When Faculty from prior UCSB Crossroads projects talk to us about their experiences and learning—what they did that worked well and what they would recommend that others do in future interdisciplinary collaborations—they tend to emphasize four basic pieces of advice. As you plan out your project proposal, these ideas may be helpful for you to keep in mind.
(1) It is important for Faculty to have Concrete Goals from the beginning to drive interdisciplinary collaboration and learning on the project.
It can be easy for academic minds to fall into debates about abstract ideas, nuances of terminology, and differences in disciplinary perspectives—and valuable group time can be lost in the process. Having a concrete, agreed-upon goal for the project helps to direct group conversations from Day 1, giving Faculty a way to frame and focus seminar themes at every group meeting, working toward specific next steps and deliverable outcomes.
(2) Graduate Fellows find value in Constructing and Helping Deliver Lectures / Course Curricula together with faculty. It takes effort on both sides, but the Fellows find it motivating, worthwhile, and empowering.
Putting together the narrative arc of a lesson's ideas and examples, seeing how those lessons fit together into a course's larger educational goals, and selecting the most pertinent readings and activities to drive home that learning are skills that many graduate students want to develop, but get few opportunities to work on, in a dedicated way, with expert support and faculty guidance. Creating time in the second quarter where Fellows—paired with Faculty, in small cohorts, and/or as a larger project think tank—develop teaching modules for the courses they will be TAing is something that the Fellows consistently appreciate. It takes a lot of thinking and effort, but turns their teaching quarter into something that they are invested in and proud of, and this helps them grow as educators and academics.
(3) Coordinating perspectives and merging understandings on an interdisciplinary project requires the inevitable investment of Time and Willingness to be Uncomfortable as learners.
Most faculty involved in these interdisciplinary collaborations describe a learning curve that is both challenging and invigorating. Faculty must sometimes step out of their role as experts and ask very basic questions in order to understand their academic peers' distinct disciplinary methods, standards of evidence, intellectual lenses and priorities, institutional motives, and vocabularies. It is important to create space for this learning through regular breaks for asking questions and paraphrasing others' ideas, online forums for building project vocabulary lists or posting explanations and links after meetings and the occasional big-picture days for stepping
(4) Faculty should use Teachable Moments as they arise to model, guide, lead and actively collaborate to facilitate group progress.
As mentioned above, the learning process in any group collaboration requires time and willingness. Perhaps even more notably in research projects that span disciplinary lines, such learning processes can be emotionally, intellectually, and socially uncomfortable for those involved.
When stresses arise in these environments, participants tend to fall back on self-affirming habits—sticking to topics they are most comfortable with, rejecting alternate viewpoints or approaches, pulling rank or ignoring others’ contributions. All of these can undermine the very core of an interdisciplinary collaboration's value: that it brings together well-honed specialties in combinations that compliment and fortify one another.
To support this mutual sharing, listening, learning, and creating, it is important that Faculty be proactive in modeling and facilitating group-affirming behaviors. Faculty can model question-asking and perspective-seeking in the group, teach/lead in moments where experience and familiarity will add clarity or movement forward, and collaborate actively. Faculty can strengthen a sense of group collaboration through recognizing when the time is ripe for teaching from experience, eliciting others' knowledge-bases, fielding incomplete ideas for others to build on, and offering useful pieces to strengthen others' valued contributions.