Teamwork – Page 8 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Using the arts and design to build student creative collaboration capacity

September 29, 2021May 15, 2018

By Edgar Cardenas

How can undergraduate and graduate students be helped to build their interdisciplinary collaboration capacity? In particular, how do they build capacity between the arts and other disciplines?

In 2018, I co-facilitated the annual, 3-day Emerging Creatives Student Summit, an event for approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students from 26 universities organized by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities. Students’ majors ranged from the sciences, engineering, music, arts, and design.

Leading large transdisciplinary projects

September 21, 2022May 8, 2018

By Sanford D. Eigenbrode, Lois Wright Morton, and Timothy Martin

What’s required to lead exceptionally large projects involving many dozens of participants from various scientific disciplines (including biophysical, social, and economic), multiple stakeholders, and efforts spanning a gamut from discovery to implementation? Such projects are common when investigating social-ecological systems which are inherently complex and large in spatial and temporal scales. Problems are commonly multifaceted, with incomplete or apparently contradictory knowledge, stakeholders with divergent positions, and large economic or social consequences.

Leaders of such very large projects confront unique challenges in addition to those inherent to directing interdisciplinary efforts:

The university campus as a transdisciplinary living laboratory

August 9, 2023May 1, 2018

By Dena Fam, Abby Mellick Lopes, Alexandra Crosby and Katie Ross

authors_dena-fam,_abby-mellick-lopes_alexandra-crosby_katie -ross — 1. Dena Fam (biography)
2. Abby Mellick Lopes (biography)
3. Alexandra Crosby (biography)
4. Katie Ross (biography)

How can transdisciplinary educators help students reflexively understand their position in the field of research? Often this means giving students the opportunity to go beyond being observers of social reality to experience themselves as potential agents of change.

To enable this opportunity, we developed a model for a ‘Transdisciplinary Living Lab’ (Fam et al., forthcoming).This builds on the concept of a collaborative test bed of innovative approaches to a problem or situation occurring in a ‘living’ social environment where end-users are involved. For us, the social environment is the university campus. We involved two universities in developing this model – the University of Technology Sydney and Western Sydney University. We aimed to help students explore food waste management systems on campus and to consider where the interventions they designed were situated within global concerns, planetary boundaries and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The Transdisciplinary Living Lab was designed and delivered in three largely distinct, yet iterative phases, scaling from individual experiences to a global problem context.

CoNavigator: Hands-on interdisciplinary problem solving

November 9, 2021February 13, 2018

By Katrine Lindvig, Line Hillersdal and David Earle

authors_mosaic_katrine-lindvig-lin-hillersdal_david-earle — 1. Katrine Lindvig (biography)
2. Line Hillersdal (biography)
3. David Earle (biography)

How can we resolve the stark disparity between theoretical knowledge about interdisciplinary approaches and practical applications? How can we get from written guidelines to actual practices, especially taking into account the contextual nature of knowledge production; not least when the collaborating partners come from different disciplinary fields with diverse expectations and concerns?

For the past few years, we have been developing ways in which academic theory and physical interactions can be combined. The result is CoNavigator – a hands-on, 3-dimensional and gamified tool which can be used:

for learning purposes in educational settings
as a fast-tracking tool for interdisciplinary problem solving.

CoNavigator is a tool which allows groups to collaborate on a 3-dimensional visualisation of the interdisciplinary topography of a given field or theme.

Three tasks for transdisciplinary bridge builders

September 29, 2021October 17, 2017

By Roderick J. Lawrence

roderick-lawrence — Roderick J. Lawrence (biography)

Human groups and societies have built many kinds of bridges for centuries. Since the 19^th century, engineers have designed complex physical structures that were intended to serve one or more purposes in precise situations. In essence, the construction of a bridge is meant to join two places together. What may appear as a mundane functional structure is built only after numerous decisions have been made about its appearance, cost, functions, location and structure. Will a bridge serve only as a link and passage, or will it serve other functions?

In discussing three things the transdisciplinary research community can do to build bridges, I use “building bridges” as a metaphor. I discuss a bridge as a human-made artefact that is attributed meaningful form. It is created intentionally for one or more purposes.

Toolkits for transdisciplinary research

March 21, 2024July 25, 2017

By Gabriele Bammer

If you want to undertake transdisciplinary research, where can you find relevant concepts and methods? Are there compilations or toolkits that are helpful?

I’ve identified eight relevant toolkits, which are described briefly below and in more detail in the journal GAIA’s Toolkits for Transdisciplinarity series.

One toolkit provides concepts and methods relevant to the full range of transdisciplinary research, while the others cover four key aspects: (i) collaboration, (ii) synthesis of knowledge from relevant disciplines and stakeholders, (iii) thinking systemically, and (iv) making change happen.

Team science glossary

September 15, 2023March 16, 2017

By Sawsan Khuri and Stefan Wuchty

As team science gains momentum, we present this glossary to standardize definitions for the most frequently used terms and phrases in the science of team science literature, and to serve as a reference point for newcomers to the field. Source material is provided where possible.

Co-authorship
When team members are given due credit by co-authoring publications from the project. There are various co-authorship models, some are dependent on disciplinary or departmental practices, and some are negotiable. This is an issue that needs to be clarified and documented very early on in a collaborative effort (Bennet et al., 2010).

Collaboration, or Collaborative project
When two or more scientists work together on a project that is expected to end with a joint publication, and maybe even a grant proposal for more collaborations.

Transkillery! What skills are needed to be a boundary crosser?

December 23, 2021March 14, 2017

By Dena Fam, Tanzi Smith and Dana Cordell

What skills and dispositions are required by researchers and practitioners in transdisciplinary research and practice in crossing boundaries, sectors and paradigms?

The insights here come from interviews with 14 internationally recognized transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners, chosen from a diverse range of research and practice-based perspectives.

Here we focus on:

1) skills for specific tasks such as facilitation of a meeting, crafting a well-written report, and communicating effectively across disciplines; and,

2) dispositions, attitudes, orientations and temperaments of an effective researcher/practitioner, i.e., as a way of being.

Six categories of skills and dispositions

The core skills and dispositions of an exceptional transdisciplinary researcher/practitioner can be grouped into six categories, illustrated in the figure below.

Research team performance

December 28, 2021January 17, 2017

By Jennifer E. Cross and Hannah Love

jennifer-cross — Jennifer E. Cross (biography)

How can we improve the creativity and performance of research teams?

Recent studies on team performance have pointed out that the performance and creativity of teams has more to do with the social processes of interaction on teams, than on individual personality traits. Research on creativity and innovation in teams has found that there are three key predictors of team success:

group membership,
rules of engagement, and
patterns of interaction.

Each of these three predictors can be influenced in order to improve the performance of teams, as the following examples show.

Taboo triangles

December 28, 2021January 10, 2017

By Charles M. Lines

Occasionally, asking your collaborators about other people and organisations to involve in the joint work may make you aware of ‘taboo triangles’. These occur when currently collaborating people or organisations feel uncomfortable with or even unable to countenance a certain person, group or organisation being invited into their existing relationships.

It is worth exploring the reasons for and stories behind these warning signs or taboos. Are they valid? Are they erected by traditions that have become unquestioned rules? Are they in reality a barrier which seeks to restrict access to some form of power, influence or sought after resource? Are they based upon assumptions and preconceptions rather than reality?

Above all, are they worth taking the risk of challenging or even ignoring?

Powhiri: An indigenous example of collaboration from New Zealand

March 23, 2022December 8, 2016

By Rawiri Smith

Collaboration is important in New Zealand as a method of bringing communities together to work on complex problems. A useful collaborative model is the Powhiri, practiced by Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, for hundreds of years.

The formal welcome to an area in New Zealand is a Maori process known as the Powhiri. The Powhiri recognises the mana of all the participants. One of the most important values of the Maori people is manaaki, or caring for the mana of everyone. The Maori word mana means the importance associated with a person. The performance of a Powhiri acknowledges the importance of a person being welcomed to an area.

The deeper meaning behind the Powhiri process gives more meaning and indicates what should be occurring through the Powhiri.

Collaboration, difference and busyness

November 30, 2022November 8, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

What are the ingredients of successful research collaboration? How can we make collaboration work when we are all getting busier?

One of the best guides to success in collaborative team work was produced by Michelle Bennett, Howard Gadlin and Samantha Levine-Findlay in 2010. Built on the experience of researchers at the US National Institutes of Health, they explored: preparing for collaboration, selecting team members, fostering trust, sharing credit, handling conflict and more.

An additional way of thinking about collaboration that I have found useful (Bammer 2008) is to consider it as a process of harnessing and managing differences.