Raising undergraduate researchers’ interdisciplinary consciousness through dialogue

The importance of interdisciplinary approaches for research and education in environmental studies and sciences is well known. Integration of the multiple disciplinary approaches taught in separate courses required within these undergraduate majors and minors, however, remains a challenge. Program faculty often come from different departments and do not have time or space to integrate their own approaches with each other, resulting in individual ways of understanding interdisciplinarity. Secondly, senior capstone, thesis, or other project-based degree requirements often come too late in an undergraduate education to design an integrative project. Students would benefit from prior training in identifying complementary or divergent approaches and insights among academic specializations—a skill built from raising interdisciplinary consciousness. We present a workshop designed to enhance undergraduates’ interdisciplinary consciousness that can be easily deployed within courses or co-curricular programs, specifically summer research programs that are focused on dedicated practice within a field of study. The central question of this project is: How do we facilitate interdisciplinary consciousness and assess its impact on our students? We propose a promising, dialogue-based intervention that can be easily replicated. This dialogue would benefit academic programs like environmental studies and sciences that require the interaction and integration of discipline-based norms. We found that our dialogue intervention opens students’ perspectives on the nature of research, who research is for, epistemological differences, and the importance of practicing the research process, a unique educational experience. These perspectives are crucial to becoming collaborative, twenty-first century professionals.