Practical steps for using interdisciplinary educational research to enhance cultural awareness

ABSTRACT

This article adds to the dialogue on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, providing definitions and practical steps for using interdisciplinary educational research to enhance cultural awareness. Informed by a research study conducted by seven primary researchers situated in the U.K. and Kazakhstan, along with local partners, we sought to combine our varied disciplinary knowledge to examine the socio-educational topic of students’ well-being in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Through integrating disciplinary perspectives in particular from psychology, anthropology and sociology into educational research for a longitudinal study (2015–2017), we found enhanced cultural awareness relating to an expanded level of trust and strengthened socio-linguistic translations. The article provides practical steps with key examples from the study to demonstrate our process of utilizing interdisciplinary educational research. Findings suggest the challenges and potential of utilizing these practical steps for facilitating the move from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary educational research to enhance cultural awareness.

KEYWORDS:

• Interdisciplinary collaboration
• cultural awareness
• interdisciplinarity
• well-being
• educational research
• culture
• communication
• multidisciplinary

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the full research team for their contribution to this paper: Ros McLellan, Liz Winter, Carole Faucher, Daniel Hernández-Torrano, A.S. CohenMiller, Eva Brown-Hajdukova, Kairat Kurakbayev, Ainur Almukhambetova, Madina Tynybayeva, and Assel Batyrova. We would also like to thank the important work undertaken by researchers from Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the ‘Newton – Al-Farabi Partnership Programme, jointly funded by the U.K. Government and the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan,’ [Reference number 172734464]. The Newton – Al-Farabi Partnership Programme is coordinated by JSC Science Fund, for Kazakhstan, and the British Council, for the United Kingdom.