Introduction to the Teaching Manual for Transdisciplinary Research

Introduction

The teaching manual is the main outcome of the KNOTS project. It is a resource as well as a toolbox for university teachers, researchers, students and interested audiences  With the manual, we want not only to motivate colleagues all over the world to take up transdisciplinarity in teaching but also to give some ideas and guidelines on how to do it in practice based on our shared experiences and endeavors. The manual seeks to address teachers, researchers, and students interested in a form of knowledge production that transgresses the separation between theory and practice, on the one hand, and the separation between university and community on the other. Similarly, the manual addresses those who want to engage with different kinds of knowledge and perspectives in teaching as well as in research. The contributors to the teaching manual share an understanding of transdisciplinarity as a framework for knowledge production, which can offer new and alternative views and perspectives on topics, themes and challenges. For us, teaching transdisciplinarity aims to avoid the reproduction of scientific norms and standards. As Ertas et al. formulated already in 2003, we hope that through the manual we can initiate transdisciplinary thinking, that is, “thinking that forces one to think across, beyond and through the academic disciplines to encompass all types of knowledge about an idea, issue, or subject” (289). This implies an understanding, learning, and engagement with different types of knowledge and sometimes even a distraction from the ‘real work’ of a university teacher or researcher. It also means to abandon the established paths of knowledge generation and conveyance of knowledge.

The teaching manual is the result of a productive exchange between university teachers, researchers, and students from different universities in Southeast Asia as well as Europe over a period of three years. Furthmore, it reflects  our learning experiences with and from many different non-academic partners who participated in the project field trips in the regions around Hanoi, Chang Mai and Ho Chi Minh City.  Whereas some of us were acquainted with the history and the concepts of transdisciplinary and already had some experience concerning teaching, others have become more familiar with transdisciplinarity in the course of the project. The respective project members have  different disciplinary backgrounds (mainly social sciences and humanities), different understandings of science, and different expectations concerning transdisciplinarity and the possibilities it offers with regard to teaching and knowledge production. Those of us, for example, who share a tradition of critical pedagogy or feminist and decolonial thought, see possibilities for a synthesis between these different approaches. We hope to find new and socially robust views of the world, or, more specifically, global challenges regarding migration, environmental problems or social inequalities, through combining transdisciplinarity with approaches that aim at decentering knowledge. Others are looking for new perspectives regarding teaching and research without necessarily questioning traditional science production and/or pedagogy.   

The KNOTS project provided a space for discussing not only transdisciplinarity per se but also different epistemologies and standpoints that became explicit throughout our collaborative activities. This is important to stress since we were neither able to develop a shared definition nor a shared understanding of transdisciplinarity within the frame of the project or the teaching manual. Instead, the teaching manual reflects our “learning-by-doing” approach: it consists of different sections, themes, and topics, which, in the broadest sense, reveal our examination and involvement with the literature on transdisciplinarity, as well as our reflections about theoretical issues (e.g.  knowledge production and science-public relations), evaluations of transdisciplinary projects, ideas about how to teach it, and methodologies. Therefore, the summer schools and especially the field trips, which took place in Thailand and Vietnam, were learning opportunities ‘beyond’ the walls and curricula of our classrooms and universities. These events were essential pillars for the development of the manual. The sections of the teaching manual (as well as the respective sessions) are the result of this learning process and reflect the different expectations, experiences, and priorities of the colleagues and students involved. Those differences emanated from different ‘local’ contexts (e.g. culturally and institutionally) and the resulting varieties in modes of teaching and learning as well as different understandings of knowledge and knowledge (co-)production.  Thus, the teaching manual features different positions and perspectives regarding research and teaching. 

This is important to emphasize since the teaching manual has a clear structure and is divided into three sections, each consisting of different sessions. The structure, however, does not determine how it should be used. The teaching manual is rather a kind of a toolbox. Before laying out our ideas on how to work with the manual, a short introduction of the sections and sessions will be given.

The structure of the manual

The structure of the teaching manual reflects our working process as well as the discussions and debates we had. All the sessions have been re-written and re-structured several times based on the feedback and suggestions from our three train-the-trainer workshops and the experiences from the field trips.

The first section

The first section consists of sessions focusing on ‘The history of transdisciplinarity’ and on ‘How to do transdisciplinarity’. Thereby, it is important to mention that we have read, studied, and discussed the extensive literature on transdisciplinarity, and it was by no means  an easy task to decide which approaches and perspectives are most suitable for our purposes. Additionally, a third session complements the first section: ‘Why transdisciplinarity? Re-Thinking Science and Research Paradigms’. In this more ‘theoretical’ session, a rough overview of the history of science, the relationship between scientific and practical knowledge as well as research paradigms is given. This session was included at a later stage to facilitate a process of reflection and to increase awareness of the paradigms and scientific discourses that frame our own work and ways of thinking. In this sense, this session intends to initiate reflections about knowledge itself and seeks to trigger a critical view on how higher education institutions have often understood legitimate knowledge in ways that excluded voices from the Global South, women or, more broadly, experience-based knowledge. The colleagues using the manual should decide by themselves whether (and in which contexts) such a reflection is necessary and vital for teaching and thinking about transdisciplinarity.

Abstracts of the sessions in section 1:

The aim of first session ‘The History of Transdisciplinarity’ is to introduce the development of transdisciplinarity as a form of knowledge production, which gained conceptual and practical importance over the last few decades. This session is for colleagues, students or an interested public for whom this integrative process of knowledge production and dissemination is new. Therefore, there is a specific focus on the differences between transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity. Furthermore, the two main understandings of transdisciplinarity are explained; first transdisciplinarity as a new principal for research and science and second transdisciplinarity as an operational modus of research (this approach will be explained further in session three, section one). The provision of knowledge about the different understandings is needed to lay the foundation for further discussions and reflections about the ‘new’ approach. Additionally the main features of transdisciplinarity are summarized. Especially these two slides (slide 22 and 23) could be used also in the beginning of the following sessions as a kind of ‘reminder’.

Session two ‘Why Transdisciplinary? Re-Thinking Science and Research Paradigms’ is a rather theoretical session.  A very rough and brief overview is given of the history of science, the relationship between scientific and practical knowledge, as well as research paradigms. This background is important since transdisciplinarity challenges  some of the historic developments of knowledge production and their interpretations, like the differentiation between scientific knowledge and lay knowledge and the hierarchy between the two. Furthermore, pragmatism is presented as a paradigm that can provide a framework for transdisciplinarity since it is oriented towards finding approaches, concepts, and methods which fit the anticipated outcomes best. The session finishes with a discussion of the two forms of knowledge production, namely Mode 1 and Mode 2, the latter relating to transdisciplinarity. 

In the third session ‘How to do Transdisciplinarity’, a kind of roadmap is presented for transdisciplinary research. Three ‘ideal’ phases, namely framing, research process implementation, and outcome are explained as well as the challenges accompanying each phase. Ideas and strategies are given about how to cope with the challenges and which competencies are needed, which are discussed in the literature and case studies. The aim of the third session is to convey that the implementation of a transdisciplinary research project is a process which develops its own dynamics.

The second section

In the second section, methodologies will be taken up and presented in seven sessions. It is important to emphasize that in our understanding, there is no such thing as a transdisciplinary research methodology or method. As a result, we will discuss those methodologies that, from our experiences, worked well in a transdisciplinary context. Since the selection is based on the expertise available in the project, other methodologies and methods beyond those discussed in the manual may be just as suitable. The session on ‘Methodologies of Transdisciplinarity’ stresses the need for reflexivity and positionality in transdisciplinary efforts and, in so doing, refers to feminist and postcolonial approaches. The importance of participation when doing transdisciplinary research is the focus of the session ‘Participation and Local Knowledge’. The session ‘Knowledge Co-production and Integrative Design’ examines the capacities needed for the integration of different forms of knowledge. Additionally, it focuses on crucial steps for a possible co-production of knowledge. The challenges accompanying the co-production of knowledge become accessible through a role-play, which is part of the session and the most ‘practical’ exercise in the manual. Why and how intersectionality can inform transdisciplinary research and influence the validity of transdisciplinary endeavors will be taken up in the session on ‘Transdisciplinarity and Intersectionality’. The session ‘Ethics in Transdisciplinary Research‘ was included after the first summer schools and fields trips since ethical questions arose, especially during interactions and cooperation with non-academic actors in the ‘field’. Although ethical questions are raised and discussed in other sessions as well, we deemed it important to include an extra session on this topic in the teaching manual.

As the brief descriptions of the sessions in this section reveal, they cover broader methodological perspectives and approaches as well as sessions that are practical oriented. The sessions and the methodologies are, however, complementary. Ethical issues, for example, are relevant in participation as well as knowledge co-production. Intersectionality may be a significant issue when a participatory approach is chosen. Questions of reflexivity and positionality should accompany research in general but it is even more critical when conducting transdisciplinary research with non-academic actors as well as researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds.  As was already mentioned briefly, the methods one chooses to use when doing transdisciplinary research depend on the academic interest of a transdisciplinary project, the methodology, the expected outcomes, as well as the qualifications and capacities of the actors involved.

Abstracts of the sessions in section 2:

The session ‘Methodologies for Transdisciplinarity’ discusses standpoint theory, postcolonial critique and reflexive positionality as indispensable conceptual foundations of any transdisciplinary endeavor. All of these methodological and epistemological perspectives deal with power differences and hierarchies related to knowledge production and truth claims. As one of the main objectives of transdisciplinarity is to overcome the positivist paradigm by accepting that different perspectives on the world co-exist, as well as to create knowledge based on the negotiations between these different perspectives, we need to be aware of the implicit assumptions we have about different kinds of knowledge in academia. Standpoint theories and postcolonial critiques provide  sound guidance to reveal that the techniques of “neutral” and “objective” academia are complicit in societal relations of domination – such as patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism. While these critical perspectives are certainly useful in the context of development studies, the mechanisms they address are to be found in all societies across the world. The discussion in this session therefore provides transdisciplinarity with a strong methodological foundation of reflexive positionality, which enables collaborative and transdisciplinary endeavors to engage in relation building across and beyond disciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge and agency.   

The general purpose of the session ‘Participation and Local Knowledge’ is to introduce participation and local knowledge in a combined way and explicitly link the two topics. The specific aim related to participation is to show that participation goes beyond mere communicative aspects and involves a political dimension, whereas the specific aim related to local knowledge is to explain that general attributes of local knowledge make it a specific kind of knowledge found in all societies. The aim is further to show that when doing transdisciplinarity, local knowledge should not be oversimplified and that local knowledge is hard to grasp conceptually, and its application within the context of transdisciplinarity is ambiguous.

 In the session ‘Knowledge Co-Production and Integrative Design’ different types of knowledge and their multiple rationalities will be discussed in order to reflect why often a gap exists between ‘real-world’ problems and knowledge produced through academic research projects. Furthermore, a methodology for transdisciplinary research developed by the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research (ISOE) is presented to exemplify how transdisciplinary research may be undertaken in practice (Bergmann et al 2012). ‘Knowledge co-production’ as a means to synthesize knowledge that may be undertaken through different approaches and degrees of interaction (participation; integration; learning; negotiation) will be presented, and it will be emphasized that knowledge co-production processes must be sensitive to power-relations between involved actors. A critical discussion on the opportunities and challenges of such an approach, when undertaken in the context of the participants’ countries, will be added. This session concludes with a role-play exercise that explores the first stage of transdisciplinary research, namely problem definition and research question preparation.

The aim of the session ‘Transdisciplinarity and Intersectionality’ is on one hand to introduce intersectionality as a concept and a methodology that shares critical epistemological concerns with transdisciplinarity. Both concepts aim to integrate different forms of knowledge, and both are critical tools for knowledge production. On the other hand, it will be shown that combining intersectionality and transdisciplinarity can be very fruitful, especially when focusing on social inequalities. That intersectionality as a concept as well as a methodology can be of special relevance in the different phases of a transdisciplinary endeavor will be shown in the last part of the session.

The session ‘Ethical Issues in the Context of Transdisciplinarity’ is an outcome of the experiences and observations during the summer schools and fieldwork phases of the project. Institutional aspects of research ethics represented by ethical guidelines are introduced as the basic tool to guide participants’ thinking about various ethical aspects of their work. However, ethical guidelines cannot cover all of the situations that accompany research in general and transdisciplinary research in particular. Therefore, concepts of positionality and reflexivity are introduced, which may help researchers to assess the more subtle ethical aspects of a research process in general and the different phases of a transdisciplinary research project in particular.

The third section

The third section consists of sessions discussing transdisciplinary research in the context of specific topics and themes. Those sessions deal, for example, with transdisciplinary topics like migration or environmental changes. These two sessions are supplemented by a session about a transdisciplinary research project on migration and the detailed reflection of a colleague, who already applied an earlier version of the teaching manual to develop and conceptualise a transdisciplinary research project. He will share and reflect upon the challenges faced as well as the possibilities a transdisciplinary approach provides.

Reflections of students and researchers who have participated in different activities, but especially the train-the-trainer and train-the-student workshop during the summer school in Ho Chi Minh City, will complete the manual. Additionally, working papers of students who did research concerning the aims of the project and dealt especially with questions of power relations, knowledge, and participation were integrated. The reflections and working papers have been added to provide additional material and perspectives with regard to teaching as well as to assist those who intend to use part of the manual for developing and conceptualizing their own transdisciplinary research projects.    

Abstracts of the sessions in section 3:

The session ‘Transdisciplinarity and Migration Studies’ gives an introduction into how transdisciplinarity could be productively linked with migration studies, which methodological assumptions could make transdisciplinarity hard to apply, and which conceptual innovations could be useful if transdisciplinarity is applied. The session starts with situating migration studies in the realm of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity and gives a short overview of the main, and still dominant, theoretical perspectives on migration, which were mainly formulated from the political economy perspective. It then picks up three conceptual innovations that from our perspective seem to provide a useful pathway for transdisciplinarity in migration studies, and in research on migration in general. These are: First, the critique on methodological nationalism as a hegemonic epistemological and methodological imaginary; Second, the political and social construction of Black and White identities and their relationality in migration; and third, the collaborative research practice as a strategy of feminist international solidarity politics. The session concludes by discussing that studies in migration correspond to the principles of transdisciplinary research design even though transdisciplinary terminology is not applied. The principles of collaborative research and production of transformative knowledge are, the authors argue,  a relevant innovation in migration studies and deserve more attention and discussion in, and beyond, academia.

The aim of the session ‘Transdisciplinary Research in Environmental Change: A Political Ecology Approach’ is, on the one hand, to problematize the relationship between environment and society to reveal their fundamental interdependence and, on the other, to emphasize how knowledge production shapes the co-produced relationship between environment and society and its governance. The field of political ecology and its key themes: scarcity, ecological modernization, the market and processes of commodification, and the commons, will be introduced to show the inherently political nature of environment-society relations. Examples of transdisciplinary research in relation to real-world challenges of environmental change will be presented to reveal that ‘environmental problems’ are very suited to transdisciplinary research.

The session ‘Environment and Social Movements in Southeast Asia’  differs from the other sessions. Here the author reflects, on the one hand, his experiences while teaching transdisciplinarity in Southeast Asia and, on the other, presents the challenges and problems faced when implementing a transdisciplinary project. The session consists of different material, which was used and prepared for teaching as well as a presentation, focusing explicitly on a transdisciplinary research project and the challenges and problems faced while implementing it. This session gives  a very intensive and reflexive input into the constraints and possibilities of transdisciplinarity in a Global South context.

The working papers written by students who have participated in the summer school and the fieldtrip in Chiang Mai  have a different format than the sessions so far. They are an output of empirical research focusing on these two activities. The first working paper focuses on power relations and participation between the different actors during the summer school, while the second working paper focuses on dissemination and the challenges accompanying this process. The working papers have been included to give an insight into the project and to reveal that challenges which have been discussed regarding transdisciplinarity also structured the project’s activities.     

How to use the manual

Our teaching manual has not been published in a print-version but is available on our open online platform. All sessions are available via open access (based on a creative common license). The rationale behind the web-based decision is our conviction that such a manual is the more useful the more flexibly it can be used. The manual should not be considered a linear guide, but users can work with it in different and flexible ways depending on their specific contexts, their specific agendas, their aims and possibilities (e.g. regarding time), but also in view of already existing curricula and seminars.

Most, but not all, sessions contain a text on (1) the aims of the session, (2) the links to transdisciplinarity, (3) a summary of the main points, (4) the use of the provided material (the slides and the literature, which will also be included), (5) additional comments, and (6) a reflection. Additionally for most sessions, three different kinds of presentations can be found for each session:

1. The first set of slides is designed for  lecturers. These slides are adaptable (PowerPoint). Lecturers can thus decide which part of the session is most suitable for their specific context (and audience). They can change the slides, shorten the session and add case studies or examples. Furthermore, they can  add videos, pictures or illustrations. There is also the possibility that the lecturers combine different sessions and make one out of two, for example, or copy some slides from one session and add them to another. Furthermore, these slides include specific suggestions, additional explanations, and comments with regard to possible group and class exercises as well as other didactical issues. These  slides are the teaching concept for the respective session.

2. The second set of slides is targeted towards lecturers and students, who seek to apply the respective session of the manual in training courses on transdisciplinary research and teaching or simply engage with the respective topics. These (PDF) slides cannot be adapted by the target audience.

3. Additionally, some sessions provide a video presentation, which is suitable for both students (who want to engage with a respective topic themselves) and lecturers. Lecturers and teachers can use these slides instead of presenting the session/sessions themselves. In this case, the main task of the lecturer will be to conduct the exercises and/or lead the discussions. For researchers who plan a transdisciplinary research project this kind of presentation might also be helpful for developing and conceptualizing their projects. The presenters in the videos are the ones who have developed a first draft version of the respective session. The presented version, however, changed over the course of the project  due to the inputs and discussions during and after the activities.

The sessions and the material provided for each session (besides the literature) are part of our joint effort to provide a learning space, a space as described by Trinh Minh-ha that can be shared by anyone, and “…that does not belong to anyone, not even to those who have created it” (1991, 108). Even though each session was developed and written by one project member, who also selected the literature, in the course of the train-the-trainer workshops the participants reworked the slides directly and gave their feedback regarding the structure of the presentations, the design of the slides, and the content. During the last summer school, participants of the train-the-trainer workshop used the third set of PowerPoint slides to train the students. They worked very creatively with the PowerPoint slides. They also adapted and reorganized the slides and exercises and included visual material, which related to their local context and the needs of this specific audience.  Lauren Crawshaw and her colleagues wrote in 2014 in an article in World Development that “…most studies to date have focused on the why rather than how transdisciplinarity can be used.” (489). We hope that the teaching manual will provide the how and encourage lecturers and researchers as well as students from different countries, universities, and disciplines to use transdisciplinarity for knowledge production. By focusing on the how we hope to show that transdisciplinarity is an educational approach that allows for the inclusion of multiple perspectives and diversity, and promotes a discursive exchange between different scientific cultures and non-academic actors. For the contributors, this change of focus is necessary and will result in the transformation of knowledge. The aspiration is to create knowledge that is socially relevant and able to deal with real world problems.

Literature

Crawshaw, Lauren et. al 2014: Lessons from an Integrated Community Health Education Initiative in Rural Laos, in: World Development, 64: 487-502.

Ertas, Atila et. al. 2003: Transformation of higher education: The transdisciplinary approach in engineering, in: IEEE Transactions on Education 46(2):289 – 295.

Minh-ha Trinh T. 1991: When the Moon Waxes Red: Representations, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge.

Teaching Manual in Thai Language is available (here).