Scaling Interdisciplinary, Collaborative Research within Higher Education

In February we are featuring Bass Connections as part of an exploration of research that crosses boundaries. Edward Balleisen is the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies.

By Edward J. Balleisen 

Efforts to foster interdisciplinary and/or team-based research involving students often live at the fringes of the curriculum, operating as extra- or co-curricular programs, or sometimes as niche curricular programs within a specific unit or school.  

Duke faculty member Kyle Bradbury works collaboratively with a team of students

In light of the positive impacts that we have documented for students and faculty in Duke University’s Bass Connections program, we think that there is a strong case for colleges and universities to explore how they might borrow this approach to blending interdisciplinary research, education, and civic engagement. Below we offer some ideas for sustainably embedding such programs in core educational undertakings. 

Admittedly, we have room to travel in linking collaborative projects to curricular frameworks at Duke as well. Most of the students who participate on Bass Connections teams receive academic credit through independent studies. And most faculty do not receive teaching credit for their efforts. We are now encouraging teams to set up their teams as “tutorials,” a little-used course type available at Duke, and departments to create “Applied Research” umbrella courses, that stipulate expectations around collaboration, public engagement, and attention to the various phases of research undertakings (question framing, data collection, analysis and interpretation, and communications of findings and arguments). 

Thus far we have been able to work around some of these shortcomings because we have a significant base of philanthropy that allows us to provide each year-long team with a meaningful budget. Some teams use that funding to facilitate participation of postdocs. Others deploy their resources to secure access to research data or needed laboratory materials. For many teams, a key priority is to send at least some students to undertake fieldwork in locations around the United States or elsewhere in the world, and to provide modest compensation for a student project manager. The overall program budget further supports a number of student proposals to extend the work that they have previously undertaken on a collaborative research team, and grants to faculty to develop semester-long collaborative project courses, for which they do receive teaching credit. 

We are mindful that few institutions of higher education will be able to draw on the kind of financial resources that Duke has so been so fortunate to have at its disposal. How then to foster the diffusion of interdisciplinary, collaborative research projects? 

For some research ideas, there are opportunities to link support for interdisciplinary student teams to external funding proposals, as through the “broader impacts” dimension of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants in the United States. NSF grants, however, remain highly competitive, and the occasional federal grant will not sustain a university strategy to weave interdisciplinary, collaborative, community-engaged research into the educational experiences of large numbers of students. And NSF, of course, focuses on STEM fields and the quantitative social sciences. We see a strong case for the development of new funding avenues, by both government agencies and foundations, that explicitly target this kind of team-based, interdisciplinary, applied research across all disciplines of knowledge. 

Even if such channels emerge, though, the most sensible strategy for universities is to embed these endeavors into their curricular structures and provide faculty with teaching credit for leading research teams. A number of universities experimenting in this area have taken this path.   

At the University of Waterloo, a still new Department of Knowledge Integration gives students extensive grounding in problem definition around issues of environmental sustainability, research design, and teamwork, alongside engagement in several collaborative research projects. Several universities, anchored by Georgia Tech, have signed onto to participate in a consortium known as the Vertically Integrated Program Consortium (VIP). At each campus, VIP coordinates, but does not fund, multi-year team-based research projects originated by faculty and involving graduate students and undergraduates. Across the country, humanities and social science labs have mushroomed, many anchored around project-based courses, and some predicated on deep engagement with external partners or clients. Arizona State’s Humanities Lab has probed a rotating set of social issues through humanistic research methods for several years; the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Social Science Lab is only a year old, but brings postdocs, PhD students, Master’s students, and undergraduates together to bring data science techniques to bear on applied societal problems. 

Students conduct local research on food insecurity on the Duke Campus Farm

On most campuses, constrained financial resources to support research undertakings will compel careful selection of focal points. Every brick and mortar institution of higher education can draw on the issues confronting their own towns, cities, and regions, and so foster community-engaged inquiry without incurring extensive travel costs. Rice University’s Houston Action Research Teams and the Liberal Arts Action Lab, a partnership between Capital Community College and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, serve as two models for grounding local research in the curriculum. The rapid expansion of IT infrastructure to facilitate remote interaction also beckons as a means of linking student research teams across space, who might each do fieldwork or complementary research in their locality, leading to comparative or other sorts of integrated analysis. Drawing on these strategies, we have had teams work with faculty and students at universities as far away as Brazil and Uganda.  

With careful planning and a willingness to reimagine curricular structures and the contexts in which faculty receive teaching credit, colleges and universities can bring research-inflected, team-based education to large numbers of their students. Indeed, one can envisage even broader and bolder initiatives that might permeate higher education, such as requirements for exposure to collaborative projects and related forms of experiential learning as a core element of the curriculum. Such a move would depend on a wider recognition that such experiences complement more traditional frameworks of instruction, and that they effectively prepare students to work in diverse teams, conceptualize truly wicked problems, and engage them through creative, interdisciplinary inquiry.