Education – Page 4 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Learning to tackle wicked problems through games / Aprendiendo a hacer frente a problemas perversos a través de los juegos/ Apprendre à affronter les problèmes sournois à travers les jeux

September 12, 2024April 11, 2017

By Claude Garcia, Anne Dray and Patrick Waeber

authors_claude-garcia_anne-dray_patrick-waeber — 1. Claude Garcia (biography)
2. Anne Dray (biography)
3. Patrick Waeber (biography)

A Spanish version and a French version of this post are available

Can we help the next generation of policy makers, business leaders and citizens to become creative, critical and independent thinkers? Can we make them aware of the nature of the problems they will be confronted with? Can we strengthen their capacity to foster and lead stakeholder processes to address these problems?

Yes.

We build on our experience as field researchers on environmental issues. We develop models that link ecological, social and economic processes, based on real study cases. We transform these models into role-playing games, both cooperative and competitive. And we use them to let students – the next generation of policy makers, business leaders and citizens – explore the complexities of natural resources management. They discover the roles of trust, knowledge, communication and conflict in a friendly environment. As games unfold, players observe, experience, experiment, and devise rules to resolve the tensions between competing demands.

Ten lessons from a transdisciplinary PhD program in sustainable development

September 10, 2024March 9, 2017

By Marianne Penker

Should a doctoral student specialise in transdisciplinary sustainable development research? What are the opportunities and challenges associated with undertaking a program that requires research integration and implementation?

At the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna in Austria, teams of PhD-students and academic supervisors collaborated with representatives from regions, cities, public authorities, businesses or civil society to solve pressing and often wicked sustainability problems. We learnt the following ten lessons.

The strength of failing (or how I learned to love ugly babies)

April 9, 2026December 1, 2016

By Randall J. Hunt

randall-hunt — Randall J. Hunt (biography)

How to give others your hard-won insights so that their work can be more informed, efficient, and effective? As I’ve gotten older, it is something that I think about more.

It is widely recognized that the environment is an integrated but also “open” system. As a result, when working with issues relating to the environment we are faced with the unsatisfying fact that we won’t know “truth”. We develop an understanding that is consistent with what we currently know and what we consider state-of-the-practice methods. But, we can never be sure that more observations or different methods would not result in different insights.

Advice to graduate students on becoming “translational”

February 11, 2025August 18, 2016

By Alexis Erwin

author_alexis-erwin — Alexis Erwin (biography)

In an earlier post on this blog, Mark Brunson posed the questions: How does an ecologist become “translational”? What training is needed to venture beyond the lab or university and to engage with the potential beneficiaries or users of research? Here I offer my own thoughts as someone who started working to “become translational” halfway through a traditional ecology Ph.D. program.

Although the focus of this blog post is on translational ecology and on specific resources for graduate students in the U.S., I suggest the ideas are more widely applicable.

Social science identities in interdisciplinary research and education

September 5, 2024August 11, 2016

By Eric Toman

What does it mean to include ‘a social scientist’ in a team tackling complex problems? Here I focus on complex environmental problems and how biophysical and social scientists work together. I’m curious if social scientists face the same issues in other problem areas, such as health.

Things have improved since my early academic career, when I was often asked to justify why a social scientist deserved a seat at the table when discussing environmental questions. It seemed that even supportive natural scientists were motivated to engage their social science colleagues only to ‘fix’ some type of problem caused by people (e.g., politicians, decision-makers, managers, the “general public”).

While it’s now normal for social scientists to be included, they tend to be lumped together, unlike the biophysical scientists who are differentiated into a range of disciplines with relevant specialization areas.

A process model for teaching interdisciplinary research

September 5, 2024August 9, 2016

By Machiel Keestra

How can we effectively teach interdisciplinary research to undergraduate and masters students? What is needed to encompass research ranging from cultural analysis of an Etruscan religious symbol to the search for a sustainable solution for tomato farming in drying areas? Given that there is no predetermined set of theories, methods and insights, as is the case with disciplinary research, what would an interdisciplinary textbook cover? How can such a textbook accommodate the fact that interdisciplinary research usually requires students to collaborate with each other, for which they also need to be able to articulate their own cognitive processes? Understandably, a textbook for interdisciplinary research must focus in a rather general sense on the process implied in such research.

In teaching more than 15 cohorts of undergraduate and masters students at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS) at the University of Amsterdam, who are conducting research projects in interdisciplinary teams and with a strong emphasis on empirical research, we have developed an IIS model. This model is arranged in four research phases: orientation, preparation, data (collection and analysis) and finalization. The key tasks in each phase are summarised in the following figure.

Training translational ecologists: Moving from accidental to intentional

June 25, 2025July 26, 2016

By Mark Brunson

How does an ecologist become translational? What training is needed to venture beyond the lab or university and to engage with the potential beneficiaries or users of their research? To communicate with (and listen to) a lay audience, advise policymaking processes, initiate a citizen science project, or involve stakeholders in the design, analysis, and interpretation of research?

William Schlesinger (2010), in coining the term translational ecology, warned that “[u]nless the discoveries of ecological science are rapidly translated into meaningful actions, they will remain quietly archived while the biosphere degrades.”

What makes a translational ecologist? Part 3: Dispositional attributes

June 25, 2025July 4, 2016

By the Translational Ecology Group

This is the third and final blog post considering competencies to make ecologists more effective in informing and supporting policy and practice change (see the right sidebar for links to all four related blog posts on translational ecology). In other words these are the competencies underpinning a new discipline of translational ecology.

The two previous blog posts examined the knowledge and skills required in three major areas:

Socio-ecological systems
Communication across boundaries, with beneficiaries, stakeholders and other scientists
Engagement with beneficiaries, stakeholders and other scientists.

This blog post uses the same three areas to examine the dispositional attributes required.

What are dispositional attributes?

Each person’s internal cognitive and moral qualities are collectively known as dispositions.

Transdisciplinarity: Learning together to teach together

December 11, 2024April 19, 2016

By BinBin Pearce, Carolina Adler and Christian Pohl

authors_binbin-pearce_carolina-adler_christian-pohl — 1. BinBin Pearce (biography)
2. Carolina Adler (biography)
3. Christian Pohl (biography)

Are there innovative methods that enable students to frame and confront the complexity of real-world problems in the context of sustainable development? Which learning approaches help students engage with design thinking to understand a particular system, and also to start thinking about responsible solutions? Which approaches enable students to reflect on their own actions, as well as become aware of the importance of diverse stakeholder perspectives and how these play out in real-world contexts?

Let’s play: Co-creating award courses for designing, teaching, researching, and facilitating transdisciplinarity – Transacademic Interface Managers as an example

December 11, 2024February 10, 2016

By Katja Brundiers and Arnim Wiek

authors_katja-brundiers_arnim-wiek — 1. Katja Brundiers (biography)
2. Arnim Wiek (biography)

Tanja Golja and Dena Fam concluded their article ‘Supporting academics learning to design, teach and research td-programs in higher education‘ with an invitation to other higher education and research institutions to share the state of play and their opportunities for collaboration. We are excited to respond to this call.

At Arizona State University (U.S.) various programs exist – across its schools and colleges – that allow students to work in transdisciplinary settings. These programs are avant-garde in many respects, e.g., pedagogical design, students’ learning outcomes, relationships with practice partners, implementation with real-world impact. Our experience with building a transdisciplinary and solution-oriented learning program at the School of Sustainability is documented in the article ‘Integrating Problem-and Project-based Learning into Sustainability Programs‘.

Supporting academics’ learning to design, teach and research transdisciplinary programs in higher education: What’s the state of play?

February 26, 2026January 20, 2016

By Tanja Golja and Dena Fam

authors_tanja-golja_dena-fam — 1. Tanja Golja (biography)
2. Dena Fam (biography)

In their 2013 report on the significance of transdisciplinary approaches to advance scientific discovery and address formidable societal challenges (PDF 700KB), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) put out a call to “expand education paradigms to model transdisciplinary approaches” (p. xiii). Ought we be considering whether transdisciplinary approaches might reconfigure education paradigms, and if so, why?

As a case in point, most Australian universities offer professional learning opportunities for academics involved in coursework teaching and research supervision (e.g. a Graduate Certificate in higher education learning and teaching). Typically, such formal scholarly programs introduce teaching academics to current educational principles, practices and research in higher education.

However, these and similar academic programs have been slow to respond to the increasing interest in transdisciplinary education and research.