Practical steps for using interdisciplinary educational research to enhance cultural awareness

Adoption, adaptation, and integration: renegotiating the identity of educational research through interdisciplinarity

“…This may result in people from different backgrounds working together (Clark et al 2017;CohenMiller et al 2017;Timmis and Williams 2017;Wishart 2017), or may result in individual researchers bringing together ideas from different disciplines (Boeren 2017;Knewstubb and Nicholas 2017;Taylor 2017). This breadth of field is illustrated in terms of the aims and desired outcomes of education, which are many and varied: for example, education can be seen as preparation for work, as social development, as selfactualization, as support for effective functioning in the world, and as an enjoyable endeavour in itself.…”

“…There are, therefore, many different types of research questions explored by educational researchers that relate to broad areas of human functioning, interaction, and context. Such 'big questions' (in this issue, for example, CohenMiller et al [2017] discuss a project that addresses well-being) are of interest to researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, and can be explored using a wide range of methods. Much collaborative research that takes place within education can be seen as working across disciplinary boundaries, given the backgrounds and methods used by researchers.…”

“…Clark et al (2017) use a diverse range of interdisciplinary projects where educational researchers partner with: speech and language therapists; architects and sociologists; plus researchers from medical education, sociology, music, cultural and heritage studies, and social computing, to reflect on the ways in which experiences with researchers and practitioners from other disciplines create opportunities for transformation of research-oriented thinking. In CohenMiller et al (2017), we see an example of researchers from anthropology, sociology, education, and psychology tangling with how to research wellbeing across cultures and languages. Knewstubb and Nicholas (2017) draw from psychology and linguistics to propose a methodology for researching teaching and learning together, and Boeren (2017) synthesizes the potential contributions to understanding lifelong learning from psychology, sociology, workplace learning, and political perspectives.…”

“…(McMurtry 2011, 20) Beyond such integration of insights, papers in this issue also discuss the development and refinement of novel theory and methodology to address complex questions. We begin with papers reflecting on the practice of interdisciplinary research (Clark et al 2017;Timmis and Williams 2017;Wishart 2017), then move on to papers that use theory to develop representations of this practice (CohenMiller et al 2017;Knewstubb and Nicholas 2017), and then complete the issue with papers that provide theoretical representations or perspectives on interdisciplinary research (Boeren 2017;Taylor 2017).…”

Young People’s Conceptualization of Their Wellbeing: Culturally Situated Understandings in the Context of Kazakhstan

“…This kind of research not only affirms young people as competent social actors, and therefore valid source of information [15], but also emphasizes cultural context, thus enabling for better capture of local understandings and the diversity of meanings young people give to wellbeing [17]. More importantly, little is known about the wellbeing of children and young people living in post-Soviet nations contexts such as Kazakhstan [18] and even less is known about how political and educational reform has impacted on generations brought up under the very different regimes of capitalism and communism [19]. Therefore the aim of this paper is to add to the existing body of knowledge on young people's wellbeing by utilizing the case of Kazakhstan as an illustrative example of a post-Soviet context of non-Western traditions and culture.…”