By Dr. Kathryn Bateman
I reached up to grab my geology colleague’s forearm for him to pull me up to the next level of the canyon we were climbing. My other colleague, a psychologist, stood below ready to hand me my pack once I got atop the four-foot wall of rock.
My colleagues were quite literally dragging me up the side of a mountain in the desert of Southern California, woefully ill-equipped for this kind of “fieldwork”. In my mind fieldwork meant that dirt looked like chalk dust and dry erase residue, not clays and sands; field notes were videos of classrooms rather than sketches of igneous intrusions.
But, here I was, an educator, along for the ride on a week of geological fieldwork with a motley crew of researchers and designers who at first glance may seem to share nothing but a grant.
Why was I, a former middle school teacher, climbing too-large rocks in the desert?
For science, obviously.
Together, our team of geologists, psychologists, engineers, and learning scientists were trying to understand how geologists use aerial vehicles in the field. We wanted to design a drone specially for geologic field work and establish ways to better understand how one learns to fly a drone. Most of our collaboration happened out in the field, flying drones with geologists and determining what problems can be solved – both cognitive and technical – before returning to separate institutions and departments to chip away at our piece.
In this article, I share my experiences as a member of an interdisciplinary team, the challenges of that experience, and some ways that we did, or could have better, negotiated what it means to do interdisciplinary research.
Interdisciplinary Lithification – The Making of a Team
With an interdisciplinary team of geoscientists, cognitive scientists, learning scientists, and engineers, our views on research were as diverse as the stratigraphic layers in the rocks in front of us.
Each group saw data and analysis in different ways. Geologists were observers who mapped their data, both in the field and on computers. The engineers used design and iterative testing of models – digital and physical prototypes. The cognitive scientists thought about internal mental processes, measurement and statistics, and coding in R. As an educational ethnographer, I wrote field notes, conducted interviews, and worked in grounded theory.
To make this work, we need to ensure that we let one another shine and find ways to support each other. For example, the cognitive scientists and I collaborated with the geologists to think about how geologists learn to fly drones to do geologic fieldwork. As the qualitative researcher, I analyzed videos of geologists in the field, making notes on what was said, gestured, or done as the geologists flew drones to solve geologic problems. To build this towards a learning task for novice drone pilots though, we needed to merge my understanding of what they were doing, with the cognitive psychology theories for what lay beneath the surface of their decision making. Together, we were able to make claims that used both research paradigms applied to the contexts of the geologists and engineers.
Really understanding the different geologists’ actions though, meant discussing initial findings with the geologists, drawing on their expertise. Finally, we shared our findings with the geologists as they innovate and build new technology. Everyone plays to their own strengths. To get to this point took some negotiation of workflow and communication of expectations and needs. Like the rock layers, we built on one another to create a more solid structure, but we needed to find ways to communicate and work together in ways that highlight everyone’s unique attributes.
For me, two key takeaways from these experiences were critical to success: find a coherent workflow, and ensure that workflow meets the needs of all members of the team.
Setting Expectations and Ground Rules: Finding a Workflow
Work styles and expectations can be different between fields and institutions within interdisciplinary teams. Although “publish or perish” is still a persistent narrative in higher education, getting to that publication can take many routes. Our first step was to determine what audience we intended to be reading each paper. Education, psychology, geology, and engineering journals often have different expectations of style and length for which we had to tailor our writing. Next, we established who would lead papers for each intended audience. At the moment, we have two papers in review, each around the same concept of articulating uncertainty in geologic field work. One led by a team psychologist which discusses the cognitive side of uncertainty in geologic fieldwork. My paper, intended for a geoscience education audience, discusses how to teach this to students in field camps. Both papers were written at the same time by the same group of authors which allowed us to craft the narratives in complementary ways rather than ways that fight for the spotlight. We decided early in the writing process what those narratives would be, what data would belong to which paper, and which team member was best suited to craft the stories that would speak to a given audience. One “hindsight” idea has been around deadlines. Both papers were slated for special issue calls from journals with submission dates with days of one another. This causes some problems with getting things done as there was a crossover of authors needing to support pieces of each manuscript in different ways. If we had decided on these papers earlier in the process, or chosen to send them to different submission calls with staggered deadlines, this could have saved us some tension during that crunch time.
Another workflow expectation to establish early on is setting up established protocols for data collection, storage, and analysis – and what counts as data. When I first joined the team, a year into the project, I was told they had not collected “data” but had hours of GoPro video from geologists flying drones in the field to work on geologic problems and video from the drone cameras during those flights. This was amazing data to me – I could both hear what the geologists were saying and see what they were seeing in the drone’s camera. I saw great potential in the crossover between the two data sources.
However, because the team hadn’t seen this as data and assumed the embedded time stamps would be enough to understand what video files were, later on, there was no clear system of naming, storing, or organizing what I saw as data. This may have been an efficient way of dealing with in-the-wild video data, but the cameras had not been calibrated and the timestamp data was not lined up with the data from the drones.
I spent hours matching drone flight files with video of geologists carrying out those flights, and maps of the areas where they flew the drones. Had we set clear, specific, normed expectations for the data before entering the field, a more efficient workflow could have been established and saved us all the extra time back in the lab.
Meeting Everyone’s Needs
In addition to being interdisciplinary, our team was multi-institutional and represented a variety of career stages. This meant taking into consideration what all team members need to meet their career goals, whether that is finding a job, achieving tenure, or just meeting personally set long-term goals.
As a post-doctoral scholar, I needed to develop skills for researching and writing under the mentorship of more senior scholars. I was hired to support a specific research agenda – understanding how geologists learn to fly drones in the field – but I also needed to craft opportunities for myself that would make me marketable to a science education hiring committee.
I understood that I needed to carve out these opportunities for myself. So, I collaborated with our senior geoscience researchers to support undergraduate instruction while learning about structural geology more deeply to better support the project goals. Elsewhere in the project, our cognitive scientists helped engineers think about human decision-making while picking up more design experience. These interdisciplinary engagements have helped better prepare all of the team members to grow in their current positions and prepare for the next stages.
Grant proposals, in particular the National Science Foundation, require a plan for professional development for post-doctoral scholars, but these are crafted early on in the process, usually before a particular post-doctoral scholar is hired. Setting aside time to tailor plans to support novice researchers’ goals once a team is assembled is critical to success.
Hiking to New Viewpoints
That hike up the mountain? It’s a great metaphor for our research process. At the top of it were the most beautiful views of Southern California and the Mecca Hills, and the perfect angle to analyze an exquisite structural feature that to my education-trained eyes looks mostly like a shark fin, but to my geology colleague told a whole story.
Getting up there helped us see from new perspectives and better understand what we were seeing on the floor of the canyon. The geologist was able to decide between folding and faulting in that specific area. I was able to hear all the ways he had to think through his observations, helping me think through what we need to teach novice geologists and drone pilots to make them successful in the field.
The four-foot rock wall? We were not getting up alone. We worked together to find the best way up. There had been other places I could navigate with less support, I had essential equipment in my pack. I had my role to play as much as the others.
About the Author
Dr. Kathryn M. Bateman is a research associate at Create for STEM at Michigan State University. Katie is a former marine biologist and middle school teacher who now studies how people learn science, and especially how we learn to teach science. She is most interested in the work that can be done around ethically teaching, learning, and doing science and the role interdisciplinary partnerships in that work. You can contact Katie via email (kmb1182@gmail.com) and on Twitter (@TeaforTeaching).