Environment and Social Movement in South East Asia - Teaching Experience

Ta-Wei Chu, Department of Social Science and Development, Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University

Teaching Objective and Methods

I co-teach a BA class, Environment and Social Movement in Southeast Asia, with two lecturers. My total number of teaching hours in the course is 15. At Chiang Mai University each BA class is usually ninety minutes. Last year, I allocated 4.5 hours to teaching transdisciplinarity, and this time was divided into three classes. The themes of the three transdisciplinary classes were: ‘Introduction to Transdisciplinarity’, ‘Knowledge Production and Integration’, and ‘Transdisciplinary Environmental Research’. The content of the PowerPoints are from (1) the teaching materials provided by the instructors in the first Train the Trainer (TTT) Workshop held by Chulalongkorn University in May 2018, and (2) books and journal articles such as The New Production of Knowledge (Gibbons et al.,1994).

My teaching objective is to stimulate students‘ interest in conducting transdisciplinary research in their future academic careers. I adopted three approaches to achieve the objective. First, I adjusted the approach to learning transdisciplinarity from the TTT Workshop. I agree that a philosophical and intricate knowledge of transdisciplinarity is significant and stems from, for example, a history of science and the differences between interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. However, the knowledge might be too heavy and tedious for BA students. Therefore, I skipped this part. In addition, I shortened the comparison between the Nicolescuian approach and the Swiss approach. In their places, I opted to teach ‘Introduction to Transdisciplinarity‘ by investing more effort into explaining the unique characteristics of transdisciplinary research and how to conduct it (please see my teaching PowerPoints).

Second, I choose my students‘ reading materials on the basis of two principles: the straightforward principle and the socially-relevant principle. Johann Vilhelm Nicolaas Tempelhoff’s paper, How Pat Metheny came to Carolina in Mpumalanga, South Africa, is a good example. The author records the evolving relations between the academic stakeholders and the practitioners, and found out that music became a catalyst to improve involved stakeholders‘ trust (Tempelhoff, 2013). The main theme of the paper is easy to understand: music as a conduit can attract students‘ attention. Incidentally, the focus of this transdisciplinary study is water pollution, which is socially relevant.

Third, I arranged a role-play activity. After joining the first TTT workshop, I found that the role-play activity is very useful for understanding how to conduct a transdisciplinary research, chiefly because students are unlikely to conduct real transdisciplinary research, which usually requires substantial time and funding. Asking students to join a mock transdisciplinary study and to play the role of each poetntial stakeholder may be a royal road to learning about these issues. In order to make the role play more efficient, the topic that I chose for the students was Mae Kha canal’s water management. Mae Kha is a canal located in Chiang Mai, and its water pollution has been unresolved for over twenty years. The issue covers several stakeholders including Chiang Mai University’s scholars, hotel owners, local villagers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and Chiang Mai Municipality. The students could quickly enter into an imaginative scenario because Mae Kha’s water management is in their local context yet can reflect water-pollution issues in South Africa.

The transdisciplinary course arrangement has achieved a small degree of its teaching objective. A student discussed with me his curiosity about transdisciplinarity. One of his questions centered on whether or not it is “called transdisciplinary [transdisciplinarity] when local [locals] tries [try] to use external knowledge like scientific knowledge?”Another student conducted a student seminar for introducting trandsiciplinarity. The student arranged the seminar independently by designing the topic, writing a symposium, and inviting a guest speaker.

Teaching Achievement and Challenges

Although the transdisciplinary section can boast achievements, they are small. Moreover, some challenges arose when I first taught transdisciplinarity. First, I could not find a transdisciplinary study situated in the Southeast Asian context. So far, many transdisciplinary studies are situated in the Western world, where democracy is consolidated, human rights are protected, and civil society is developed. In Southeast Asia,the aforementioned conditions are weak. Moreover, many countries in Southeast Asia exhibit strong patterns of hierarchy, patriarchy, andpatron–clientelism.Therefore, because transdisciplinarity can be a problem-solving paradigm, researchers who want to use transdisciplinarity to address Southeast Asia’s “wicked problems” are highly likely to encounter problems that are unique to Southeast Asia. Thus, conducting transdisciplinary research in the West and Southeast Asia can be very different. However, it is difficult to find a journal article related to transdisciplinarity in a Southeast Asian context.

One journal article that I did find suitable for teaching transdisciplinarity in a Southeast Asian is by Tuck Fatt Siew and his colleagues, and is situated in the Philippines and Vietnam (Siew 2016: 820). The authors found that several challenges are present in Asia’s transdisciplinary projects. These challenges includestakeholders’ difficult access to information, their unwillingness to engage in workshop discussions, distrust between stakeholders, and lack of funding. Siew and his colleagues linked the challenges in the four discussed transdisciplinary projects to local particularities. Even though the funder, which is the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF), was still from Europe, this paper may suitably help students understand transdisciplinarity in a Southeast Asian context.

The second challenge is limited time. As mentioned, in our department, many courses are co-taught. Thus, I did not have enough time to properly flesh out my introduction to transdisciplinarity. This year, I have proposed adjusting the teaching content in the course The Environment and Social Movements in Southeast Asia. I would like to use all my teaching hours to deliver topics around transdisciplinarity and, in particular, the knowledge that my instruction from last year neglected.

Suggested Teaching Materials for BA Level Students

Reading Difficulty’s Level: Difficult [★★★]; Moderate [★★☆]; Straightforward [★☆☆]

Introduction of Transdisciplinarity

Augsburg, Tanya. 2014. Becoming Transdisciplinary: The Emergence of the Transdisciplinary Individual. World Futures 70(3–4): 233–247 [★★☆].

Godemann, Jasmin. 2008. Knowledge Integration: A Key Challenge for Transdisciplinary Cooperation. Environmental Education Research14(6): 625–641 [★☆☆].

Bernstein, Jay Hillel. 2015. Transdisciplinarity: A Review of Its Origins, Development and Current Issues. Journal of Research Practice11(1): 1–15 [★★☆].

Issue-Based Transdisciplinarity

Tempelhoff, Johann. 2013. How Pat Metheny Came to Carolina in Mpumalanga, South Africa: Using Music in Transdisciplinary Water Research. The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in South Africa9(2): 357–378 [★☆☆].

Transdisciplinarity in Southeast Asian Context

Siew, Tuck Fatt, Thomas Aenis, Joachim H. Spangenberg, Alexandra Nauditt, Petra Döll, Sina K. Frank, Lars Ribbe, Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos, Christian Rumbaur, Josef Settele, Jue Wang. 2016. Transdisciplinary Research in Support of Land and Water Management in China and Southeast Asia: Evaluation of Four Research Projects. Sustainability Science11: 813–829 [★★☆].

Bibliography

Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott & Martin Trow. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. SAGE Publication.

Introduction to Transdisciplinarity

Knowledge Production and Integration

Transdisciplinary Environmental Research