The term ‘intercultural education’ means different things to different people. Moreover, the boundaries between intercultural education and multicultural, international, development and comparative education are ill defined. Ambiguities around definitions and academic identities are often a barrier to creative collaborative work in intercultural education. In this paper we explain how members of Faculty in a Finnish university with diverse perspectives worked together to develop a collaborative inter- and multidisciplinary framework in which to research intercultural education. The approach is a development of Dillon’s (2006, 2008) work on a ‘pedagogy of connection’ which is grounded in integrativism and consists of a framework for focusing on the contexts of connection and tools for making connections. Contexts are explored through the notions of boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), the artefacts, documents, institutional and administrative protocols, etc. that have to be addressed by people from different communities if shared understandings are to be built. Walker & Creanor (2005) describe a boundary as a discontinuity in some form of practice, often determined by limits of effective communication. Boundary encounters occur as people interact across these boundaries. They may be interpersonal or mediated by artefacts (i.e. tools). Boundary crossings are the flow of ideas, constructs and innovations across boundaries.

Perspectives of participants were recorded through a structured mapping exercise and then progressively and cumulatively refined through a series of dialogues and commentaries on dialogues. The mapping and dialogue are means of actively engaging with boundary objects, exploring the tensions at the boundaries, and facilitating boundary crossings. Out of this process a series of collectively agreed themes emerged. The themes are: relationships between culture and place; language as a reflection of culture and as a tool for intercultural cooperation; cultural contexts of knowledge; facilitating intercultural education through the use of information and communication technologies.

In this paper we discuss the process through which the framework and themes were developed and consider the utility of the approach for promoting collaborative research in intercultural education. The contribution to research is thus substantially methodological. In making connections and identifying and resolving tensions, we see the potential for combining the analytical, integrative and synthetic forms of thinking that Sternberg & Lubart (1999) identify with combinational cross-disciplinarity. Understanding how ideas and concepts have developed within disciplines, how they are verified, and their potential for contributing to a bigger picture involves analytical thinking. Moving ideas between disciplines and working simultaneously in more than one involves integrative thinking. Recognising new patterns that emerge from reconfigurations of ideas and concepts and developing new frameworks to accommodate them involves synthetic thinking. Collaborative cross-disciplinary research might thus be defined in terms of negotiating boundary crossings and applying a combination of modes of thinking in the generation of new outcomes. At the University of Eastern Finland we have used the approach as part of a strategy of re-focussing and consolidating research expertise in intercultural education at a time of institutional change.