Socialization to interdisciplinarity: faculty and student perspectives

Gardner, Susan K.; Jansujwicz, Jessica S.; Hutchins, Karen; Cline, Brittany; Levesque, Vanessa R.

doi:10.1007/s10734-013-9648-2

Cited by 50 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The Weidman et al model exemplifies the comprehensive, multifaceted, interactive, and complex description of the socialization of doctoral students into their professional roles. This framework has been used in multiple studies (Cole & Griffin, 2013;Gardner, Jansujwicz, Hutchins, Cline, & Levesque, 2014;O'Meara, Knudsen, & Jones, 2013) to investigate the organizational structures that act as barriers or gateways to successful doctoral student socialization.…”

Section: Doctoral Student Socializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rolling With the Punches: Examining the Socialization Experiences of Kinesiology Doctoral Students

Russell

2014

Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Doctoral Student Socializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rolling With the Punches: Examining the Socialization Experiences of Kinesiology Doctoral Students

Russell

2014

Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Efforts within the SSI to span various institutional and cultural boundaries have already been studied [22], including the interdisciplinary boundaries between researchers [23,24], and those boundaries that must be overcome to enable community-based research partnerships [25]. Here we apply a novel experimental methodology to explore cooperation across key institutional and cultural boundaries.…”

Section: Sustainability Solutions Initiativementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The interdisciplinary boundary is well known to academics, and well-studied [26][27][28]. Within the SSI, faculty and doctoral students have been forced to face their significant disciplinary differences directly, with mixed results [23].…”

Section: Sustainability Solutions Initiativementioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperation across Organizational Boundaries: Experimental Evidence from a Major Sustainability Science Project

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Engaged research emphasizes researcher-stakeholder collaborations as means of improving the relevance of research outcomes and the chances for science-based decision-making. Sustainability science, as a form of engaged research, depends on the collaborative abilities and cooperative tendencies of researchers. We use an economic experiment to measure cooperation between university faculty, local citizens, and faculty engaged in a large sustainability science project to test a set of hypotheses: (1) faculty on the sustainability project will cooperate more with local residents than non-affiliated faculty, (2) sustainability faculty will have the highest level of internal cooperation of any group, and (3) that cooperation may vary due to academic training and culture in different departments amongst sustainability faculty. Our results demonstrate that affiliation with the sustainability project is not associated with differences in cooperation with local citizens or with in-group peers, but that disciplinary differences amongst sustainability faculty do correlate with cooperative tendencies within our sample. We also find that non-affiliated faculty cooperated less with each other than with faculty affiliated with the sustainability project. We conclude that economic experiments can be useful in discovering patterns of prosociality within institutional settings, and list challenges for further applications.

show abstract

“…However, we know relatively little about the extent such graduate training programs influence the ways students view their own identities as scholars. There is evidence (e.g., Carr et al, 2018;Gantogtokh & Quinlan, 2017;Gardner et al, 2012Gardner et al, , 2014Lindvig, 2018;Robinson, 2016) that conditions in many graduate programs and research institutions are not conducive to facilitating the scholarly identity development of interdisciplinary scientists. Students who fail to develop or receive recognition for their scholarly identities are at greater risk for leaving their programs or their field altogether (Baker & Pifer, 2011Carlone & Johnson, 2007;Hudson et al, 2018;Lyall, 2019;McAlpine, Amundsen, & Turner, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Plugging In: How One Graduate Program Shaped Doctoral Students’ Scholarly Identities as Interdisciplinary Scientists

Culpepper

O’Meara

Ramirez

2020

IJDS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how one graduate program shaped doctoral students’ scholarly identities as interdisciplinary scientists. Background: Scholarly identity refers to the ways individuals see themselves as legitimate, contributing members of their academic community. However, much of the research on scholarly identity focuses on students and faculty within traditional, discipline-bound contexts. We therefore know little about how doctoral students develop scholarly identities that are interdisciplinary in nature. By interdisciplinary, we refer broadly to scholarly work that uses methods, concepts, frameworks, or perspectives from two or more academic fields or disciplines, or scholarly work aimed at addressing research problems that spans multiple academic fields or disciplines. Methodology: This qualitative, ethnographic case study focuses on the University of Maryland’s Language Science Center (LSC), which houses a National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Program for doctoral students in the interdisciplinary language sciences, which includes fields such as linguistics, hearing and speech, computer science, and neuroscience. The LSC is nationally and internationally known for its interdisciplinary graduate training program and thus provides a platform for understanding the components of graduate training that contribute to students’ scholarly identity development as interdisciplinary scientists. We draw from four years of qualitative data collection, including student interviews, student and faculty focus groups, ethnographic observations, and document analysis. Contribution: Across the public and private sectors, there is a strong push for developing interdisciplinary solutions to society’s problems. However, many colleges and universities are not organized to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and research. Focusing on the ways one graduate program facilitated interdisciplinary scholarly identity development for doctoral students therefore provides graduate programs with a potential roadmap for navigating the barriers that may block the development of students with interdisciplinary research interests. Findings: We found curricular and co-curricular NRT program activities contributed to students’ scholarly identity development as interdisciplinary scientists by connecting them (or “plugging them in”) to a pre-existing, interdisciplinary network of students and faculty; increasing doctoral student competence in the methods, cultures, and perspectives of other disciplines; encouraging doctoral students to find common ground with scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds; and broadening doctoral students’ views of the potential impact and application of their work. Recommendations for Practitioners: Graduate training programs in the interdisciplinary sciences should think strategically about the kinds of activities that help students develop a scholarly identity and the conditions and contexts in which scholarly identity development might be undermined. We offer multiple examples of the kinds of activities graduate programs can consider using to facilitate scholarly identity development and the underlying mechanisms that make such activities successful. Recommendation for Researchers: Developing a scholarly identity is an important component of doctoral student success and should be considered as a useful potential theory for individuals who study graduate education. Impact on Society: Graduate programs play a critical role in training not only the next generation of faculty, but also the next generation of scientists in government and industry. If more graduate programs can successfully train doctoral students to be interdisciplinary scientists, societal benefits could include more responsive and adaptive solutions to pressing social problems. Future Research: Future researchers should consider how different graduate training elements produce students with different types of interdisciplinary scholarly identities, how the scholarly identity of students trained in interdisciplinary graduate programs continues to evolve as they transition into both academic and non-academic careers, and the strategies and experiences of faculty members who mentor students from outside of their own disciplines.

show abstract

Socialization to interdisciplinarity: faculty and student perspectives

Cited by 50 publications

References 11 publications

Rolling With the Punches: Examining the Socialization Experiences of Kinesiology Doctoral Students

Rolling With the Punches: Examining the Socialization Experiences of Kinesiology Doctoral Students

Cooperation across Organizational Boundaries: Experimental Evidence from a Major Sustainability Science Project

Plugging In: How One Graduate Program Shaped Doctoral Students’ Scholarly Identities as Interdisciplinary Scientists

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About