EME-professionals as boundary agents in cross-disciplinary learning environments

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2024

Is it the case that disciplinary literacy is increasingly questioned as an isolated educational objective? Many established disciplines are interacting in new complex and shifting contexts in attempts to address SDGs. In educational contexts, we need to address this changing societal reality in our needs analyses, and help scaffold students and researchers navigate in the resulting inter- or transdisciplinary contexts and negotiate the resulting discourses and practices. I am curious how our EME-students fare when disciplines mix and match to respond to complex phenomena and the context for student work and research requires negotiating multiple discourses and their respective assumptions. How should we design courses, and which are our adapted learning outcomes for our EME-contexts in this transdisciplinary reality?

The study uses two main sources of data, On the one hand, supervisors of STEM degree project thesis writing, at BSc, MSc, or PHD levels, provide self-assessment statements during and after a faculty training course for supervising writing processes. One the other hand, I collect 24 PhD students’ reflexive descriptions of their discursive universes as they write for publication. Both data collections are subjected to a basic grounded theory discourse analysis. In the second stage of the data analysis, two foci guide the analysis: comments about language and discourse negotiation; comments about disciplinary literacy tension between the interacting disciplines. Preliminary findings suggest that neither cohort is ready to step up to the dynamic inter- or transdisciplinary plate required for today’s society. Similarly, findings also indicate that neither group have begun to articulate the monolinguistic assumptions and power of English as the preferred language for publication and second or third cycle education.

While there are indeed sites of interdisciplinary education today, the traditional academic disciplines and their English language discourse remain mainstream. What we can do as individual educational developers is work at the level of programmes and student projects. We need to help faculty towards a decision to design collaborative learning environments with dynamic problems requiring both faculty and students to begin to hone their interdisciplinary literacy ability and develop the discourse for the environments they enter. We might be able to do such work with academic literacy and genre-based approaches, but only as long as we also manage to guide faculty and students to look beyond any one individual disciplinary discourse and its givens.