Sustaining collegiality through the imperative of interdisciplinary practice

Abstract

Contemporary universities in the developed world face a plethora of increased -and changing -responsibilities. We are the global university, responsible for the production of worker citizens who will be 'prepared' for an extraordinarily diverse set of challenges across all facets of their lives. Much of our research concentration in the academy necessarily requires a plural, diverse approach to developing the appropriate capabilities for our students. Multidisciplinarity is the simple reality of the professional world. Universities have at their disposal sophisticated self-aware multidisciplinary practitioners. Or do they? How is multidisciplinarity perceived and understood in university departments and research teams? What are the tangible measures of successful multi-disciplinary practice? Drawing on a cultural studies framework, this paper will consider the challenges to academic identity and collegiality which reside in the assumed move to multiple ways of knowing in discovery and scholarship. How do we open to, and learn from, each others' disciplinary tools, traditions and epistemologies? How are such collegial approaches -concrete collegialities -embedded in our starting discipline? What are the understandings and limitations we face in seeking to move to a rich meaningful interdisciplinary practice? I will explore these questions in relation to the UN Decade on Education for Sustainability and Sustainable Development.

Insights into the value of a ‘stand‐alone’ course for sustainability education

“…It is widely accepted that academics understand the world primarily through their own discipline or field framework (Becher and Trowler 2001;Blättel-Mink and Kastenholz 2005;Hegarty 2009;Shulman 2004). Shulman (2004) has particularly noted that classroom teaching is framed by academics through their key content knowledge.…”

Defining Terms for Integrated (Multi-Inter-Trans-Disciplinary) Sustainability Research

“…As a consequence, there can be no structured step-by-step or 'best practice' guide to conducting integrated research. (This has not stopped eager research teams from offering their own experiences (or workshops) as examples of 'best practices' though [76,[88][89][90].) In addition, for research employing a transdisciplinary or goal-oriented interdisciplinary approach, the process of designing and conducting the research needs to be an iterative one and, consequently, setting too rigorous a guideline for the integrated project would remove some of the flexibility that is essential for its success.…”

An action research approach for embedding education for sustainability in a university undergraduate curriculum

“…Few are the papers in the literature that discuss or focus on issues to do with academic culture and sustainability (Hegarty, 2008(Hegarty, , 2009. No evidence has been found on how academic culture impacts interdisciplinary sustainability projects development.…”

“…The link of interdisciplinary practice in research and education as the means to deal with the sustainability challenge is logical because of the complex and multifaceted nature of the term (Hegarty, 2009;Tilbury, 2012). According to Hegarty (2009, p. 84), change projects at universities that seek to embed cross-cutting agendas such as sustainability have been 'anything but straightforward'.…”

“…Existing disciplinary silos and boundaries deter the capacity of EfS advocates to influence or convince other academics about the need to rethink current teaching and learning in HE in order to embed EfS (Hegarty, 2009). This is due to a strong sense of identify formation, assumptions and beliefs amongst academia, being socially constructed, and in which a status quo and a set of values claimed by certain academics are being reproduced (Hegarty, 2008).…”