Interdisciplinary foundations: reflecting on interdisciplinarity and three decades of teaching and research at Griffith University, Australia

Franks, Daniel M.; Dale, Patricia Ellen; Hindmarsh, Richard Alan; Fellows, Christy Susan; Buckridge, Margaret Mary; Cybinski, Patricia Janina

doi:10.1080/03075070701267228

Cited by 58 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Within the broad, potentially interdisciplinary, School of 'Geography and Environmental Studies', teaching was not integrated beyond some first-year initiatives. Therefore, teaching appeared to be strongly discipline based, in spite of a majority of views from our participants that complex environmental problems required at least some exposure to the discourses and methods in other disciplines, and at least three decades of scholarship in favor of the provision of formal integrated interdisciplinary learning opportunities (Petrie, 1992;Huber, 2002;Boix Mansilla & Duraisingh, 2007;Franks et al, 2007;Woods, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…Klein (2010) points out that institutionalizing interdisciplinarity undermines its very meaning and that the pragmatics of the new approach mean change to protocols, practices and conventions, unless interdisciplinarity is just a façade for the disciplines to continue behind a new structure. These difficulties have resulted in some of the institutions established around interdisciplinarity in the 1970s experiencing drift away from collaboration, although environment-related programs may be relatively robust (Franks et al, 2007;Gibson, 2007).…”

Section: Moving Forward: Removing the Barriersmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Does Interdisciplinarity Exist Behind the Façade of Traditional Disciplines? A Study of Natural Resource Management Teaching

Pharo

Bridle

2012

Journal of Geography in Higher Education

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We investigated the hypothesis that interdisciplinarity is being explicitly taught behind the façade of traditional disciplines. We interviewed 14 academics (seven geographers and seven agricultural scientists) about their teaching in the inherently interdisciplinary field of natural resource management. Our teachers were generally well informed about interdisciplinarity, believed it is important in a natural resource management degree, and participants viewed the traditional discipline-based structure as a major obstacle to collaboration, mostly because of competition between disciplines for student income. Other barriers included the strong rewards of disciplinary specialization, the difficulty of sustaining teaching teams, and other university structures, such as inflexible timetables. We suggest that if institutions with traditional disciplinebased structures want to provide students with interdisciplinary opportunities, teachers need to be adequately supported in terms of workload, career rewards and pedagogy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Moving Forward: Removing the Barriersmentioning

confidence: 98%

Does Interdisciplinarity Exist Behind the Façade of Traditional Disciplines? A Study of Natural Resource Management Teaching

Pharo

Bridle

2012

Journal of Geography in Higher Education

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“…Indeed most instructors would provide some resistance to teaching in such a pluri-discipline for this reason. Franks et al (2007) synthesise more recent thoughts on this topic. At the level of teaching a subject, such resistance may be a result of (i) differences in the characteristics of disciplinary knowledge,…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 92%

Engaging Staff in Curriculum Change: Reflections from an Accounting Ethics Initiative

Wright¹,

Byers²,

Dyball³

et al. 2011

ASS

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This paper identifies the challenges associated with engaging staff in curriculum change, using the context of systematic inclusion of ethics in the accounting curriculum of a major Australian metropolitan university, and offers some suggestions as to how these challenges might be overcome. We characterize the inclusion of ethics in the accounting curriculum as 'pluri-disciplinary' following the typology of Davies and Devlin (2007) and draw on 22 interviews with accounting academics to examine curriculum change in a pluri-disciplinary context. We find that key staff concerns are the impact on broader accounting discourse, assignment of teaching responsibilities, curriculum content, and identification of who is ultimately responsible for the curriculum change. The responses indicate that staff would like to be equipped to confidently deliver ethics content and to have material relevant to a technically-focused student cohort. One means of achieving this might be to involve ethics experts in developing and delivering foundational material early in the curriculum and having accounting staff teach applications of this material in the latter stages. Our observations might also be of interest to those seeking to embed other 'soft' skills (such as communication, critical thinking and sustainability) within a technical curriculum.

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“…How can we capture the workings of the team? To reflect on these, we decide to write down our thoughts: 5 'Knowledge integration', as Franks et al (2007) have called collaborations between diverse academic disciplines, challenges established epistemologies and knowledge creation. The benefits to multidisciplinary work include gaining opportunities to broaden the scope of investigations and teaching, expanding professional relations, and answering questions that are beyond the scope of one discipline (Klein, 1990)-for example, the social impacts of preventive medicine (Hagoel and KalekinFishman, 2002) or the ecology and managing landscapes (Fry, 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carnivalesque collaborations: reflections on ‘doing’ multi-disciplinary research

Spiller

Ball

Daniel

et al. 2014

Qualitative Research

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Many funding bodies emphasise the advantages of using multi-disciplinary approaches; in response, in this paper we consider our reflections on doing such a project. We contribute to the multidisciplinary literature by considering the standardizing effect of collaboration on multifarious research approaches. We argue that greater attention should be paid to 'doing' qualitative multidisciplinary research. We find that elements of 'letting go' and 'coming together' are important when new perspectives and knowledge are engaged. Therefore, we call for clarity on the multidisciplinary approaches and discuss how we came to understand the collaborative processes of researching, thinking, and writing. The paper begins with vignettes about our ontological journeys during the research project. In developing our argument, we consider the retrospective and reflexive qualities expressed in our vignettes and examine how our collaborative theorizing shaped the research project.

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Interdisciplinary foundations: reflecting on interdisciplinarity and three decades of teaching and research at Griffith University, Australia

Cited by 58 publications

References 12 publications

Does Interdisciplinarity Exist Behind the Façade of Traditional Disciplines? A Study of Natural Resource Management Teaching

Does Interdisciplinarity Exist Behind the Façade of Traditional Disciplines? A Study of Natural Resource Management Teaching

Engaging Staff in Curriculum Change: Reflections from an Accounting Ethics Initiative

Carnivalesque collaborations: reflections on ‘doing’ multi-disciplinary research

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