Learning about sustainability: an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in biocomplexity

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The paper aims to report on the experiences moderating an interdisciplinary graduate-level sustainability seminar. Initiated in Fall 2002, the seminar has explored diverse sustainability topics and reached approximately 150 faculty and students. The paper describes how the course shaped participants' perceptions of sustainability and influenced their viewpoints on interdisciplinarity. The paper discusses the implications of this seminar format for communicating about sustainability and provides suggestions for replicating the course at other institutions. Design/methodology/approach -Information about the course is complemented by analyses of the results of 15 in-depth interviews of students and faculty who have participated in the course. Findings -The course facilitated positive outcomes for students and faculty by expanding their familiarity with interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainability and environmental issues, increasing respect for other disciplinary perspectives, learning the basic vocabulary of disciplines outside their area of expertise, and strengthening collaborations between faculty. The course can be strengthened with more involvement from colleagues from the humanities and social sciences, and with attention to equal participation from all involved. Originality/value -The experience is unique in that it represents a nearly decade-long initiative to teaching about sustainability and biocomplexity from an interdisciplinary perspective. The innovative format, content, and pedagogical approach used for this course can be easily implemented in other disciplines. The learning community has facilitated other teaching and research endeavors. This model of sustainability education can advance understanding of complex environmental issues at a time when both interdisciplinarity and sustainability are becoming more common in higher education.

Elusive expectations for a novel program design: Contrast between program intentions and student recruitment and retention

“…Twenty-first-century problems will not be solved by single disciplines (Palmer, 2001). Interdisciplinary engagement, in which students can integrate knowledge and skills drawn from diverse disciplines, can help them to address ill-structured, "wicked" problems (Bridle, Vrieling, Cardillo, Araya, & Hinojosa, 2013;Holley, 2017) and develop creativity, critical thinking, innovation, problem-solving skills, and synergy (Cowden & Santiago, 2016;Haynes, 2017;Mobley, Lee, Morse, Allen, & Murphy, 2014). However, many traditional programs encourage disciplinary specialization, and new graduates are often challenged to venture beyond their discipline to synthesize knowledge, skills, and abilities from other disciplines.…”

Revisiting Graduate Student Training to Address Agricultural and Environmental Societal Challenges

“…The endgame of these courses is for students to apply knowledge gained to dissertation research, ensuring that experiments are conceived in an interactive, collaborative environment. Indeed, seminar series and “workshop” courses have proven effective at uniting student interdisciplinary curricula (Kulcsar et al, 2016, Leuba et al, 2014, Mobley et al, 2013, Moslemi et al, 2009). Finally, incentivization of collaborative research with a small (∼$1,000–5,000) grants program allows cooperating students to write collaborative proposals to gain support for their research, and enhance their professional development (Moslemi et al, 2009).…”

Interdisciplinary Nature of Nanoscience: Implications for Education

“…As hinted at previously, interdisciplinary research is at first glance viewed as less challenging and rigorous, for those that "could not succeed in their own discipline", a way to "lose their professional identity" [67,69]. Such statements reflect the deep socialization to one's own discipline, and the ease of viewing it as superior to others [6,67,70,71], but also the academic prestige of "pure" research in natural sciences [72]. The more sophisticated critique questions the possibility of valid interdisciplinary research per se; e.g arguments that the epistemic differences are too big to overcome [13,15].…”

“…Calculating institution-specific student involvement or numbers of students is no longer critical when the instructors' co-operation is necessary to demonstrate collaboration [139]. It also gives the student group a community of their own and the strengthening of this community can be set as a priority -by means of organizing student conferences, opportunities to meet with staff, and involving students in research [28,67,71,120,140]. It provides a peer group for interdisciplinary networking and support for each other as they face similar problems -institutional, social, or cognitive.…”

“…A jointly held seminar with speakers from various disciplines -usually under a shared, larger theme -is perhaps the most common way of introducing interdisciplinarity [67,71,139,140,149]. In part, it is likely because the seminar is separate from and in addition to all other learning requirements.…”