Have you ever heard the phrase the grand challenges of the 21st century require interdisciplinary approaches?
Arguments like climate change or disaster resilience, engineering alone as a discipline can't solve them. We have to think with interdisciplinary ways across humanities and social sciences and engineering disciplines.
As an education researcher, I became really interested in this demand and I specifically wanted to understand what is it like to train to become an interdisciplinary scholar?
Especially when we do tend to train engineering researchers, social science researchers, and operate in these siloed systems in universities.
Now, I was not the first person to be interested in this issue. There have been decades of research on interdisciplinary graduate programs.
But little has changed in the overall structure of how these programs work. They tend to be add-on or auxiliary programs to students main degree granting departments.
Additionally, we know there are numerous individual factors that are challenges to interdisciplinary work that have been identified already.
We know students are challenged to get interdisciplinary exposure when most of their requirements in their disciplines are engineering focused.
They are expected to publish in disciplinary focused journals. And we know that faculty experience this too. And it's hard for them to mentor interdisciplinary graduate students when they themselves have so many disciplinary expectations.
My research is interested in adding a new theoretical lens to this space. I want to specifically analyze how these individual influences actually function as interconnected systems working together to shape graduate student development.
And I argue that this is important because if we want systemic or transformative change in interdisciplinary graduate education, we need to understand the systems impacting the students.
I take a qualitative case study approach at a high level with interviews from students and faculty in an interdisciplinary disaster resilience graduate program.
And I focus specifically on STEM graduate students who were in this program, but they were also getting STEM degrees in dissertations with departments in STEM departments, as well as at the same time being in the IDR program, which presented interesting tensions between interdisciplinary and disciplinary spaces.
I talked to 11 students overall annually over the course of program enrollment. So I had 33 student interviews tracking their development over time, as well as six faculty interviews to help me add additional validation.
In my study, I used future possible selves theory to help me understand student development, and I used ecological systems theory to understand the systems impacting that development.
Where systems here are described as patterns of activities, rules, relations, and specific settings.
So in my study, I focused on looking at my interview data and identifying first in my first manuscript how students developed over time mapping their three developmental trajectories through the lens of this theory, future possible selves.
And in the second manuscript, I identified the system salient to that development through ecological systems theory, looking for where students were talking about the activities, roles, and relationships associated with different systems impacting their development.
And ultimately, I found that 12 microsystems impacted my students development overall, and they all acted in different ways, either as barriers, supports, or negotiations.
And additionally, they all interacted with each other in complex ways that also impacted the development.
And so the big finding for me here was that these interdisciplinary graduate students development was not being impacted by just single activities, rules, relationships, or settings, those individual influences.
Those individual influences actually spanned systems like their interdisciplinary graduate program, even their undergraduate programs they were still thinking about as influencing their development because they didn't always feel like they got exposure to interdisciplinary work ahead of time. They only got it when they got to the interdisciplinary program.
They were also talking about how publishing agencies and job markets were impacting their development in complex ways.
And so overall i found that Interdisciplinary development really emerges from complex negotiations with academic systems and these systems maintain stable patterns that make interdisciplinary graduate education hard to change. We have to make changes at a systems level if we want to transform them. We can't just change
Individual activities, roles, or relationships within these individual systems. And so this is the main contribution of my work is seeking to change understanding in this research space So that we can start making change.