The Snowbird Charrette: Integrative Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Environmental Research Design

A pedagogical model for integrative training in conservation and sustainability

“…Because the literature on interdisciplinary education shows that students tend to fall back into disciplinary silos as they progress through their programs (Hackett and Rhoten 2009), the ICON program also includes a series of integrative mechanisms designed to encourage exchange throughout the program and across cohorts. Students engage in peer review of proposals and manuscripts, brown bag discussions, and reflective collaborative journaling throughout their time at UGA.…”

“…We conceptualize our students as "agile scientists" who, although grounded in a specific discipline, should have translational skills that enable them to (a) be conversant across a range of disciplines and knowledge domains, (b) move easily between the worlds of academia and practice, and (c) translate research into action. The agile scientist should be able to understand, value, and evaluate many different kinds of knowledge, critically interrogating assumptions about what types of knowledge count, and he or she should be able to function in situations of incomplete or shifting knowledge, recalibrating and adapting as necessary (Hackett and Rhoten 2009). Perhaps most importantly though, agile scientists must have the instincts to define and redefine conservation issues in ways that avoid the oversimplification to which these issues are often subjected.…”

Examining Interprofessional Education Through the Lens of Interdisciplinarity: Power, Knowledge and New Ontological Subjects

“…Similarly to interprofessional education/practice, interdisciplinarity has been widely touted in recent decades as a route to greater efficiency and more effective and relevant ('applied') problem-solving in a range of academic and industrial fields (Barry et al 2008;Choi and Shields 2015;Hackett and Rhoten 2009;Jacobs and Frickel 2009), amid the move to 'Mode 2' knowledge production (Nowotny et al 2003). While its definition is varied and contested, interdisciplinarity involves collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries (Cooper 2013), and therefore, like IPE, potentially disrupts the link between exclusive knowledge and professional status (Garforth and Kerr 2011).…”

“…They call for further comparative research -a suggestion that has also been applied to the field of IPE . A rare example is Hackett and Rhoten's (2009) comparison of the problem-solving capabilities of students trained within an interdisciplinary graduate education programme versus those from disciplinary programmes, which found interdisciplinary students were more successful in the junior years, but disciplinary students were more successful in the senior years. A number of empirical studies documenting the lived experience of interdisciplinary working have also emerged recently, highlighting the tensions and ambivalence that such collaborations can produce (Choi and Shields 2015;Fitzgerald et al 2014;Garforth and Kerr 2011;Hannigan 2014;Panofsky 2011;Rabinow and Bennett 2012).…”

Teaching Interdisciplinary Sustainability Science Teamwork Skills to Graduate Students Using In-Person and Web-Based Interactions

“…Third, exposure to the professional culture of funding and proposal writing is crucial to becoming an effective contributor to and leader of complex sustainability efforts [30]. Fourth, development of model grant proposals provides a meaningful context within which to negotiate disciplinary difference and pursue interdisciplinary integration; further, it functions as an effective measure of interdisciplinary achievement [31].…”