Session Information
15 SES 06, Conceptualisation
Paper Session
Contribution
This conceptual paper considers the complexities faced by researchers from education working across disciplinary boundaries, in partnership with researchers from other backgrounds and from other disciplines. This paper proposes the development of a clear position for education within inter-disciplinary working, to take account of the unique characteristics of our field. With the increasing calls for large-scale research projects that cross boundaries of disciplines, institutions, and countries there has never been a more appropriate time to problematize collaborative research practices, within education and between education and other disciplines.
Education as an academic discipline is inherently inter-disciplinary: researchers come from a variety of backgrounds, including psychology, sociology, international studies, geography, teaching, specific school curriculum subjects, to name just a few. Educational research often explores “big problems” and “big questions” of human functioning and context, which are of interest to many disciplines and can be explored using a wide range of methods. Education, then, is well-placed to work across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Such research partnerships can be constructed (or evolve) in different ways: often those in different disciplines view a problem from different viewpoints, and individual researchers simply use different approaches alongside each other. Other approaches can be more transformative, however, such as researchers from different disciplines coming together to create a new idea, approach or perspective through synthesis (eg McMurty, 2011).
Nonetheless, working in this way is not straightforward. Different disciplines hold different assumptions about what the “best” method to use is, and this results in privileging the type of knowledge produced by that method (as a brief example, consider the differences between: large-scale assessment data; interviews with individuals; surveys with samples of populations; and ethnographic work; and the differences in how these approaches are viewed by different disciplines and by researchers from different traditions). Such hierarchical positioning of knowledge in research partnerships can be challenging to researcher and disciplinary identity - questioning researchers' sense of their own expertise.
This is problematic because professional identity is intertwined with a sense of making a unique contribution and having defined expertise in a particular discipline, field, or method (Rose 2011, Rose & Norwich 2014). This also relates to content and practice of research. Academics are encouraged to build a career on this premise: as a specialist or expert in a specific, bounded field. They are not encouraged to develop as generalists who work across boundaries. The academic system, including university departments, journals, publishers, and assessment of research output, is created in disciplinary confines, so working across disciplines does not give researchers clear identities. Justifying one’s own worth and developing an identity as an inter-disciplinary researcher, therefore, is hard.
These hierarchies can become magnified across international boundaries, when researchers from different countries are working together. Different traditions and different assumptions around types of knowledge, and differing levels of familiarity with funding bodies and their expectations, can become even more problematic when there are limited opportunities to meet, explore assumptions, and work through differences.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
McMurtry, A. (2011). The complexities of interdisciplinarity: Integrating two different perspectives on interdisciplinary research and education. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 8(2), 19-35. Rose, J. (2011) Dilemmas of inter-professional collaboration: Can they be resolved? Children and Society, 25, 151-163. Rose, J. & Norwich, B. (2014). Collective commitment and collective efficacy: A theoretical model for understanding the motivational dynamics of dilemma resolution in inter-professional work. Cambridge Journal of Education, 44, 59-74.
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