Playing the interdisciplinary game across education–medical education boundaries: sites of knowledge, collaborative identities and methodological innovations

Abstract

This paper aims to interrogate the potential and challenges in interdisciplinary working across disciplinary boundaries by examining a longitudinal partnership designed to research student experiences of digital technologies in undergraduate medicine established by the two authors (one from Education, the other Medical Education). The paper is situated in current methodological trends including the changing value of replicability and evidence based methods and increases in qualitative and mixed methods studies in Medical Education, whilst education research has seen growing encouragement for randomised controlled trials and large-scale quantitative studies. A critical analysis of the partnership interactions is framed by Holland's positional and imagined identities, negotiated across 'figured' worlds and the concept of epistemic games that guide knowledge construction. We consider social, political and cultural challenges and how 'in between' sites of knowledge were established where the academic identity of each was shaped by engaging with the other and new theoretical, methodological and ethical understandings were co-constructed. The paper concludes that despite the ongoing challenges, 'bottom up' partnerships can contribute to a growth in interdisciplinarity which might itself be understood as a boundary object as this necessitates improvisation and boundary crossing and can therefore always be considered a matter of negotiation, creativity and collaboration.

Adoption, adaptation, and integration: renegotiating the identity of educational research through interdisciplinarity

“…Taken together, the papers in this issue demonstrate the potential of educational research to transform research in other disciplines through stepping outside traditional disciplinary boundaries -whether that is through boundary objects (Timmis and Williams 2017) or boundary experiences (Clark et al 2017). This issue also demonstrates how educational research can itself be transformed through adoption, adaptation, and integration of other disciplinary practices and theory (Boeren 2017;Clark et al 2017;CohenMiller et al 2017;Knewstubb and Nicholas 2017;Taylor 2017).…”

“…Such hierarchical positioning of knowledge in research partnerships can be challenging or threatening to disciplinary identity. The papers by Timmis and Williams (2017) and Wishart (2017) in this issue narrate some of the challenges associated with the hierarchical nature of different disciplines, particularly when working with the field of sciences, in these cases medical education and veterinary science. A key power differential in the practice of conducting interdisciplinary research highlighted in these papers is that of ethics.…”

“…This may result in people from different backgrounds working together (Clark et al 2017;CohenMiller et al 2017;Timmis and Williams 2017;Wishart 2017), or may result in individual researchers bringing together ideas from different disciplines (Boeren 2017;Knewstubb and Nicholas 2017;Taylor 2017). This breadth of field is illustrated in terms of the aims and desired outcomes of education, which are many and varied: for example, education can be seen as preparation for work, as social development, as selfactualization, as support for effective functioning in the world, and as an enjoyable endeavour in itself.…”

“…Knewstubb and Nicholas (2017) highlight that education is only loosely a 'discipline': people based within the field of education often bring theoretical perspectives from their own backgrounds to its study. Within higher education, people also study the practice of education within their own disciplines (Knewstubb and Nicholas 2017;Timmis and Williams 2017;Wishart 2017), bringing their own disciplinary perspectives to their research. This can lead to particular assumptions about what education as a discipline is about and the paradigms in which educational research should operate (Wishart 2017).…”

“…(McMurtry 2011, 20) Beyond such integration of insights, papers in this issue also discuss the development and refinement of novel theory and methodology to address complex questions. We begin with papers reflecting on the practice of interdisciplinary research (Clark et al 2017;Timmis and Williams 2017;Wishart 2017), then move on to papers that use theory to develop representations of this practice (CohenMiller et al 2017;Knewstubb and Nicholas 2017), and then complete the issue with papers that provide theoretical representations or perspectives on interdisciplinary research (Boeren 2017;Taylor 2017).…”