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Plenary Panels

Report by Machiel Keestra

Plenary panel on ‘Teaching and Learning in Transdisciplinary Environments. Preparing the next Generation for Navigating between Different Environments’ – Thursday, September 14, 2017. – Report by Machiel Keestra (Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Amsterdam; past president Association for Interdisciplinary Studies)

After days of exchanging experiences with and insights about research that involves both academics from different disciplines as well as extra-academic partners (like patients, clients, citizens, governments, industry, and so on) and about the challenges regarding the implementation of the results from such research projects, the plenary panel session on Thursday morning focused on the question: “Can we prepare students sufficiently for such transdisciplinary projects at all, and if so: how?” The motivation behind that question was the following. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects can in many cases be carried out in the controllable environment of the lab and at a distance of the relatively messy and uncontrollable world outside the lab. However, transdisciplinary projects do by nature not take place in such an environment as they are context-specific and depend upon the adequate involvement of individuals and groups with relevant experiential knowledge, whose norms and interests are often at stake. Leaving the confines of the university, transdisciplinary projects are thus facing extra dimensions of diversity. Indeed, the university being an environment with its internal diversity, its community still shares a set of practices and principles that make interdisciplinary collaboration easy compared to projects that engage extra-academic partners. Obviously, preparing university students for their roles in such transdisciplinary projects poses extra and very different requirements, which to some are at odds with the nature of academic training or university programs. (Before entering this domain, the session started with a brief report on the New Zealand co-conference by Melissa Robson, from Landcare New Zealand.)

While seeking an answer to the question of how we prepare our university students for navigating such transdisciplinary environments, Machiel Keestra (Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Amsterdam and past president of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies) moderated a highly interactive session during which he tapped from the expertise of the audience and invited five panelists to respond to questions they prepared beforehand. The panelists came from three different continents and were as academics all five involved in transdisciplinary projects that in some way included extra-academic participants while developing solutions to real-world problems that these participants helped to define. Marcel Bursztyn (University of Brasilia), Dena Fam (University of Technology Sydney), Christian Pohl (ETH Zürich), Esther Meyer (student and faculty of Leuphana University Lüneburg) and Daniel J. Lang (Leuphana University Lüneburg) introduced themselves by conveying what to them had been perhaps the most impressive educational experience.

After that they offered brief 2-minute statements in response to the three questions that served to organize the session as a whole:

  1. What transdisciplinary skills and knowledge are difficult to provide to our students? (> 27 min.)

  2. Can we create transdisciplinary environments within an academic/university setting? (>54 min.)

  3. Can we prepare students sufficiently for the ‘intercultural endeavours’ of TD? (>73 min.)

Watch the session on YouTube

Even though the statements were prepared individually, there was a surprising amount of agreement between the panelists and with the audience, allowing us here to offer a brief report of the discussions.
    
1. As to what transdisciplinary skills and knowledge might be difficult to provide to our students, the panelists largely agreed that our academic programs still tend to focus mainly on knowledge, even though we should prepare students for ‘knowing, acting, and being’. And even when it comes to learning how to handle knowledge issues, it is difficult to prepare them to handle appropriately the opinions, misunderstandings or flat-out false knowledge claims that extra-academic partners sometimes present. This immediately shows how ‘acting and being’ are at stake in such situations, as much of transdisciplinary collaboration depends upon personal attitudes and competences and upon interpersonal communication. We should probably devote more academic teaching, training and assessment to those, even though it is not easy to nurture or facilitate the humility, the curiosity, the courage and the excitement that students need to navigate adequately in such transdisciplinary environments. The audience and panelists agreed that resources from organization science and business schools are often useful in such contexts. However, only a minority of those present actually had integrated those in their transdisciplinary programs, laying bare certainly room for improvement.

2. Contexts were the topic of the next section of the discussion, focusing on whether we can create transdisciplinary environments in our university settings. Here again, all participants agreed that we cannot avoid to create such environments and that the only way to do so is to develop ‘hybrid environments’ together with extra-academic partners. It may be that individual programs must limit themselves to certain ‘niche projects’ when co-creating these contexts, as it does amount to sharing some ownership of those programs with partners. Several panelists were coordinating transdisciplinary labs, hybrid environments in which projects were co-determined in such a way from start to finish. Such experiences convinced them that merely inviting partners for some guest lectures and as providers of internships is not sufficient to conduct genuine transdisciplinary projects, to expose students to the many characteristics of these contexts, to train them for these and assess them accordingly. Indeed, one audience member told how she eventually succeeded in implementing a rule, according to which half of each team with which she teaches, conducts research, or governs her centre, consists of practicioners and other extra-academic partners. It was clear that for most audience members such a rule would be hard to implement, as universities tend to operate rather like a Titanic, which only slowly changes its course.

3. Starting with transdisciplinary skills and competences, the discussion had moved to transdisciplinary environments while finally focusing on the general topic of the conference as a whole: transdisciplinarity as an ‘intercultural endeavour’. Moderator Keestra made the provocative statement that the academic community (stemming generally from western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic – ‘weird’- countries) represents only a small minority of the global population and that we should ask ourselves whether we’re nonetheless capable of engaging with partners from other groups, communities and cultures sufficiently to address their concerns and problems. Here again, panelists agreed that we can do nothing but to face our limitations and biases and at least offer our students and ourselves the time, space and tools to gather such experiences and to reflect upon them. However, this again underlined that such transdisciplinary endeavours can not always comply with the constraints set by common university programs: building trust and overcoming conflicts with extra-academic partners, for example, require more time and other conditions than usual academic projects. An audience member from Ethiopia, now teaching in Germany, told how students in Ethiopia fulfill a practical requirement during their study by working and living for a while with a local community, which exposes them to some extent to the lived experience of extra-academic partners. He added that in Ethiopia, like in Germany, students seem to be more eager to participate in such transdisciplinary projects than their professors, who sometimes prefer staying in their comfort zone.

If there is any general lesson that can be drawn from the vivid discussions during this panel session, it is that all those involved in transdisciplinary education must move outside their comfort zone: this holds irrespective of our roles, our professional background and our institutional context. Even though this is challenging on many levels, the consensus was equally that navigating such transdisciplinary environments can be highly exciting and rewarding. Hopefully, viewing this plenary session can inspire others to start or modify their transdisciplinary engagements such that they can only agree with this enthusiasm.

Blog Posts

Some more topics covered at the conference are presented in the following blog posts by the community weblog for researchers "Integration and Implementation Insights":