1.6 Interdisciplinary collaborations: business as unusual?

Comments

• • Johan van de Worp
  • 1682335112

  Here you can read a report from this workshop (with thanks to the reporter for making it):

  How do you tell an alien what 'Recognition & Reward' means? The workshop participants all needed different words for that. They run form ‘then we recognize everyone's talent’ to ‘you do something you do well, and I'll give you a candy for it’.

  With this introduction, it became clear at once what makes interdisciplinary work so complicated, even for scientists who basically have a drive for interdisciplinary work. But that, one might briefly say, can be remedied with training in ‘learning to understand each other’. Unfortunately, other obstacles to working more interdisciplinary are more difficult to tackle. How do you get scientists to do this in traditionally discipline-oriented universities? How do you know if interdisciplinary work suits you?

  You have to be able and willing to look beyond your own discipline, be at the service of the team, share knowledge in an accessible way, these are just some of the aspects that are important. Going beyond the boundaries of your disciplinary work means going out of your comfort zone, and that can mean that not everything goes smoothly. If we really move towards more interdisciplinary work, then we have to accept that when something goes wrong it is not a failure, but part of the experiment. At the moment we avoid that, afraid as we are for our CV.

  If we really want to work interdisciplinary, we will not only have to do research assessments, but more broader assessments. Assessments as well on education and research and impact but also on the general and more specific skills that are needed.

  When a team finally works on an interdisciplinary assignment, it is often still under pressure due to short-term funding. Interdisciplinary work takes more time than monodisciplinary work to achieve results. The common language must be found, and collaboration must also be learned. Continuing to work together then goes into one's own time. That is not really recognition and reward!

  Question that remained at the end was: is it a solution not to assess at all and just let everyone go at their strengths, or go to self-managing teams that take responsibility themselves to come up with results? These are two very different questions but worth exploring further in terms of desirability, pros and cons and feasibility.

  
• • Claartje Chajes (Communitymanager RRview)
  • 1682337107

  @julmabraat, @marionstolp, @biancalanghout, @jeroenvanderham, here you can find the report of your workshop. Are there any interesting take aways you want to share with us?