Interdisciplinary Best Practices

This page provides opening remarks to a discussion of best practices which proceeds under several headings:

We believe that it is possible to identify best practices for interdisciplinary communication, research, teaching, administration, and policy advice.

A similar sentiment was recently voiced by Kessel et al.: “The underlying premise of this collection is that constructive approaches toward interdisciplinary science can be drawn from the practical experiences of successful research teams and that these experiences can illuminate the way forward to creative and usable findings for science and society. From the outset, the hope and promise of the project was that scholars, researchers, administrators, and practitioners who seek to meet the challenge of constructing interdisciplinary teams and programs aimed at addressing pressing problems of humanity will find guidance in such cases. The basic goal, then, was to provide a set of case studies that serve as signposts of successful interdisciplinary research linking the health and social sciences.” Kessel, F.S., Rosenfield, P. L., & Anderson, N. B. (Eds.). Interdisciplinary research: Case studies from health and social science (2nd ed.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

We believe that it is not only possible but important to identify best practices. Some interdisciplinarians may worry that we should not suggest that some examples of interdisciplinary research or teaching are better than others. But the challenge to interdisciplinarity in today’s academy is no longer primarily from disciplinarians who claim that it is impossible to do good interdisciplinary research, but rather a far more insidious claim that we are all interdisciplinary now and thus interdisciplinary programs are redundant. Interdisciplinarity was once thought impossible and is now imagined to be easy. If we do not proclaim interdisciplinary best practices we will be swamped by superficial interdisciplinarity.

We endorse best practices (that can be consciously followed) while also appreciating a role for intuition and creativity in interdisciplinary research and teaching. We accept and indeed celebrate the findings of historians of science that scholarly inquiry is necessarily guided by a combination of reason and intuition. Indeed, the subconscious mind is able to draw connections across disparate pieces of information that the conscious mind cannot see. But the subconscious can only draw connections if the appropriate information is gathered. Inspiration comes only to the prepared mind. And the subconscious throws up many ideas, not all of which survive reasoned analysis. It is our intent here to provide the subconscious minds of interdisciplinarians with a better capacity to make novel and useful combinations. Moreover acts of intuition and creativity themselves are characterized by best practices.

Likewise the existence of best practices in no way detracts from the importance of tacit knowledge – understandings that are hard to write down and are often unconscious or semi-conscious – carried by the experienced interdisciplinarian. Much important research and teaching has been done by scholars who have spent little time reflecting consciously on best practices. This can hardly be a surprise given that most practicing interdisciplinarians in the contemporary academy were trained as disciplinarians. They have slowly mastered interdisciplinary practice through a process of trial and error. Yet we can both ease the path of those who follow (especially those being trained as Interdisciplinarians) by distilling best practices wherever possible, and at the same time provide useful advice to the self-taught interdisciplinarian.

The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies has a list of consultants at http://www.units.muohio.edu/aisorg/consult/conlist.shtml happy to share both tacit and non-tacit knowledge with interested institutions.

We faced a choice as we designed this section:

· Provide a list of only those best practices that we as an organization have a great deal of confidence in.

· Provide a more extensive list of best practices argued for in the published literature (providing references to that literature) that we have no good reason to doubt.

Both strategies have merit. The first requires a much more formal vetting process. Since the first approach is thus more complex than the second, and can be built upon by the second (by having some committee evaluate the proposed best practices identified in the second approach), we start here with the second approach. It is important to stress therefore that no organization or person has formally endorsed any particular best practice recommended here. We do have confidence that most of the best practices suggested here will be found useful by at least some Interdisciplinarians. And we are pleased to see that some set of best practices has been recommended for virtually every aspect of interdisciplinary research, teaching, administration, and public policy. We hope to encourage conversation here regarding particular best practices. If you have pursued any of the best practices listed in this section, email rszostak@ualberta.ca and let us know whether it worked for you and how you evaluated it. Likewise email us if you have additional best practices or references to suggest.

We are of course aware that not all best practices will prove useful for every interdisciplinary project. We thus encourage scholars to identify the range of applicability of each best practice. We note here that we are aware that interdisciplinary practice differs for a variety of reasons:

· Some problems are more complex than others

· Some projects integrate across a larger number and/or more diverse set of perspectives than others

· The natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities and fine and performing arts differ in important ways with implications for interdisciplinary practice. Integrating across these divisions presents further challenges.

· Individual teachers and researchers face different challenges from team teachers and researchers

· Some questions have more immediate public policy importance than others

· The focus of integration varies across concepts, theories, methods, and policy advice

· The focus may be on adding to understanding of a particular theme or solving a particular problem

· Interdisciplinarians must cope with a wide range of institutional structures

We urge scholars to reflect on these and other differences as they identify the range of applicability of different best practices. Nevertheless, our starting assumption is that it makes sense to identify best practices at a general level: these will often apply across many/all different types of interdisciplinarity

Katri Huutoniemi, Julie Thompson Klein, Henrik Bruun, and Janne Hukkinen “Analyzing interdisciplinarity: Typology and indicators” Research Policy 39 (2010) 79-88 develops a typology of types of interdisciplinarity.