IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 5, Issue 2, Summer 2016

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl)

Sustainability science graduate students as boundary spanners

Graduate training in sustainability science (SS) focuses on interdisciplinary research, stakeholder-researcher partnerships, and creating solutions from knowledge. But becoming a sustainability scientist also requires specialized training that addresses the complex boundaries implicit in sustainability science approaches to solving social-ecological system challenges. Using boundary spanning as a framework, we use a case study of the Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI) at the University of Maine to explicate key elements for graduate education training in SS. We used a mixed-methods approach, including a quantitative survey and autoethnographic reflection, to analyze our experiences as SSI doctoral students. Through this research, we identified four essential SS boundaries that build on core sustainability competencies which need to be addressed in SS graduate programs, including: disciplines within academia, students and their advisors, researchers and stakeholders, and place-based and generalizable research. We identified key elements of training necessary to help students understand and navigate these boundaries using core competencies. We then offer six best practice recommendations to provide a basis for a SS education framework. Our reflections are intended for academic leaders in SS who are training new scientists to solve complex sustainability challenges. Our experiences as a cohort of doctoral students with diverse academic and professional backgrounds provide a unique opportunity to reflect not only on the challenges of SS but also on the specific needs of students and programs striving to provide solutions

D3.13 MAZI as an experiment in interdisciplinarity: the outcome of a self-reflection exercise (version 3)

[Executive summary] This is the final version (#3) of the MAZI deliverables that propose self-reflections as a way of dealing with collective work in interdisciplinary action and research projects. Its goal is to provide a meta-perspective of the self-reflection outcome documented in detail in previous deliverables. More specifically, this document overviews the process as carried out in MAZI, and based on this experience It develops three categories of action toward shaping common spaces for inter- and transdisciplinary research. These are namely a) communities of practice around DIY networking technology (Section 2); b) transdisciplinary co-design of the MAZI toolkit across-localities (Section 3); and c) learning, appropriation of knowledge, sustainability and knowledge transfer (Section 4). It concludes with a few important lessons learned for the design of future projects, namely the positive impact of assigning overlapping leading roles to partners in interdisciplinary research, and the need for carefully designed intimate spaces for self reflection

Reviewing the Interdisciplinarity of Professors at Colleges and Universities Globally Through a Meta-Analysis of Current Literature

The lineage of interdisciplinarity throughout history pushes us towards understanding the need for interdisciplinarity more than ever in a modern climate. Through a meta-analysis of current literature, topics and themes will be discussed to find answers on how interdisciplinarity of professors are present within institutes of higher learning on a global scale; in addition, the implications that can be drawn from interdisciplinarity of higher education professors. This global outlook of research will focus on a continental approach to observing the divergent forms of interdisciplinarity in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania with nineteen different articles across nineteen different nations across the globe. Themes discussed in the literature relate to creating a free and autonomous interdisciplinarity in higher education, the need for sustainable education, new and integrative ways of learning, university frameworks for administration and professional development, and a global interdisciplinarity framework to consolidate the many socio-geographic forms of interdisciplinarity. Implications arose with the need to address the impact of inherent and biological interdisciplinarity, and the potential limitations of interdisciplinarity when used as a policy lever inside institutions. Ultimately, the need for interdisciplinarity relating to our innate convictions of making knowledgeable connections is not a new idea, rather a reinvigoration of primal concepts relating to knowledge attainment

Concrete utopianism in integrated assessment models: Discovering the philosophy of the shared socioeconomic pathways

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are at the forefront of climate change science today. As an influential methodology and method, the SSPs guide the framing of numerous climate change research questions and how these are investigated. Although the SSPs were developed by an interdisciplinary group of scientists in a well-documented process, there is no apparent consensus in the literature that answers the question, "What is the philosophy of science behind the SSPs?" To investigate, the paper applies a systematic thematic qualitative content analysis to the dataset of published papers that establish the rules and expectations for using the SSPs. The research determines that there is no obvious and concise statement on the epistemological and ontological foundation of the SSPs. However, based on the evidence identified in the dataset, SSPs are implicitly, though not explicitly, consistent with a critical realist and concrete utopian philosophy as coined by Roy Bhaskar. This is the first paper to discuss the philosophical underpinning of the SSPs

Interdisciplinary pedagogy in higher education : Proceedings from Lund University's Teaching and Learning Conference 2019

This is the proceedings volume from the 7th biannual Teaching and Learning Conference at Lund University. The conference theme, Interdisciplinary pedagogy in higher education, is very timely as we see a steady increase, not only in interdisciplinary research and full teaching programmes, but also in new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary courses and components in more traditional disciplinary education at Lund University. The conference highlighted some of the many challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary education where educators meet students with different disciplinary, cultural and geographical profiles. In this volume, the authors share the thoughts, experiences and learning they presented at the conference

Beyond commercial design: a critique of design and graphic design writings in Emigre and Dot Dot Dot magazines

Graphic design faces the contradictions of commercial intent and social relevance. This study explores the contribution of criticism, in two independent, seminal graphic design magazines, towards shifting the dominant preferences of graphic design from a purely commercial pursuit to a human-centred practice. Emigre magazine (c.1984 - 2005) and Dot Dot Dot magazine (c.2000 - 2010) are recognised for their critical intent and within them are emerging critical issues that suggest a potential niche for graphic design beyond consumerism and commerce. In the discipline of graphic design, designers define what it is to be human (and thus equally the realities of dehumanisation) in very particular ways (Rose, 2001:135; Freire, 1993:43). Graphic design has a history of commercial practice. This commercial history continues to define its identity and reinforce a particular body of knowledge. Graphic design criticism, however, is an inventive voice that has the potential to contribute to change. Both Emigre and Dot Dot Dot were representative of a “constructive marginality” (Bennett, 1993:64), drawing from their own set of references and awareness of graphic design’s potential to inform their identities, instead of looking to established definitions of practice to do so. This analysis explores how they anticipated a modern conception of graphic design that has become part of a recently adopted (2015) and more widely embedded discourse. This discourse involves critical design that interrogates multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, environmental sustainability, social and political agency, and speculative futures. Graphic design engages social institutions and practices that denote social constructions of difference and inequality, and is never neutral. Any work, any representation of ideology, is at once individual and discursive at the level of social, cultural and political formations. The critical issues evident in Emigre and Dot Dot Dot, with the exception of an absence of speculative futures, anticipate a more humanising perspective in graphic design. They invite critique and the potential for change that is relevant to the surrounding world, as a counter to commercial self-interest