Facilitating Conversation Between Disciplines

The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) is a multi-year research and action project that supports university departments' efforts to more purposefully structure their doctoral programs. It works with selected departments in the fields of Education, History, Neuroscience, Chemistry, English, and Mathematics to foster discipline-based conceptual work and design experiments that lead to the education and preparation of "stewards of the discipline."

Indiana University School of Education CID Overview

Departments share their experiments and learn from each other during three summer convenings at the Carnegie Foundation and, sometimes, during disciplinary meetings. The first two summers involved discipline specific meetings and the third will be theme-based and interdisciplinary. The conversations conducted during the first two convenings have been invaluable, as teams from various universities discussed doctoral education in terms generally not discussed among university scholars and students. The departments shared their contexts, challenges, innovations, and exemplary practices and worked to define “steward” for each of their disciplines.

CID Research Director, Chris Golde and Project Director, George Walker integrated the KEEP Toolkit at the end of the second convening, in order to facilitate continued conversations among departments who are distantly located from each other. They felt that the attractive and easily shared versions of work produced by the KEEP Toolkit would help focus conversations and allow participating departments to borrow and build on one another’s findings. In order to decide what departments would need to make available to their peers and to develop shared understanding, CID directors asked themselves, “What do we want them to make explicit to themselves, to us, and to each other? How do we keep it short and readable? How do we keep our partners thinking of questions of assessment and evidence? How can we all talk about it such that it transcends disciplinary language?”

Indiana University School of Education Innovation

The answers to these questions led CID directors to include two snapshot templates in their project—one that described CID work including the context of each department and one that encouraged departments to describe each innovation it wanted to make as a step toward preparing a steward of their discipline. A third template- Exemplary Element Template-soon was added. Golde found that departments often expressed interest in on-going activities of other departments, so she proposed the third snapshot in which departments could exhibit some pre-existing exemplary activity or practice of their department. This allowed a certain amount of boasting for departments who wanted to share what they do well and an equal amount of borrowing from departments who saw how these practices addressed mutual challenges.

In order to guide CID departments toward creating rich descriptions of their collective work, innovations, and exemplary elements, CID directors developed templates for each of the planned snapshots. They considered CID goals of building on certain kinds of conversations and of representing collective work to develop the easy to follow templates. CID directors discussed and revised the templates with other colleagues through more than five rounds. Their final templates became thought provoking guides that met their goals: using language that transcended the language of educational study, reflecting the deep concerns of educational transformation, and in a format that displayed clearly on a web-based platform. Every box on each template provided concrete instructions on how to respond to each question.

Indiana University School of Education Exemplary Element

Debora Hinderliter of Indiana University’s School of Education shared her department’s efforts. Within her team, Hinderliter used the snapshot to reflect on-going discussions and separate conversations, knowing she could easily and quickly make additions and edits. The drafts of snapshots she shared with her team thus displayed the results of conversations with different members, as she carefully represented the team’s ideas. Giving stimulating feedback quickly increased the conversations among Indiana’s CID team and helped Hinderliter keep her team focused.

Hinderliter noted that the template prompts were “helpful for focusing our work and focusing the questions we needed to ask [of ourselves]…When you’re in the middle of changing [policies], you forget why you started doing this. The questions in the template point you back to where you began: This what we’re thinking about and how we’re thinking about it. This is where we were and where we’re going.”

In order to facilitate sharing and conversation among CID participants, CID directors worked with the Knowledge Media Lab to create a digital gallery of CID snapshots. Snapshots are added to the gallery as CID departments send their completed snapshots to the CID team. Currently, only CID departments can browse this gallery, which gives each department a sense of security about making public both positive and challenging aspects of their work. The gallery is arranged by discipline and institutions and provides easy access to the community's snapshots to the community's members.

The CID will continue to use the KEEP Toolkit to help its departments make their work and findings public, examinable, and capable of being built upon. In the summer of 2005, the project will convene three multidisciplinary groups, which will focus on three different areas of innovation. The CID expects to create new templates to support these areas of focus such that during each convening, groups will be able to share their KEEP Toolkit produced products with convening participants. The information shared in the snapshots will be used as a basis to build new understandings during the convening as well as be available to those participating departments who attend other convenings.