2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Responding to decades of calls for interdisciplinary scholars capable of addressing complex societal challenges [1], [2], [3], this conference paper addresses persistent gaps in interdisciplinary graduate education reform. Despite extensive research on transformational interdisciplinary graduate education, little change has been made in reshaping governing funding, policies, and program structures as well as disciplinary-based academic cultures [4], [5], [6]. Moreover, interdisciplinary graduate students, particularly those with STEM backgrounds, still grapple with scholarly identity formation and integration into interdisciplinary research communities [7], [8].

We argue a systems-based approach to evaluating and facilitating interdisciplinary graduate student development– drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) and spanning high- and low-consensus disciplines [9], [10], [11]– represents an important answer to calls for systems-based research on multifaceted systemic change across layers of academia [12], [13], [14]. We posit the persistence of challenges in interdisciplinary graduate education results – at least in part – from the primarily localized focus of previous research focusing on only a single domain (e.g., one academic department, only institutional academic policies, and not institutional culture, or on faculty experiences alone), one point in time, and through the lens of primarily sociocultural and cultural-historical perspectives despite calls for systems analyses. Typical research also focuses on learning outcomes, pathways, relationships, identities, and motivations separately (i.e., not as parts of systems or as multiple interrelated aspects of development more broadly) and passively (i.e., typically from the perspectives of faculty and not students themselves) [4], [15], [16], [17].

These research gaps have highlighted the need for systems-oriented research. To that end, this study used Ecological Systems Theory (EST) [9], [18] to examine how dimensions of graduate education interact to influence interdisciplinary students’ development across high- to low-consensus backgrounds. This research focused on a qualitative and longitudinal case study of systems influences on interdisciplinary graduate students’ development within an interdisciplinary program focused on disaster resilience (referred to as the IDR program throughout). We used a secondary dataset of 62 annual semi-structured interviews with 26 interdisciplinary graduate students across 5 years. A key point of analysis was considering differences between interdisciplinary graduate students’ developmental systems and experiences comparatively– specifically across high- (e.g. engineering) and low-consensus fields (e.g., social sciences). Our findings underscore challenges faced by interdisciplinary graduate students across the consensus spectrum and support the idea that interdisciplinary programs where researchers come from disciplinary departments face inherent limitations. This study extends Newswander & Borrego’s [19] argument that adding new interdisciplinary degree programs without considering existing organizational cultures and structures can lead to challenges in training interdisciplinary scholars; even in an established interdisciplinary program like IDR, developing interdisciplinary graduate students grapple with the influence of disciplinary microsystems– whether they were engineering or nonSTEM based, and often at the expense of their interdisciplinary work.