Understanding Ecosystems of Interdisciplinary Graduate Education through an Ecological Systems Approach

Margaret Webb; Marie C. Paretti

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Graduate Studies Division (GSD) Technical Session 4: Interdisciplinary Graduate Education
Tagged Division: Graduate Studies Division (GSD)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48189

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Paper Authors

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Margaret Webb Virginia Tech

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Margaret (Maggie) Webb is a master's and Ph.D. student in sustainable land development (civil engineering) and engineering education, respectively, at Virginia Tech. She graduated with her mechanical engineering degree from Rice University and worked for ExxonMobil as a subsea engineer and as a high school STEM teacher in a Houston charter school before starting grad school. Her research interests include interdisciplinary higher education, focusing on organizational systems theory and facilitating interdisciplinary graduate programs; the identity development and experiences of interdisciplinary engineering graduate students and faculty; and the decision-making processes and factors impacting implementation of interdisciplinary graduate education initiatives. She works as a graduate research assistant for the Virginia Tech Disaster Resilience and Risk Management interdisciplinary graduate program, as well as for the VT Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies.

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Marie C. Paretti Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University orcid.org/0000-0002-2202-6928

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Marie C. Paretti is a Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she directs the Virginia Tech Engineering Communications Center (VTECC). Her research focuses on communication, collaboration, and identity in engineering.

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Abstract

Responding to decades of calls for interdisciplinary scholars capable of addressing complex societal challenges [1], [2], [3], this conference paper addresses persistent gaps in interdisciplinary graduate education reform. Despite extensive research on transformational interdisciplinary graduate education, little change has been made in reshaping governing funding, policies, and program structures as well as disciplinary-based academic cultures [4], [5], [6]. Moreover, interdisciplinary graduate students, particularly those with STEM backgrounds, still grapple with scholarly identity formation and integration into interdisciplinary research communities [7], [8].

We argue a systems-based approach to evaluating and facilitating interdisciplinary graduate student development– drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) and spanning high- and low-consensus disciplines [9], [10], [11]– represents an important answer to calls for systems-based research on multifaceted systemic change across layers of academia [12], [13], [14]. We posit the persistence of challenges in interdisciplinary graduate education results – at least in part – from the primarily localized focus of previous research focusing on only a single domain (e.g., one academic department, only institutional academic policies, and not institutional culture, or on faculty experiences alone), one point in time, and through the lens of primarily sociocultural and cultural-historical perspectives despite calls for systems analyses. Typical research also focuses on learning outcomes, pathways, relationships, identities, and motivations separately (i.e., not as parts of systems or as multiple interrelated aspects of development more broadly) and passively (i.e., typically from the perspectives of faculty and not students themselves) [4], [15], [16], [17].

These research gaps have highlighted the need for systems-oriented research. To that end, this study used Ecological Systems Theory (EST) [9], [18] to examine how dimensions of graduate education interact to influence interdisciplinary students’ development across high- to low-consensus backgrounds. This research focused on a qualitative and longitudinal case study of systems influences on interdisciplinary graduate students’ development within an interdisciplinary program focused on disaster resilience (referred to as the IDR program throughout). We used a secondary dataset of 62 annual semi-structured interviews with 26 interdisciplinary graduate students across 5 years. A key point of analysis was considering differences between interdisciplinary graduate students’ developmental systems and experiences comparatively– specifically across high- (e.g. engineering) and low-consensus fields (e.g., social sciences). Our findings underscore challenges faced by interdisciplinary graduate students across the consensus spectrum and support the idea that interdisciplinary programs where researchers come from disciplinary departments face inherent limitations. This study extends Newswander & Borrego’s [19] argument that adding new interdisciplinary degree programs without considering existing organizational cultures and structures can lead to challenges in training interdisciplinary scholars; even in an established interdisciplinary program like IDR, developing interdisciplinary graduate students grapple with the influence of disciplinary microsystems– whether they were engineering or nonSTEM based, and often at the expense of their interdisciplinary work.

Citation
Format

Webb, M., & Paretti, M. C. (2024, June), Understanding Ecosystems of Interdisciplinary Graduate Education through an Ecological Systems Approach Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48189

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Responding to decades of calls for interdisciplinary scholars capable of addressing complex societal challenges [1], [2], [3], this conference paper addresses persistent gaps in interdisciplinary graduate education reform. Despite extensive research on transformational interdisciplinary graduate education, little change has been made in reshaping governing funding, policies, and program structures as well as disciplinary-based academic cultures [4], [5], [6]. Moreover, interdisciplinary graduate students, particularly those with STEM backgrounds, still grapple with scholarly identity formation and integration into interdisciplinary research communities [7], [8]. 

We argue a systems-based approach to evaluating and facilitating interdisciplinary graduate student development– drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) and spanning high- and low-consensus disciplines [9], [10], [11]–  represents an important answer to calls for systems-based research on multifaceted systemic change across layers of academia [12], [13], [14]. We posit the persistence of challenges in interdisciplinary graduate education results – at least in part – from the primarily localized focus of previous research focusing on only a single domain (e.g., one academic department, only institutional academic policies, and not institutional culture, or on faculty experiences alone), one point in time, and through the lens of primarily sociocultural and cultural-historical perspectives despite calls for systems analyses. Typical research also focuses on learning outcomes, pathways, relationships, identities, and motivations separately (i.e., not as parts of systems or as multiple interrelated aspects of development more broadly) and passively (i.e., typically from the perspectives of faculty and not students themselves) [4], [15], [16], [17].

These research gaps have highlighted the need for systems-oriented research. To that end, this study used Ecological Systems Theory (EST) [9], [18] to examine how dimensions of graduate education interact to influence interdisciplinary students’ development across high- to low-consensus backgrounds. This research focused on a qualitative and longitudinal case study of systems influences on interdisciplinary graduate students’ development within an interdisciplinary program focused on disaster resilience (referred to as the IDR program throughout). We used a secondary dataset of 62 annual semi-structured interviews with 26 interdisciplinary graduate students across 5 years. A key point of analysis was considering differences between interdisciplinary graduate students’ developmental systems and experiences comparatively– specifically across high- (e.g. engineering) and low-consensus fields (e.g., social sciences). Our findings underscore challenges faced by interdisciplinary graduate students across the consensus spectrum and support the idea that interdisciplinary programs where researchers come from disciplinary departments face inherent limitations. This study extends Newswander &amp;amp; Borrego’s [19] argument that adding new interdisciplinary degree programs without considering existing organizational cultures and structures can lead to challenges in training interdisciplinary scholars; even in an established interdisciplinary program like IDR, developing interdisciplinary graduate students grapple with the influence of disciplinary microsystems– whether they were engineering or nonSTEM based, and often at the expense of their interdisciplinary work.  
AU  - Margaret Webb
AU  - Marie C. Paretti
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Understanding Ecosystems of Interdisciplinary Graduate Education through an Ecological Systems Approach
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/48189
ER  -