Interdisciplinary Practices in Academia PDF Download

Author: Louisa Buckingham
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100085051X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

View

Book Description
This volume addresses the implications that academic interdisciplinarity in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has for research and pedagogy with a global reach. The Editors present a coherent, research-supported analysis of the influence of interdisciplinary research and methods on the way academics collaborate on courses, develop their careers and teach students. The hitherto prevalence of disciplinary silo-like approaches to academic and scientific issues is increasingly ceding ground to an interdisciplinary synergy of different methodological and epistemological traditions. In the context of ongoing trends towards interdisciplinarity in degree programmes and the increasing popularity of such degree programmes with students (e.g., bioinformatics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuropolitics, evolutionary finance, global studies, and security studies), academics and programme administrators need awareness of the skills needed to operate in interdisciplinary contexts. Studies in this edited volume examine interdisciplinary communication practices, and identify how academic writing, teaching, language proficiency assessment and degree programmes are responding to changes in the broader social, institutional and political contexts of academia. As authors in the volume demonstrate, the discursive features, literacy practices and instructional modes, and the student experience of these emerging interdisciplines deserve systematic exploration. This insightful volume sheds light on contexts across the globe and will be used by students studying EAP and ESP pedagogy or practice; academics in the fields of applied linguistics and higher education, as well as higher education faculty and administrators interested in interdisciplinarity in degree programmes.

Author: Scott Frickel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813585910
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

View

Book Description
Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in academia, as research universities funnel their financial resources toward collaborations between faculty in different disciplines. In theory, interdisciplinary collaboration breaks down artificial divisions between different departments, allowing more innovative and sophisticated research to flourish. But does it actually work this way in practice? Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration puts the common beliefs about such research to the test, using empirical data gathered by scholars from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book’s contributors critically interrogate the assumptions underlying the fervor for interdisciplinarity. Their attentive scholarship reveals how, for all its potential benefits, interdisciplinary collaboration is neither immune to academia’s status hierarchies, nor a simple antidote to the alleged shortcomings of disciplinary study. Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)

Author: Louisa Buckingham
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000850498
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

View

Book Description
This volume addresses the implications that academic interdisciplinarity in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has for research and pedagogy with a global reach. The Editors present a coherent, research-supported analysis of the influence of interdisciplinary research and methods on the way academics collaborate on courses, develop their careers and teach students. The hitherto prevalence of disciplinary silo-like approaches to academic and scientific issues is increasingly ceding ground to an interdisciplinary synergy of different methodological and epistemological traditions. In the context of ongoing trends towards interdisciplinarity in degree programmes and the increasing popularity of such degree programmes with students (e.g., bioinformatics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuropolitics, evolutionary finance, global studies, and security studies), academics and programme administrators need awareness of the skills needed to operate in interdisciplinary contexts. Studies in this edited volume examine interdisciplinary communication practices, and identify how academic writing, teaching, language proficiency assessment and degree programmes are responding to changes in the broader social, institutional and political contexts of academia. As authors in the volume demonstrate, the discursive features, literacy practices and instructional modes, and the student experience of these emerging interdisciplines deserve systematic exploration. This insightful volume sheds light on contexts across the globe and will be used by students studying EAP and ESP pedagogy or practice; academics in the fields of applied linguistics and higher education, as well as higher education faculty and administrators interested in interdisciplinarity in degree programmes.

Author: Martin Davies
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 0857243721
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 333

View

Book Description
Offers a contemporary of our understanding and practice of interdisciplinary higher education. This book considers a range of theoretical perspectives on interdisciplinarity: the nature of disciplines, complexity, leadership, group working, and academic development.

Author: Lisa R. Lattuca
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826513830
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 310

View

Book Description
Interdisciplinarity, a favorite buzzword of faculty and administrators, has been appropriated to describe so many academic pursuits that it is virtually meaningless. With a writing style that is accessible, fluid, and engaging, Lisa Lattuca remedies this confusion with an original conceptualization of interdisciplinarity based on interviews with faculty who are engaged in its practice. Whether exploring the connections between apparently related disciplines, such as English and women's studies, or such seemingly disparate fields as economics and theology, Lattuca moves away from previous definitions based on the degrees of integration across disciplines and instead focuses on the nature of the inquiry behind the work. She organizes her findings around the processes through which faculty pursue interdisciplinarity, the contexts (institutional, departmental, and disciplinary) in which faculty are working, and the ways in which those contexts relate to and affect the interdisciplinary work. Her findings result in useful suggestions for individuals concerned with the meaning of faculty work, the role and impact of disciplines in academe today, and the kinds of issues that should guide the evaluation of faculty scholarship.

Author: Balasubramanyam Chandramohan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134295928
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 193

View

Book Description
As universities increasingly offer courses that break the confines of a single subject area, more students are enrolling on interdisciplinary programmes within multidisciplinary departments. Teaching and learning within interdisciplinary study requires new approaches, including an understanding of the critical perspectives and frameworks and the rearranging of intellectual and professional boundaries. Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in Higher Education explores the issues and tensions provoked by interdisciplinary learning, offering helpful information for: Staff development Distance learning Mass communication courses Interdisciplinary science courses Grounded in thorough research, this collection is the first of its kind to provide practical advice and guidance from around the world, improving the quality of teaching and learning in interdisciplinary programmes.

Author: Bianca Vienni-Baptista
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040019129
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
Drawing on eight crowdsourced cases, Interdisciplinary Practices in Higher Education demonstrates the range and diversity in approaches to teaching, learning and collaborating across disciplinary and institutional borders. The cases explore everyday challenges within interdisciplinary higher education experiences such as designing study programmes, planning curricula, ensuring sufficient assessment and feedback for diverse groups of students and coordinating and aligning expectations with external stakeholders. Each case is analysed by three leading experts, providing solutions and practical guidance to support practice. Chapters explore the challenges of: Breadth versus depth in interdisciplinary teaching and learning activities Disciplinary identities in interdisciplinary collaborations The governance and administration of interdisciplinary courses and study programmes Career trajectories for interdisciplinary researchers Aligning expectations with stakeholders in transdisciplinary endeavours A highly practical, solution-based book, this is an essential read for lecturers, students, researchers and others who might wish to embark on an interdisciplinary path or develop future border-crossing practices within their higher education institutions.

Author: Rustum Roy
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595011799
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 241

View

Book Description
"Interdisciplinarity" is perhaps the most used keyword in describing changes in current patterns of Federal funding. However, it is not a new idea - the interdisciplinary theme has been tried for over forty years. Yet, until now, involved or the performance has been. This book is the report on the "Interdisciplinarity Revisited: Materials Research as a Case Study" Conference, convened on August 31-September 1, 1999 at the Pennsylvania State University. The contributors included the world's leading practitioners in the field of interdisciplinary thrusts in other areas, from Science, Technology and Society to medicine, were represented by senior practitioners. The key findings include the following: - The entire research enterprise demands and is moving increasingly toward "interactive research." (Interactive includes inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional, and inter-sector research.)-The university world has, by and large, failed to organize itself to respond to this new reality. -Specific hindrances to I3R are the traditional peer review process and academic intellectual property practices. - New directions proposed include: funding based largely on past performance and matching fund strategies." is perhaps the most used keyword in describing changes in current patterns of Federal funding. However, it is not a new idea - the interdisciplinary theme has been tried for over forty years. Yet, until now, involved or the performance has been. This book is the report on the "Interdisciplinarity Revisited: Materials Research as a Case Study" Conference, convened on August 31-September 1, 1999 at the Pennsylvania State University. The contributors included the world's leading practitioners in the field of interdisciplinary thrusts in other areas, from Science, Technology and Society to medicine, were represented by senior practitioners. The key findings include the following: - The entire research enterprise demands and is moving increasingly toward "interactive research." (Interactive includes inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional, and inter-sector research.)-The university world has, by and large, failed to organize itself to respond to this new reality. -Specific hindrances to I3R are the traditional peer review process and academic intellectual property practices. - New directions proposed include: funding based largely on past performance and matching fund strategies.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309165482
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

View

Book Description
Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research examines current interdisciplinary research efforts and recommends ways to stimulate and support such research. Advances in science and engineering increasingly require the collaboration of scholars from various fields. This shift is driven by the need to address complex problems that cut across traditional disciplines, and the capacity of new technologies to both transform existing disciplines and generate new ones. At the same time, however, interdisciplinary research can be impeded by policies on hiring, promotion, tenure, proposal review, and resource allocation that favor traditional disciplines. This report identifies steps that researchers, teachers, students, institutions, funding organizations, and disciplinary societies can take to more effectively conduct, facilitate, and evaluate interdisciplinary research programs and projects. Throughout the report key concepts are illustrated with case studies and results of the committee's surveys of individual researchers and university provosts.

Author: Dominic Holland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134490097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

View

Book Description
In this important new text, Holland seeks to explain, by means of social scientific and philosophical inquiry, the difficulties that researchers often experience when attempting to integrate knowledge from different academic disciplines, either individually or as part of a team of subject specialists. It is argued that the difficulty of integrating knowledge from different academic disciplines is the result of, firstly, an inadequate justification of the nature of scientific integration and differentiation and, secondly, the dominance of disciplinary specialization in scientific inquiry. By focusing on both the theoretical justification for, and the practical feasibility of, integrating knowledge through interdisciplinary research, this book asks what properties of reality make the integration of knowledge from different academic disciplines possible and to what extent it is feasible to integrate knowledge through interdisciplinary research within a traditional, disciplinary context. Accordingly the text is both philosophical and social scientific in content: philosophical in the sense that it presents a theory of causal determination, which will help researchers to understand how reality is both differentiated and interconnected; social scientific in the sense that it presents the results of three case studies of collaborative interdisciplinary research projects. The book is heavily informed by the philosophy of critical realism. The philosophical argument about the possibility of integration and specialization in science draws explicitly on some of the key concepts of critical realism – particularly those comprising the theory of ‘integrative pluralism’ – while critical realist assumptions underpin the social scientific argument about the causal influence of the social system of knowledge production. By exploring researchers’ conceptions of knowledge and of reality on the one hand and their decisions about what sort of knowledge to produce on the other, Holland shows how the difficulty of scientific integration is both a problem of knowledge and a problem of knowledge production. This book is essential reading for students and academics interested in the emerging topic of knowledge integration and interdisciplinarity.