Integration and Implementation Insights
Research resources for understanding and acting on complex real-world problems
By Maria Helena Guimarães, Olivia Bina and Christian Pohl
If disciplines shape scientific research by forming the primary institutional and cognitive units in academia, how do researchers start being interested in and working with a transdisciplinary approach? How does this influence their career development?
We interviewed 12 researchers working in Switzerland who are part of academia and identify as ‘transdisciplinarians’.
By BinBin Pearce
What are the objectives of transdisciplinary learning? What are the key competences and how do they relate to both educational goals and transdisciplinary research goals? At Transdisciplinarity Lab (TdLab), our group answered these questions by observing and reflecting upon the six courses at Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD levels that we design and teach in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Six competence fields describe what we hope students can do with the help of our courses. A competence field contains a set of interconnected learning objectives for students. We use these competence fields as the basis for curriculum design.
Read moreLinking learning and research through transdisciplinary competences
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.
Read moreUsing the arts and design to build student creative collaboration capacity
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:
By Machiel Keestra
How can we adequately prepare and train students to navigate transdisciplinary environments? How can we develop hybrid spaces in our universities that are suitable for transdisciplinary education?
These questions were considered by a plenary panel, which I organised and chaired at the International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2017 at Leuphana University, Germany. Three major educational requirements were identified:
Read moreOvercoming a paradox? Preparing students for transdisciplinary environments
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.
Read moreTranskillery! What skills are needed to be a boundary crosser?