Time commitment – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Metacognition as a prerequisite for interdisciplinary integration

January 5, 2023February 5, 2019

By Machiel Keestra

What’s needed to enable the integration of concepts, theories, methods, and results across disciplines? Why is communication among experts important, but not sufficient? Interdisciplinary experts must also meta-cognize: both individually and as a team they must monitor, evaluate and regulate their cognitive processes and mental representations. Without this, expertise will function suboptimally both for individuals and teams. Metacognition is not an easy task, though, and deserves more attention in both training and collaboration processes than it usually gets. Why is metacognition so challenging and how can it be facilitated?

Institutionalising interdisciplinarity: Lessons from Latin America / Institucionalizar la interdisciplina: Lecciones desde América Latina

April 8, 2021July 17, 2018

By Bianca Vienni Baptista, Federico Vasen and Juan Carlos Villa Soto

authors_bianca-vienni_federico-vasen_juan-carlos-villa-soto — 1. Bianca Vienni Baptista (biography)
2. Federico Vasen (biography)
3. Juan Carlos Villa Soto (biography)

A Spanish version of this post is available

What lessons and challenges about institutionalising interdisciplinarity can be systematized from experiences in Latin American universities?

We analyzed three organizational structures in three different countries to find common challenges and lessons learned that transcend national contexts and the particularities of individual universities. The three case studies are located in:

Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. The Argentinian center (1986 – 2003) was created in a top-down manner without participation of the academic community, and its relative novelty in organizational terms was also a cause of its instability and later closure.
Universidad de la República in Uruguay. The Uruguayan case, started in 2008, shows an innovative experience in organizational terms based on a highly interactive and participatory process.
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The Mexican initiative, which began in 1986, shows a center with a network structure in organizational terms where the focus was redefined over time.

How is transformative knowledge ‘co-produced’?

January 7, 2022April 3, 2018

By Andy Stirling, Adrian Ely and Fiona Marshall

It’s often said that knowledge to tackle big problems in the world – food, water, climate, energy, biodiversity, disease and war – has to be ‘co-produced’. Tackling these problems is not just about solving ‘grand challenges’ with big solutions, it’s also about grappling with the underlying causal social and political drivers. But what does co-production actually mean, and how can it help to create knowledge that leads to real transformation?

Here’s how we at the Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS) Centre approach this challenge of co-production.

Overcoming a paradox? Preparing students for transdisciplinary environments

June 24, 2020January 30, 2018

machiel -keestra_jan-2018 — Machiel Keestra (biography)

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:

long-term collaborations with businesses, as well as non-governmental, governmental and community organisations
teaching particular dispositions and competencies
preparing students for intercultural endeavours.

Epistemological obstacles to interdisciplinary research

May 12, 2020October 31, 2017

By Evelyn Brister

What causes interdisciplinary collaborations to default to the standard frameworks and methods of a single discipline, leaving collaborators feeling like they aren’t being taken seriously, or that what they’ve brought to the project has been left on the table, ignored and underappreciated?

Sometimes it is miscommunication, but sometimes it is that collaborators disagree. And sometimes disagreements are both fundamental and intractable.

Often, these disagreements can be traced back to different epistemological frameworks. Epistemological frameworks are beliefs about how particular disciplines conceive of what it is they investigate, how to investigate it, what counts as sufficient evidence, and why the knowledge they produce matters.

Two audiences and five aims of action researchers

September 13, 2021October 19, 2017

By Hilary Bradbury

Do action researchers have something to offer to the contemporary and urgent question of how to respond to complex real-world problems? I think so.

Action researchers, often working in inter-disciplinary settings, hold in mind that technical, practical and emancipatory goals of action research require us to develop facility in communicating with two audiences: the ‘local’ practitioners and the ‘cosmopolitan’ community of scholars.

Let’s start with the latter. The cosmopolitans are motivated by the question of what, if anything, can be contributed to what scholars already know. As a result these academic colleagues usually privilege the written medium exclusively. The local audience, however, is not served when action researchers write a manuscript intended for scholarly peers!

Synthesis centers as critical research infrastructure

May 4, 2020August 22, 2017

By Andrew Campbell

When we think of research infrastructure, it is easy to associate astronomers with telescopes, oceanographers with research vessels and physicists with particle accelerators.

But what sort of research infrastructure (if any) do we need in order to do more effective multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on big, complex, ‘wicked’ challenges like climate change or food security?

Some eminent colleagues and I argue in a new paper (Baron et al., 2017) that the answers include:

Improving mutual consultation among key stakeholders to optimize the use of research evidence

August 24, 2022June 15, 2017

By Allison Metz

Processes to support the uptake of research evidence call for each of the key stakeholders to consider the challenges faced by other key stakeholders in making good use of research evidence. When stakeholders have the opportunity to consider perspectives other than their own, they will generally have a broader understanding of the problem space, and, in turn a greater commitment to co-creating prototypes for improving research translation.

Let’s consider a real world example in New York City’s public child welfare system.

Learning from Google about inter- and transdisciplinary leadership

July 1, 2021June 6, 2017

By Janet G. Hering

Like most engineers, the Google leadership had assumed that the leader of an engineering team must be at least as competent technically as the members of the team. As Laszlo Bock described in his 2015 book Work Rules!, however, a data-driven assessment disproved this assumption. The counter-intuitive result of “Project Oxygen” was that having “important technical skills that help advise the team” only ranked number eight in the list of key attributes differentiating the most from the least effective managers.

This is very good news for leaders of inter- and transdisciplinary synthesis projects since it’s highly unlikely that these leaders could have all the subject expertise relevant to their projects. If subject expertise is not the most important characteristic of leadership, then what kind of expertise should leaders have and what kind of roles do they play? How important are leaders and leadership in such synthesis projects?

Ten lessons from a transdisciplinary PhD program in sustainable development

February 13, 2020March 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.

Values, confidence, and time: What researchers should consider when engaging with civil society organisations

December 27, 2021February 28, 2017

By William L. Allen

william-allen — William L. Allen (biography)

When researchers want to engage or work with groups outside universities—especially civil society organisations—what should they consider as part of this process?

Civil society comprises organisations—large and small—that are outside of the public and private sectors. These include non-governmental organisations, charities, or voluntary groups.

Three lessons emerged from asking civil society organisations what they would tell academics who want to work with them:

Two barriers to interdisciplinary thinking in the public sector and how time graphs can help

January 27, 2022December 21, 2016

By Jane MacMaster

After one year or so delivering seminars that share practical techniques to help navigate complexity to public sector audiences, I’ve observed two simple and fundamental barriers to dealing more effectively with complex, interdisciplinary problems in the public sector.

First, is the lack of time to problem-solve – to pause and reflect on an issue, to build a deeper understanding of it, to think creatively about it from different angles, to think through some ideas, to test out some ideas. There is too much else going on.

Second, is that it’s often quite difficult to put one’s collective finger on what, exactly, the problem is.