Next generation social work research education: fostering transdisciplinary readiness

ABSTRACT

Globally, scholars across disciplines are seeing increasing pressures to develop the capacity for multi-level, boundary-spanning research focused on complex social, health, and environmental problems. Although social work is inherently an integrative discipline, the profession faces challenges and gaps in effectively and thoughtfully responding to these demands. This paper focuses on transdisciplinarity, arguing that it is a core dimension of research training aimed at better achieving readiness to engage these changing landscapes. We describe some of the major changes in contemporary research, define concepts related to transdisciplinarity, illustrate developments in pedagogical thinking, particularly at the doctoral level, and encourage reflective, cross-pollinating conversations between US, European, and other international partners regarding what can be gained from both our areas of commonality and our differences.

ABSTRAKT

Komplexe soziale, gesundheitsbezogene und ökologische Probleme werden weltweit von Wissenschaftler_innen unterschiedlicher disziplinärer Provenienz als immer dringlichere Herausforderungen betrachtet, die nach Forschungszugängen verlangen, bei denen mehrere Ebenen berücksichtigt und disziplinäre Grenzen überschritten werden. Obwohl Soziale Arbeit von je eher interdisziplinär ausgerichtet war, steht die Profession aktuell vor der Herausforderung, dass sie bislang noch keine effektiven und systematischen Lösungen für diese Probleme entwickelt hat. Dieser Beitrag fokussiert Transdisziplinarität als zentrale Dimension in der wissenschaftlichen Ausbildung von Forschungskompetenzen, um auf diese sich wandelnde Wissenschaftslandschaft besser vorbereitet zu sein. Wir beschreiben einige zentrale Veränderungen in den gegenwärtigen Forschungszugängen, definieren Konzepte und Theorien der Transdisziplinärität, erläutern Entwicklungen in der Ausbildung von Forschungskompetenzen, insbesondere auf postgradualem Niveau, und plädieren für einen reflexiven, sich gegenseitig bereichernden Diskurs zwischen den USA, Europa und anderen internationale Partnern, der die Möglichkeiten einer weiteren Entwicklung aufzeigt, bei dem Gemeinsamkeiten und Differenzen in den jeweiligen Regionen gleichermaßen berücksichtigt werden.

KEYWORDS:

• Transdisciplinary
• interdisciplinary
• doctoral
• research
• global

STICHWÖRTER:

• Transdisziplinarität
• Interdisziplinarität
• Postgraduale Ausbildung
• Forschungskompetenzen
• Globalisierung

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paula Nurius, PhD, is the Grace Beals Ferguson Scholar, Professor and Associate Dean for Transdisciplinary Research at the University of Washington School of Social Work. A Fellow in the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, Dr. Nurius is the inaugural recipient of the GADE National Leadership in Doctoral Education Award and past Vice President of SSWR and GADE. Her research focuses on life course stress and trauma effects on health, development, and functioning as well as training to support transdisciplinary and translational team science.

Susan P. Kemp PhD is Charles O. Cressey Endowed Professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work. Her research and scholarly interests focus on place and environment as foci of social work practice, community-based and community-engaged services, public child welfare, social work history, and transdisciplinarity. A Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, she is national co-lead of the AASWSW Grand Challenge, Create Social Responses to a Changing Environment, and, at the University of Washington, a founding Executive Committee member of Urban@UW, a transdisciplinary hub for urban research and practice.

Stefan Köngeter, PhD, is currently Professor for Social Pedagogy at the Department for Education at Trier University, Germany. After finishing his PhD at Hildesheim University in 2008, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, and at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests comprise a broad range of topics in social pedagogy, social work, and sociology: transnationalization of welfare knowledge, professionalization of social pedagogy and social work, child, and youth care, history of the settlement house movement, relational social theories.

Sarah Gehlert, PhD, is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity at the Brown School of Social Work and Professor in the Department of Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Gehlert is President of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and a past president of the Society for Social Work and Research. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies.

Notes

1. Including TD-net in Switzerland (http://www.naturwissenschaften.ch/topics/co-producing_knowledge/about), Short Guides in Edinburgh (http://www.innogen.ac.uk/briefings.php?id=448), SciTS in the US (https://www.teamsciencetoolkit.cancer.gov/public/TSExpertDetail.aspx?tid=10&rid=526), Integration and Implementation Sciences in Australia (http://i2s.anu.edu.au/), International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/index_en.php), and the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies in Canada (http://wwwp.oakland.edu/ais/). These web sites offer a variety of resources for those who wish to develop or sustain such collaborations.

2. Although their particular focus was on better understanding pathways through which stressful environments and contexts can affect a range of health and functioning outcomes, this kind of multi-level modeling can be applied across a range of problems.

3. In the US, the initiation period, typically the first year of structured doctoral coursework, tends to focus on orienting students to their new roles as social work scholars, and providing them with a strong theoretical and methodological foundation for their later, more individualized programs of study. At the same time, the first year also presents opportunities for orienting students to developments in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and laying the foundations for a TD orientation. In the second and third years, framed in this model in terms of navigation, students tend to move outwards from a primarily disciplinary base to significant involvement in coursework in other disciplines. This, in turn, lays the foundation for work on their dissertations (as doctoral candidates) in the fourth year and beyond.

4. Examples of individualized development plan guidelines and formats can be found at Intersections of Mental Health Perspectives in Addictions Research Training: http://www.addictionsresearchtraining.ca/resources/forms.html, University of Wisconsin http://grad.wisc.edu/pd/idp, and University of Washington http://depts.washington.edu/gwach/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/PedsID_Individual-Development-Plan.pdf.