Teamwork

Six lessons from students about transdisciplinary learning

By Irina Dallo, Jan Freihardt and Juanita von Rothkirch

mosaic-image_dallo_freihart_von-rothkirch
1. Irina Dallo (biography)
2. Jan Freihardt (biography)
3. Juanita von Rothkirch (biography)

What is an effective way of providing students with practical experience in stakeholder engagement? How can students learn to communicate and engage with community members on a transdisciplinary project, as well as how to create a space for those community members to reflect on their daily lives through interactions and discussions with the student outsiders? What makes it possible for students to broaden their horizons and to acquire new competences and skills?

We present our reflections on how the Winter School 2020 “Science meets Practice” run by ETH Zürich successfully contributed to our transdisciplinary learning process. We suggest there are six key lessons for those who want to design a successful course.

Lesson 1: A diverse and motivated group

A key element in fostering the transdisciplinary learning process was the diversity of the participant cohort.

Read more

How librarians contribute to interdisciplinary research teams

By Kelly Miller and Kineret Ben-Knaan

mosaic_kelly-miller_kineret-ben-knaan
1. Kelly Miller (biography)
2. Kineret Ben-Knaan (biography)

What can librarians contribute to interdisciplinary research teams working on complex problems? We suggest that librarians add value in the following three ways:

  1. finding and accessing information resources across disciplines
  2. connecting teams to experts and resources, and
  3. improving collaboration and communication strategies.

Our experience comes from being part of the University of Miami’s Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge initiative, also known as U-LINK, which aims to address the world’s most compelling problems through interdisciplinary inquiry. From 2018-2020, teams of scholars from multiple disciplines have received funding to pursue solutions to global challenges.

Librarians have been embedded in each of the teams. This opportunity has provided librarians with direct knowledge of the needs and demands of interdisciplinary teams.

Read more

Evolution of hot topics in team science / 团队科学中热点主题的演变

By Ying Huang, Ruinan Li, Yashan Li and Lin Zhang

A Chinese version of this post is available

authors_ying-huang_ruinan-li_yashan-li_lin-zhang
1. Ying Huang (biography)
2. Ruinan Li (biography)
3. Yashan Li (biography)
4. Lin Zhang (biography

What are the research hotspots in the Science of Team Science (SciTS) field? How have they evolved in the last decade?

We used conference programs from the annual International Science of Team Science (INSciTS) conferences held between 2010-2019 and the CorTexT Platform (https://www.cortext.net/) to select the top terms used with high frequency in the 852 titles and abstracts.

High-frequency terms and their evolution

The top 25 terms and their evolution are shown in Figure 1: evaluation / assessment (89 mentions), team science training (63), leadership (31), communication (30), curriculum (14),community (29), funding (13), mixed methods (13), model (13), Toolbox Project / Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (13), Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) (11), graduate students (11), networks (26), education (20), tools (20), productivity (16), bibliometrics (19), framework (14), gender (11), readiness (8), distributed collaboration (7), multi-team systems (7), research network tools (8), team performance (7), multiple levels (5).

Read more

Outbreaks, break-outs and break-times: Creating caring online workshops

By The Care Operative

author_mosaic_outbreaks-breakouts-breaktimes
The Care Operative details

How can online workshops be productive, engaging, caring and fun? How can researchers creatively adapt to a ‘virtual normal’ and develop caring and co-operative ways of working?

In March 2020, we – 20 international sustainability science colleagues – were prohibited from meeting face-to-face by COVID-19-related travel restrictions. Yet, we had time blocked out and a detailed workshop schedule. Within 48 hours, with invaluable help from experienced facilitator Concepción Piñeiro, we shifted the workshop online, adapting for virtual collaboration.

Here, we share how we made our online workshop productive, engaging and caring.We share what we learned about contrasts with in-person meetings, and identify additional skills and habits for great online interaction in a more detailed report (The Care Operative 2020).

The key principles are: seek to recreate the best things about face-to-face sessions and creatively adapt them to enhance online collaboration.

Read more

Guiding collaborative conversations and connections with probing questions

By Yulia A. Strekalova and Wayne T. McCormack

authors_yulia-strekalova_and_wayne-mccormack
1. Yulia A. Strekalova (biography)
2. Wayne T. McCormack (biography)

How can we ignite discovery conversations and foster open, psychologically safe conversations among researchers from different disciplines who have not met previously?

This blog post is based on the findings of a workshop with pre-doctoral trainees (Strekalova and McCormack 2020), but is likely to have broader relevance. The workshop was structured around the initial steps of Strategic DoingTM (Morrison et al., 2019), a disciplined approach to facilitating complex collaborative projects. The conversations in the room progressed by addressing five key PROBE-Action questions.

Question 1. What personal expertise and interests are represented in the room?

Read more

What lessons for improving interdisciplinary collaboration emerged from the 2019 Science of Team Science conference?

By Julie Thompson Klein and Ben Miller

authors_julie-thompson-klein_ben-miller
1. Julie Thompson Klein’s biography
2. Ben Miller (biography)

Six lessons emerged from the seven plenary panels at the May 2019 Science of Team Science conference hosted by Michigan State University in the US.

1. Understanding the nature of team science is crucial to monitoring team behavior, including managing conflict, diverse voices, and strong leadership.

The Science of Groups and Teams plenary panel affirmed one approach alone is not sufficient. It featured perspectives from psychology, management, and organizational behavior in two regional research institutions, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

2. Networking and collaboration increase access to pertinent expertise and skills, equipment, and other resources including funding, relevant techniques, education and training, visibility and recognition.

Read more

Resources to help team scholarship achieve success

By Gary M. Olson, Judith S. Olson, Dan Stokols and Maritza Salazar Campo

authors_gary-olson_judith-olson_dan-stokols_maritza-salazar-campo
1. Gary M. Olson (biography)
2. Judith S. Olson (biography)
3. Dan Stokols (biography)
4. Maritza Salazar Campo (biography)

In this blog post we review the benefits and difficulties of working in teams before introducing a new web site whose goal is to help those carrying out collaborative interdisciplinary projects to solve problems and be more effective.

Benefits of working in teams

Working in teams has at least five major benefits:

  • enables access to broader expertise
  • enlarges access to more resources
  • creates synergies
  • builds on past success
  • expands funding opportunities.

Read more

Strategies to deal with forced hostile collaborations

By Kristine Lund

author-kristine-lund
Kristine Lund (biography)

What can you do when a national funding umbrella organization asks you to add a new partner to a collaborative project, especially when that partner has a poor reputation for collaborating?

Here I share lessons based on my experience of leading a multi-million Euro grant, where two interdisciplinary language sciences laboratories, which had worked together successfully for 8 years, were preparing a bid for a 5-year continuation in funding. In the process of preparing that bid, our national umbrella organization suggested that a third language sciences laboratory that had strong links to neurosciences join the consortium.

Strategy 1: Try to make it work

Based on previous experience, neither of the two founding member labs wanted to accept the new collaborative partner.

Read more

Theory U: A promising journey to embracing unknown unknowns

By Vanesa Weyrauch

author-venesa-weyrauch
Vanesa Weyrauch (biography)

How can we best live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world? How can we shift from a worldview that looks to predict and control what is to be done through plans and strategies to being present and flexible in order to respond effectively as unexpected changes take place? How can we be open to not knowing what will emerge and embrace uncertainty as the opportunity to co-create and learn?

One powerful and promising way forward is Theory U, a change methodology developed by Otto Scharmer and illustrated below. Scharmer introduced the concept of “presencing”—learning from the emerging future. The concept of “presencing” blends “sensing” (feeling the future possibility) and “presence” (the state of being in the present moment). It acknowledges that we don’t know the answers. Staying at the bottom of the U until the best potential future starts emerging requires embracing uncertainty as fertile soil.

Read more

Transdisciplinary action research: A guiding framework for collaboration

By Steven Lam, Michelle Thompson, Kathleen Johnson, Cameron Fioret and Sarah Hargreaves

authors_steven-lam_michelle-thompson_kathleen-johnson_cameron-fioret_sarah-hargreaves
1. Steven Lam; 2. Michelle Thompson; 3. Kathleen Johnson; 4. Cameron Fioret; 5. Sarah Hargreaves (biographies)

How can graduate students work productively with each other and community partners? Many researchers and practitioners are engaging in transdisciplinarity, yet there is surprisingly little critical reflection about the processes and outcomes of transdisciplinarity, particularly from the perspectives of graduate students and community partners who are increasingly involved.

Our group of four graduate students from the University of Guelph and one community partner from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, reflect on our experiences of working together toward community food security in Canada, especially producing a guidebook for farmer-led research (Fioret et al. 2018). As none of us had previously worked together, nor shared any disciplines in common, we found it essential to first develop a guiding framework for collaboration. Our thinking combined the following key principles from action research and transdisciplinarity:

  • reflexivity,
  • participation and partnership,
  • methods and process, and
  • integration.

Read more

Theoretical framework for open team science / オープンチームサイエンスという考え方

By Yasuhisa Kondo

A Japanese version of this post is available

author yasuhisa kondo
Yasuhisa Kondo (biography)

What is open team science? What challenges does it deal with and how?

What is open team science?

In our experience, projects are commonly disrupted by socio-psychological boundaries, particularly at the initial phase of team building. Such boundaries are often generated by asymmetric information, knowledge, wisdom (wise use of knowledge; Bellingen et al., 2004), values, socio-economic status, and power among actors.

We have developed a theoretical framework that considers open science as an open scientific knowledge production system, which can be interlinked with transdisciplinarity as a driver of boundary spanning to develop a new research paradigm. We call this open team science.

Read more

10 tips for next generation interdisciplinary research

By Rachel Kelly

Author - Rachel Kelly
Rachel Kelly (biography)

Can we develop a shared understanding on how to engage in an interdisciplinary setting that will be useful in addressing current and future grand challenges?

Advice provided by interdisciplinary experts from 25 countries, across all continents, and with over 240 years cumulative experience (Kelly, et al., 2019) is combined here into succinct guidance that aims to empower researchers wishing to engage in interdisciplinary endeavors. The ten tips are also summarized in the figure below (focused on socio-ecological researchers).

Read more