners.

Conceptualised in this way, Disciplinary Intuitions may therefore be thought of as innate computational modules of mind (Pinker, 1997) which are in the process of being exercised and developed as the learner interacts with his or her external environment. We see intuition as the phenomenological bases which influence behaviour and decision-making.

Given this definition, Disciplinary Intuitions has its roots in embodied cognition, social realism, and the computational theory of mind.

An embodied perspective is critical to the Disciplinary Intuitions approach because of how we understand intuitions; we see the latter as innate modules of mind - which by themselves are rudimentary and are exercised and developed (only) if and when the individual utilises them as he or she interacts with his or her (physical (including 'virtual') and / or social) environment.

In turn, the social realist perspective is equally critical to the Disciplinary Intuitions approach because it provides an epistemological (and sociological) ground from which to argue for a disciplinary structuring of 'reality' - the same disciplinarily thereof is mirrored in the typology of the innate modules of mind described in the computational theory of mind.

diSessa’s (1988) has described “knowledge in pieces” such as phenomenological primitives (‘p-prims’) as fragmentary sub-structures of cognition. diSessa’s view of intuitive knowledge describes p-prims as unstable, nascent and emergent conceptions, as opposed to the more stable – yet inaccurate – cognitive structures of pre- and / or misconceptions (1983, 1993); in fact, from a constructivist perspective, the very existence of the latter has been questioned by diSessa and his colleagues (diSessa and Sherin, 2000; and Smith, diSessa and Roschelle, 1993) in the first place.

It can be reasonably argued that diSessa has his roots in Piagetian – and, consequently, Vygotskyian – understandings of learning and development. It was in fact Vygotsky who made the distinction between a learner’s everyday concepts and non-spontaneous concepts. Vygotsky described the former as formed during a learner’s activity through interaction with social others in everyday life; thus, for example, everyday concepts manifest themselves in the way learners use words in everyday language, as opposed to scientific concepts which are mastered during systematic instruction.

Vygotsky theorised that spontaneous, everyday concepts are not binarily displaced over time by scientific concepts, but each is dependent on the other in a dialectic coupling which serves both to reinforce understanding and arouse curiosity. When a learner is confronted with novelty in an everyday context, he or she gradually develops the verbo-logical structure which brings into existence the everyday concept; Vygotsky described such verbo-logical structures as developed initially through the accumulation of ‘syncretic heaps’ and then through the formation of complexes (or pseudo-concepts). Because of this gradual process (from heaps to complexes to concepts), the development of everyday concepts was described by Vygotsky as being from bottom to top.

In this way, he contrasted the development of everyday concepts with the development of scientific concepts, the latter of which Vygotsky (1986) described as being from top to bottom. In such a framing, Vygotsky was therefore able to claim that the development of scientific concepts starts with a formalized (often verbal) explanation, and is subsequently connected to the learner’s experience. The initial (verbal) definition is given within a fixed system and subsequently ‘descends’ to the concrete phenomena that the learner encounters in everyday life.

Vygotsky went further to recognize the reciprocal dependence of everyday concepts and scientific concepts. He claimed that the development of both were two “parts of a single process: the development of concept formation which is affected by varying external and internal conditions but is essentially a unitary process, not a conflict of antagonistic, mutually exclusive forms of thinking” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 157). Vygotsky continued:

“in working its slow way upward, an everyday concept clears a path for the scientific concept and its downward development. It creates a series of structures necessary for the evolution of a concept’s more primitive, elemental aspects. Scientific concepts – in turn – supply structures for the upward development of a child’s spontaneous concepts toward consciousness and deliberate use” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 194).

Luria (1973) described this dialectical coupling as ‘interfunctional organisation’, in which “scientific concepts rise on the foundation of everyday concepts and – in the process – fundamentally change the everyday concepts by drawing them into systemic relations.”

Whether explicitly (as expressed through models of curriculum design such as Understanding by Design and Teaching for Understanding) or tacitly (the enacted curriculum by teachers in classrooms), it is our argument that insufficient attention has been paid to this interfunctional dialectic relationship between scientific concepts and everyday concepts. Indeed, the opposite is often true, as the nascent understandings (Vygotsky’s ‘syncretic heaps’, ‘complexes’ and / or ‘everyday concepts’) that learners bring to the classroom risk being dismissed by teachers subject to ‘curricular constraints’ as pre- and misconceptions, to be quickly set right by the formal curriculum. In 1991, Johnstone recognised this and published a paper in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning titled Why is science difficult to learn? Things are seldom what they seem.

It has been our experience from the Six Learnings programme, however, that when teachers and learners are afforded opportunities to acknowledge, surface, and negotiate these disciplinary intuitions, the reinforcing nature of Luria’s interfunctional organization means that the subsequent scientific concepts result in much more enduring understandings on the part of the learners.