Education

Team science is an integral competency for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Program

By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke

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1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
3. Michael O’Rourke (biography)

What roles do research and development agencies have in actively preparing research teams to engage productively in collaborative research? Is it enough to require that teams engaging in funded research prepare themselves to collaborate effectively?

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Program was launched in 2019 to fast track the development of ideas into real-world applications and solutions intended to have substantive societal and economic impact. Building upon basic research and discovery and using a convergent approach, the program accelerates use-inspired research toward impact by funding multidisciplinary teams from a wide range of disciplines and sectors to solve complex societal and economic challenges.

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Towards fair transdisciplinary collaborations that honour epistemic justice

By Annisa Triyanti, Barbara van Paassen, Corinne Lamain, Jessica Duncan, Jillian Student, Jonas Collen Ladeia Torrens and Nina de Roo

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1. Annisa Triyanti; 2. Barbara van Paassen; 3. Corinne Lamain; 4. Jessica Duncan; 5. Jillian Student; 6. Jonas Collen Ladeia Torrens; 7. Nina de Roo  (biographies)

What principles need to be upheld to fund and support fair, inclusive, and equitable transdisciplinary collaborations? What competences and attitudes are required for transdisciplinary collaborations to foster epistemic justice? And what do mushrooms have to do with this?!

It is widely acknowledged that to address complex societal problems and harness plural ways of knowing, a wider range of actors, perspectives and types of knowledge are needed than is traditionally the case in other forms of knowledge creation. Transdisciplinary collaborations are different from traditional forms of science in:

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Effective capacity development in and with the Global South

By Jon Harle

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Jon Harle (biography)

How to do capacity development well in the research and knowledge for development sector? And since the pandemic pushed everyone online, how can capacity development be done well digitally too? In particular how to avoid making the same mistakes, with disappointing results and frustrated partnerships?

As an international development organisation, INASP has been doing this work for the last thirty years and while it isn’t easy, we think it is possible to do it well. There are also very simple starting points: we have to listen carefully, start with what already exists, and see ourselves as enablers and partners, who are also learning in the process, not experts with all the answers.

We recognise capacity building is an imperfect term too – and a contested concept, with origins in colonial and in post-war technical projects to accelerate development and ‘catch-up’ the South.

The INASP approach is summarised in our learning and capacity development framework shown in the figure below.

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Interdisciplinary teamwork: Expert and non-expert at the same time

By Annemarie Horn and Eduardo Urias

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1. Annemarie Horn (biography)
2. Eduardo Urias (biography)

How do teams engage in interdisciplinary knowledge integration and how can they be supported in doing so? Why does simple sharing and questioning of knowledge not necessarily lead to interdisciplinary knowledge integration? And what does it mean to act as both an expert and a non-expert in interdisciplinary teamwork, and why is it hard?

In a five month course, we supervised a team of eight master students in the integration of insights and concepts from their individual, discipline-based projects into a joint work about circular economy. Based on our earlier research, described in our i2Insights contribution on four typical behaviours in interdisciplinary knowledge integration, we expected that if we helped the students to share their own knowledge and to engage with each other’s knowledge, that integration would emerge.

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A framework for building transdisciplinary expertise

By ANU Transdisciplinarity Working Group

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Author biographies

What expertise should everyone have in order to effectively play their role in tackling complex societal and environmental problems? Is there a framework that can help everyone develop rudimentary skills and provide a pathway to enhancing them as and when necessary?

We were charged with addressing these questions, not for everyone, but for all undergraduates at our university, The Australian National University (ANU). In particular, we were asked to ensure that all ANU graduates would be able to work with others to understand and creatively address amorphous and complex problems. More formally, this was described as proposing how undergraduates could develop the “Capability to Employ Discipline-based Knowledge in Transdisciplinary Problem Solving.”

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Decolonising research capacity development

By Maru Mormina and Romina Istratii

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1. Maru Mormina (biography)
2. Romina Istratii (biography)

Why do many countries in the Global South remain behind when it comes to knowledge production and use, despite decades-long efforts to strengthen research capacity?

We think this is because the North still looks at the South with a ‘deficit mentality,’ according to which the latter has the problems and the former the solutions. From this standpoint, northern-led capacity development initiatives fail to recognise the South’s rich and diverse knowledge traditions and systems. Instead, they continue to impose monolithic blueprints of knowledge production, therefore re-inscribing colonial patterns of intellectual Western hegemony.

Of course, in many countries, research systems need support but current approaches are at best producing mixed results. A decolonial lens can help us identify alternative models.

Decolonising research capacity development in principle

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Replacing conferences with effective online learning experiences

By Maha Bali, George Station and Mia Zamora

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1. Maha Bali (biography)
2. George Station (biography)
3. Mia Zamora (biography)

What options are there for developing effective online replacements for face-to-face conferences? How can these options promote better access for those without funds or freedom to travel? How can they contribute to climate justice?

We share our experience in co-organising (with others) Equity Unbound’s inaugural Mid-Year Festival 2022, aka #MYFest22 (referred to throughout as MYFest), a virtual event that sought to center community and support, and avoid the many pitfalls of online, in-person and hybrid events.

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Four typical behaviours in interdisciplinary knowledge integration

By Annemarie Horn and Eduardo Urias

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1. Annemarie Horn (biography)
2. Eduardo Urias (biography)

Why do some collaborators in interdisciplinary teamwork clash? And why does collaboration between others seem smooth but not yield anything? What causes these differences in collaboration, and how can this inform interventions to support interdisciplinary collaboration and integration?

When we started teaching an interdisciplinary masters course, we expected it to become a battlefield, based on our reading of countless lists of the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. We thought that the students’ diverse study backgrounds – ranging from arts to medicine, and from social sciences to mathematics – would cause tensions; that they would disagree with each other about theories and methods that they were unfamiliar with and held opinions about.

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Theory and process for interdisciplinary undergraduate course development

By Ana M. Corbacho

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Ana M. Corbacho (biography)

How can interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates move from being intuitively designed to theoretically based? How can course design accommodate cohorts of teachers, not previously experienced in interdisciplinarity, from across a university?

Here I share how colleagues and I developed courses where teams of university faculty worked with undergraduate students to tackle interdisciplinary problems.

I first describe three useful theoretical perspectives for building an interdisciplinary undergraduate course, namely:

  1. social constructivism and situated-learning theory
  2. academic motivation
  3. interdisciplinary education from a diversity perspective.

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Developing facilitation capacities in graduate students

By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Robert Hacku (biography)

What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.

We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.

Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.

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Connecting and building capacity in the transdisciplinary research community

By Josefa Kny and David P. M. Lam

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1. Josefa Kny (biography) (photograph by Leyla Hoppe)
2. David P. M. Lam (biography)

What does the transdisciplinary research community want when it comes to building a global and virtual community, as well as capacity?

In developing a new interactive online platform, we surveyed 122 transdisciplinary researchers, mostly from German-speaking countries, and ran an online workshop with 27 early career transdisciplinary researchers from 8 European countries to assess what they would find most effective.

The key needs identified in the survey were to:

  • receive and share information on community- and capacity- building activities
  • have opportunities to network and discuss within an online community
  • share their own research projects and experiences.

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A Partnership Outcome Spaces framework for transdisciplinary student-staff partnerships

By Giedre Kligyte, Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, Jarnae Leslie, Tyler Key, Bethany Hooper and Eleanor Salazar

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1. Giedre Kligyte; 2. Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer; 3. Jarnae Leslie; 4. Tyler Key; 5. Bethany Hooper; 6. Eleanor Salazar (biographies)

How can universities leverage students’ perspectives to create pathways towards lasting organisational change in higher education? How can we conceptualise institutional impact and outcomes of transdisciplinary student-staff partnerships?

Why student-staff partnerships?

Student-staff partnerships is an emerging approach to collaboration between students and staff members to create more egalitarian learning cultures in universities. Through partnerships, students are typically engaged in co-creating aspects of curriculum and student-facing university initiatives (such as service design), acknowledging students as having authority in their learning experience.

The Partnership Outcome Spaces framework

We adopted and extended the Transdisciplinary Outcome Spaces model described by Mitchell and colleagues (see also Mitchell et al., 2015) to develop a Partnership Outcome Spaces framework which enabled us to reconceptualise the purpose, scale and impact of process-oriented student-staff partnerships.

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