Interdisciplinary approaches are often seen as necessary for attacking the most critical challenges facing the world today, and doctoral students and their training programs are recognized as central to increasing interdisciplinary research capacity. However, the traditional culture and organization of higher education are ill-equipped to facilitate interdisciplinary work. This study employs a lens of socialization to study the process through which students learn the norms, values, and culture of both traditional disciplines and integrated knowledge production. It concludes that many of the processes of socialization are similar, but that special attention should be paid to overcoming organizational barriers to interdisciplinarity related to policies, space, engagement with future employers, and open discussion of the politics of interdisciplinarity.
BACKGROUNDInterdisciplinary teamwork is increasingly important for engineering graduates. Yet, the reality of teaching interdisciplinarity requires faculty and students to navigate structures of engineering programs that do not accommodate interdisciplinary work.
PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS)The purpose of this study is to understand how students and faculty negotiate interdisciplinary identities and how self-managed work teams can be used as a pedagogical strategy for promoting interdisciplinarity. Gee's concepts of affinity identity and institutional identity are used to theorize interdisciplinary teaming.
DESIGN/METHODMultiple data sets from observations and interviews are used to present a case study of one interdisciplinary design course from the points of view of faculty and students. This approach, combined with research literature, is used to propose a pedagogical model for interdisciplinary teaming.
RESULTSA pedagogical approach of self-managed teaming can promote interdisciplinary identities if (a) faculty model institutional identities as interdisciplinary researchers and instructors, (b) students are encouraged to perform as decision-makers in groups constructed through affinity identities, and (c) faculty provide scaffolding for self-managed teams and encourage valuing of different disciplinary perspectives.
CONCLUSIONSIn the midst of an international shift toward interdisciplinarity, structural boundaries within academia present challenges to interdisciplinary collaborations. Gee's identity theory can facilitate our understanding of academic structures, especially in examining how overlapping affinity and institutional identities are at the center of newly formed interdisciplinary spaces. Issues critical to aiding interdisciplinary teaming include conflict management, scaffolding by instructors, and realistic appraisal of disciplinary grounding.
KEYWORDSaffinity identity, institutional identity interdisciplinarity, self-managed teams 100 (April 2011) 2 Journal of Engineering Education both student and faculty levels. Alignment of departments, budgets, and promotion and tenure with traditional disciplines stands as a significant obstacle to faculty members' pursuit of interdisciplinary teaching and research, which has direct implications for undergraduate student learning. Specifically, few interdisciplinary learning environments are available to students, and faculty are rarely encouraged to develop sophisticated pedagogies specifically addressing interdisciplinarity. Given the stark contrast between industry and academia, how can academics effectively offer authentic, pedagogically sound, cross-disciplinary teaming experiences to their students?We employ identity theory (Gee, 2000) to understand how faculty members and students construct professional identities and explain how interdisciplinary design practices can be injected into disciplinary engineering education. Gee defines "institutional identity" as a position or role authorized through a set of "laws, rules, traditions, or principles of various sort...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.