By Laura Zeller
In the fall of 2017, I found myself in a familiar space: a professional development for science teachers. As a high school physics teacher for 6 years, I attended many similar workshops, but this time was different. I bid farewell to my classroom the previous spring and started a Ph.D. program in Learning Sciences.
Rather than attending as a participant, I was instead one of the researchers hosting the workshop. I had a new hat to grow into, but my teacher hat didn’t just disappear.
Today, I wear multiple hats and consequently have many views with which I walk through the world. “Interdisciplinary” does not always have to describe a team; individuals can be interdisciplinary too. As a researcher, it is important that I consider what hats I bring to my work and communicate how this positions me within my research.
As a teacher, I wore many disciplinary hats. My teaching degree certified me to be a science teacher in Illinois. To earn that degree, I took science courses across physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science. Even though I was the physics expert for the professional development workshops, my background from my undergraduate studies prepared me to step into conversations with other teachers about other science topics as well. Having a wide breadth of knowledge across science disciplines allowed me to comfortably work with all our participating teachers and understand the content they were working with. Having multiple disciplinary hats allowed me to code switch and adapt what we were trying to do in the workshops to individual subjects. These cross-disciplinary discussions and understandings enriched both the learning for the participating teachers and the data analysis our team could conduct.
It isn’t just me. I see all teachers as inherently interdisciplinary. The course work most teachers take to become certified is broken into two categories: content and teaching. A teacher constantly draws from their specialty in disciplines such as pedagogy, multiple subject areas, and classroom management. Some change hats throughout the day, teaching multiple classes, coaching, and/or sponsoring clubs. Teachers are a great example of how interdisciplinary can describe an individual.
Within my research, my teaching hat is invaluable. My experiences as a teacher motivate my research and shape the decisions I make, such as what questions I investigate, the data I collect, and the frameworks I use. When I step into a classroom, I view it both as a researcher and as a teacher. This gives me an inside view of the classroom, but sometimes it also makes things more difficult.
For example, when I first started doing classroom observations as a researcher, all I wanted to do was talk to students, answer their questions, and guide them in building knowledge. However, this was no longer my role. I was there, not to facilitate learning, but to observe and examine how that learning was taking place. I had to change into my researcher hat and put my teacher hat aside. Having multiple hats means that you have to match the one you wear to the task at hand.
Throughout graduate school, I constructed a new hat. I learned how to collect and organize data, how to design and facilitate the workshops and design my own research projects. As I came to fit into my new hat, I drew from my experience wearing my teaching hats. My background as a classroom teacher was invaluable because we worked with high school science teachers on developing classroom assessments. My experiences within our project and my graduate courses helped me knit together my new researcher hat, but I always have my teacher hats at the ready.
I embrace my multiple hats and leverage them together to engage in action research, where I conduct research within a course that I am teaching. This work requires me to be deliberate about planning when to prioritize my different hats. While leading class, I can’t stop and take field notes. When coding data, I have to look for evidence of what happened as opposed to what I wanted to happen. I also have to acknowledge that I can never totally put a hat away. There are always things that I learned in one hat that influence how I act in another. This is why including positionality statements in research reports that clearly communicate to readers how you and your various hats fit into and shape your work.
Interdisciplinarity is typically used to describe a team of people working on something together, but an individual can be interdisciplinary too. I experienced this as a teacher and as an action researcher. I encourage you to think about the different hats you wear and how they impact you and your work. Our research can never be separated from who we are and what we bring to the table. Research is inherently a human endeavor shaped by the experiences and frameworks woven into the fabric of each of our many hats. So when you share your work, talk about your hats and how they position you within the study.
About the Author:
Laura Zeller is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the International Learning Science Student Association steering committee (2021-2022) for the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Her dissertation research focuses on how science classroom patterns of practice are sustained by systemic, multi-leveled supports. You can contact her by email on Twitter (@physicsedu2).
