Click here to view the July 13th INTEREACH webinar, featuring NRT Program Coordinators Nicole Scott (Iowa State University), Sara Mata (Oklahoma University), Jyothi Kumar (Michigan State University), Toccara Houston (Georgia Tech University) and Kristin Brethova (Indiana University). This webinar provides an overview of the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) as a program designed to encourage innovation and interdisciplinary, sustainable graduate programs. Our speakers describe the characteristics and roles filled by a Program Coordinator, and highlight that despite the uniquity of this job title in academia, the role rarely matches the job description. Program Coordinators are responsible for a wide variety of tasks that require them to “change hats” throughout the day and throughout the lifecycle of the program. This confluence of factors drove our speakers to come up with three distinct components to achieving success in their roles, namely: creativity, change agent, and community building. The speakers end by highlighting some challenges that a Program Coordinator may encounter, which members of our INTEREACH CoP may resonate with. Learn more about the work of our speakers in their affiliated NRT’s at @CNS-NRT; @nrt_impacts; @GT_RoboARMS; @aero_eco; @p3iastate.
May 11th: Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams: Reflexivity & Readiness
May 11th: Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams, Session 4: Reflexivity & Readiness
Click here to view the May 11th INTEREACH webinar, the fifth and final installment in our Spring 2021 series on Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams. In this episode we are introduced to two (2) tools to help teams in the work of preparing for and reflect on how they will conduct their work together. The tools presented can help with reflexivity processes and awareness of our collective readiness to collaborate, including unlocking our hidden assumptions, bodily knowledge, and moral imagination.
First, Dr Antonietta Di Giulio, senior researcher at the University of Basel, presents her tool “Evaluation Criteria for Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research”, a comprehensive set of questions with instructions that can be used for internal evaluation and reflection on a project's inter- and transdisciplinary quality. Dr Di Giulio provides some bounding meta-information about the tool’s creation to provide our listeners with a contextual understanding of its intended use. The tool was published by the Swiss outlet Panorama, and the pdf is available at this link.
Next, Margot Greenlee shares with us her tool “Model the Metaphor”, which she employs as Artistic Director of BodyWise Dance to help teams better understand their perspectives, creative capacity, and overall readiness to work together. In demonstrating the tool’s use, Margot invites participants to explore their own creative space using poetic language, common household items and sense of fun, all while letting go of the internal editor and judge to make and build a model for a team, of which they are a member. This method serves as a way to reflect and gain new perspective and appreciation for what the team has accomplished and what lies ahead.
April 13th: Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams, Session 4: Knowledge Integration
Click here to view the April 13th INTEREACH webinar, the forth installment in our Spring 2021 series on Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams. In this episode we are introduce to two (2) tools for Integrating different ways of knowing, providing transformative insights into the complex problems that research teams often engage. First, we hear from Drs Sibylle Studer and Michael Stauffacher about a tool called The Give & Take Matrix. This tool is used to identify pieces of knowledge to be shared between participants or working groups of inter- and trans-disciplinary projects. It aids knowledge integration by showing which pieces of knowledge can be shared between which subprojects. It can also aid conflict transformation by showing how everyone will contribute to the effort. Sibylle and Michael demonstrate the use of The Give & Take Matrix with our participants by asking each person to individually to formulate what they would like to "give and take” from the presenters & participants in today’s session. Participants indicated they would like to “Take” e.g., “action steps for implementing the tool in their teams”, “learning new approaches for team engagement and integration”, “tools to use with teams in proposal development”, and “Give” e.g., “a layperson’s perspective on the tool’s use”, “experience facilitating conversations across many disciplines, especially focused on inclusivity and social justice”.
Next, Dr Bethany Laursen, shares a tool called Argument Standard Form which uses a logically-ordered list of the reasons (a.k.a. premises) to believe something (a.k.a. the conclusion) is true. Anyone’s perspective can contribute a premise or part of one, so the tool shows how different knowledges can be integrated through logic-based reasoning. It is also good for evaluating knowledge integration to see if it makes sense and includes all relevant perspectives. She uses some real-world examples to demonstrate the tool and its use, including the diversity of perspectives around hesitancy toward the new COVID-19 vaccine, while relating back to boundary spanning work which sees different kinds of perspectives in the form of disciplines, professions and cultures.
March 9th : Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams, Session 3: Conflict Transformation
Click here to view the March 9th INTEREACH webinar, the third installment in our Spring 2021 series on Boundary Sapnning Tools for Research Teams. In this episode we are introduced to two (2) tools for dealing with conflict, and specifically to transform conflict into generative, problem-solving interactions. First, Dr Hannah Love, Team Scientist, Professional Facilitator and Co-Founder of Divergent Science LLC, presents on a tool called Gradients of Agreement. This tool is allows teams delve deeply into participatory decision-making to expand the binary spectrum of agreement from “yes” or “no”, to a whole continuum of agreement. Hannah also demonstrates a number of modalities for implementing the Gradients of Agreement with a virtual group.
Next, Dr Gabriele Bammer, Professor of Integration and Implementation Sciences, Research School of Population Health, The Australian National University joins us asynchronously to share the Principled Negotiation tool, which encourages conflicting parties to engage in structured dialogue to find mutually agreeable and fair solutions to their disagreement. This tool is also called “Getting to Yes”, from Fisher, Ury, and Patton in their 1981 book “Getting to Yes. Negotiation an agreement without giving in.” Dr Bammer outlines the 4 steps involved in the tool’s use: 1. Separate the people from the problem, 2. Focus on interests, not positions, 3. Generate a variety of possibilities for deciding what to do, and 4. look for a fair solution, based on merits, and then provides two example case studies to illustrate the process and intricacies.
Relevant links shared in the webinar:
Febuary 9th: Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams, Session 2: Team Cohesion
Click here to view the February 9th INTEREACH Webinar, the second installment in our Spring 2021 series on Boundary Spanning Tools for Research Teams. In this episode we are introduced to two (2) tools for building team cohesion, presented by Anne Heberger Marino and Merel van Goch & Iris van der Tuin. To start us off, Anne Heberger Marino, Founder of Lean-to Collaborations, a consultancy focused on creating conditions for highly effective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, shares a tool called Four Levels of Listening, developed by Otto Scharmer and MIT’s Presencing Institute. This tool is designed to help individuals and groups build awareness of how they listen to each other; that effective listening is a widely recognized competency for Team Science practitioners speaks to the importance of implementing this framework in both our daily personal and professional activities.
Next, Dr van Goch, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University, and Dr van der Tuin, Professor of Theory of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University and Director of its School of Liberal Arts, present their tool “The Pressure Cooker”. This tool, which was originally developed by our presenters for a conference on interdisciplinary education, is based on Repko & Szostak’s 2020 book Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory. The Pressure Cooker tool introduces participants/students to the challenges of interdisciplinary research by guiding them through a 10-step, process that includes 1) Setting up the research, by defining the problem 2) Establishing the disciplinary foundation, by studying the defining elements of the relevant disciplines and 3) Integrating the disciplinary elements by identifying conflicts and common ground. The process is designed to be accomplished in 90 minutes, however, a useful feature of this tool is that is highly adaptable for different conditions, including for this webinar.
Relevant links shared in this webinar:
January 12th: Spring Webinar Series Kickoff: Overview of Boundary Spanning Tools for Team Research
Click here to view the January 12th webinar featuring Bethany K. Laursen, PhD, Assistant Dean, Michigan State University, Graduate School. In this webinar, Dr Laursen provides a background and general principles of tools and tool use, especially in cross-disciplinary research settings. This webinar sets the stage for the next 4 monthly webinars in the series “Boundary Spanning Tools for Team Research”, an idea that she conceptualized for INTEREACH. For this webinar series, Dr Laursen also created a “DIY Boundary Spanning Field Notebook” to facilitate a collaborative, co-learning practice for learning and implementing the tools (8 in total) that will be shared in this series. You can still get your copy at this link! She then covers 5 principles of tool suitability, stressing their importance in implementing these abstract concepts into practice: 1. Systems, 2. Systems of Systems, 3. Four Basic Features, 4. Affordances, 5. Eudainomics (the proposed study and practice of what generally makes a tool contribute to the Good Life).
December 8th: Editorial Facilitation in Team Science: A proposed intervention to incentivize and reward collaborative, reproducible, open research
The December 8th webinar featured Sarah Greene, CEO and Founder of Rapid Science, a non-profit organization that develops tools and processes to promote collaboration as a means of accelerating discovery (due to confidentiality agreements, this content cannot be made available on the web). In this webinar, Ms Greene laid out the motivations, programs and tools implemented by Rapid Science to begin to address systemic problems of the scientific establishment associated with hyper-competition. She discussed the 4 components of the work of Rapid Science in accelerating innovation and translation: (1) advocacy for mandates from funding agencies for the conduct of open, transparent research, (2) creating tools for collaborating, (3) facilitating team interactions, and (4) the re-imaging and creation of incentives and rewards for collaborating. She proposed a new professional role of “Editorial Facilitator” (EF), who would promote team sharing and internal peer review of incremental findings, null results, and insights within a scientific consortium. From these discussions the EF would create a continually updated “Collaborative Review” citing the team’s early results in the context of the field’s latest published evidence.
November 10th: Adapting and designing interdisciplinary training programs to prioritize (and excel because of) diversity, equity and inclusion
Click here to view the November 10th webinar featuring Nicole Motzer, Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Science, at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. In this webinar, Dr Motzer shares her process, motivations and outcomes in developing a graduate interdisciplinary training program that prioritizes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in socio-environmental synthesis research. She makes the case that DEI is a foundational and required component for conducting complex, interdisciplinary science aimed at addressing society’s most pressing needs. She then describes how to workshop was designed (and subsequently adapted for a virtual platform), and conducted. She finally ends with some lessons learned and recommendations, followed by a Q&A session. The training schedule for DEI in S-E Synthesis workshop, and an example request for proposals are provided at this link.
October 13th: Understanding How to Use 3D Team Leadership
Click here to view the October 13th webinar featuring Bradley Kirkman, Professor Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, in the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University. In this webinar, Dr Kirkman gives us a high level overview from his book, 3D Team Leadership, which was born out of a recognition that books about Team Management were written about what he terms “yesterday’s teams”. He describes the characteristics of “today’s teams” as being highly dynamic in terms of interdependence, membership and duration of existence, for example, and addresses some of the challenges that today’s team leaders face in balancing the needs of the individual team members and the team as a whole. In this engaging and at times humorous webinar, Dr Kirkman shares with us the importance of focus (e.g. what to focus on, and when), and how to do so, when leading teams in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. The powerpoint slides and, a Team Charter used with MBA students are both available.
September 8th: Writing Management Plans for Team Science Proposals
Click here to view the September 8th webinar featuring Alan Paul, Founder of Giant Angstrom Partners, based in Los Angeles, USA. In this webinar, Alan delves into what is needed to create successful grant applications for large US-government funded convergence projects, particularly focusing with a particular focus on NSF proposals, although the lessons are more broadly useful across other funding agencies, including those outside the US. The slide deck from the workshop is available (PDF 5MB) at this link. The webinar focused on two challenges for convergent research teams: 1) turning researchers into leaders and 2) telling a compelling story of how the team will pull off the project. For the first challenge, Alan shares his model for different leadership requirements for disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. This is followed by a discussion of methods and tools for creating and sharing meaning within the team. The second challenge focused on budget, governance, training, incentives, infrastructure and evaluation.