This paper analyses empirical data collected in the course of an interdisciplinary collaboration between an academic from the University of Oslo’s (UiO) Department of Education (author Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke, hereafter Tone) and an academic from the Faculty of Dentistry (author Anne Møystad, hereafter Anne). Although the two worked together on an academic development project often pursued in higher education – how to improve student supervision – rarer are the ways in which their collaboration grew to include research on how a profession (dentistry) contributes to a public good. Concerning public good, we draw on McLean and Walker (2012) who argue that professions and society have a contract, where in exchange for professional autonomy and prestige, a profession contributes to public good by sharing its expertise as a public service to the social system. We argue that what has led to Anne’s and Tone’s contribution to public good has been a collaboration marked by a high degree of academic hospitality. Their academic hospitality helped them overcome challenges as they arose in their ten-year (and counting) collaboration that has brought about a change in the dental faculty’s cultural values and approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment. The dental faculty now discusses, reflects on, and lives out ideals for teaching students how their work contributes to public good.

The work of Anne and Tone led a faculty to change fundamentally their supervision and assessment practices, to develop practices designed to ‘make’ students, rather than ‘break’ them, as they prepare for professional work.  The case details how Tone and Anne, with painstaking attention to language and to hearing each voice at the Faculty of Dentistry, worked to align dental academics’ often widely varying views on their dentistry’s professional standards. They worked to make suitability assessment formative for dental students and academics alike, giving each ample information about whether students are suitable or not for professional work (Solbrekke & Møystad 2022). Because the assessment occurs over the course of each semester, students have opportunities to reflect on and then change their behaviors. 

Our purpose is to dissect Anne’s and Tone’s collaboration to highlight its inner workings and then generalize about collaboration in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. To analyze their collaboration, we draw heavily on the concept of a specific type of collaboration as enacted through academic hospitality (Phipps & Barnett, 2007).  Academics engage in academic hospitality when colleagues: share ideas, methods, and concepts with each other, whether from the same or different disciplinary tribes (epistemological hospitality); provide resources to each other or students (material hospitality); welcome fellow academics who travel to new locations, whether across the globe or from across a campus (touristic hospitality); and use language to develop a shared repertoire to communicate across disciplines or educational environments, such as across clinical and non-clinical teachers. We also draw on Imperiale et al’s (2021) reconsideration of academic hospitality’s emphasis on conversations as the modes of engaging in academic hospitality, as well as their exploration of how academic hospitality is lived out in relationships.

Anne’s and Tone’s collaboration evolved within the frame of the research project: The Formation and Competence Building of University Academic Developers (FORMATION) (2015-2021) and continues as part of another: Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education (AHIE) (2021-2026) . Because the three authors are researchers on and actors in the case, we use an insider-outsider participative action research approach. Anne is an insider at the Faculty of Dentistry; and Tone and author Sutphen (hereafter referred to as Molly) are outsiders from the Department of Education at UiO. In their research, Tone and Anne carried out focus group interviews with eight cohorts (N=40) and surveys of six cohorts (N=137) of staff and students at the Faculty of Dentistry. We also draw on the authors’ individual reflection logs, e-mail correspondence, and archived meeting minutes. Molly worked closely as a ‘critical friend,’ asking naïve questions to ferret out stances taken for granted and why (Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2020). Drawing on qualitative data collected, Molly used academic hospitality as an analytical frame to dissect, with the help of Tone and Anne, the collaboration that occurred in the Faculty of Dentistry. We use the concept of academic hospitality as an analytical frame because it provides descriptions of mindsets and actions, adding specificity to the too often vague term of collaboration. Although we draw heavily on Phipps and Barnett (2007), we also use theories of hospitality from Derrida (2000) and anthropologists Candea and Da Col (2012). The analysis of data is a close collaboration among the three authors. We use a retrospective analysis of the interviews and documents in an abductive and reflexive manner (Solbrekke and Møystad, 2022). Our collaboration is an iterative ‘dance’ among, the concepts of collaboration and hospitality, phases of collaboration, and how the collaboration has evolved and changed as a dynamic process over more than 10 years (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000). Simultaneously, the data help us to consider critically Phipps’ and Barnett’s (2007) four dimensions and other perspectives on hospitality.

We argue that during their collaboration, Tone and Anne unwittingly used academic hospitality, and by using it, they gradually shifted their focus, from meeting the needs of a vague call from the Dental Faculty for help to improve clinical supervision and the environments in which the supervision occurred, to bringing about a changed culture in and practices of the Dental Faculty. This paper provides concrete examples of how those who collaborated experienced touristic hospitality, where they tried to orient themselves to the new situations, asking questions and trying to map their surroundings. Hosts offered material hospitality in the form of taking the time needed to explain their respective epistemologies. Both hosts and guests also engaged in linguistic hospitality, explaining the words they used and why. To make changes in cultures of education requires a high degree of work to shift or eliminate practices firmly embedded in the cultures of organizations (Stensaker 2018), as well as time, patience, and courage to motivate academic staff and leaders to see what is possible in already overloaded workdays typical at public universities. As we demonstrate interdisciplinary collaboration requires time to explain epistemologies of their respective fields, what each means by terms taken for granted by a discipline’s practitioners – in this case public good or preparation for practice – and to usher the tourist into one’s field, as Tone did for Anne and Anne for Tone. Nevertheless, as we argue, when educational leaders are willing to acknowledge the time it takes to change established practices and then invest resources to collaborate with other staff and students, changes are more likely.

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