Project Abstract
To address the burgeoning challenges to sustain and enhance life on earth through smart use and management of natural resources and to proactively respond to the corresponding rapid changes within and beyond the energy and environmental fields, future researchers and workforce personnel will require transdisciplinary research abilities with a broad understanding of the dynamic relationships across natural, social, and engineering systems. This National Science Foundation Innovations of Graduate Education (IGE) award to Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) will pilot and test transformative approaches to develop and improve engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research that helps reach sustainable solutions respecting the interdependence of natural, social, and engineering systems on local and trans-local scales that resonate globally. This project will bring together researchers and graduate students from different fields of study to share spaces, conversations, analyses, scholarship, research approaches, methods, questions, and solutions through workshops and service learning projects.
This project titled IGE: Transdisciplinary Research in Graduate Engineering Education (TREE) will create and offer workshop-based thematic modular units in three thrust competencies (intercultural competence, community-engaged practice, and qualitative and quantitative mixed research methods) and an operationalized service learning component. The TREE project will search for multi-scalar answers to two major research questions: 1) Are the thrust competencies workshops and thematic modular units taught in the workshops able to effectively and efficiently develop and improve engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research? 2) Is the operationalization of these principles through collaborative service learning projects able to effectively and efficiently further enhance engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research? The project will provide new educational opportunities to graduate students who will be engaged with local communities, sketching and running simulations on initial, medial, and final stages of dominant and subordinate processes in search of sustainable solutions. Such collaborations will not only support transdisciplinary thinking and problem solving but also the co-construction and soft assembly of complex solutions that value the inputs across disciplines and individuals who bring multicultural insight to the decision-making table. It will impact students, communities, and the ways they think about knowledge to achieve ecologically and humanly sustainable solutions. Moreover, it will lead to the design of scalable and transformative approaches based on thematic modular units and service learning, which will be shared via a well-structured dissemination plan to be adopted by and used to guide other STEM graduate programs at TAMUK and across the nation.
This project titled IGE: Transdisciplinary Research in Graduate Engineering Education (TREE) will create and offer workshop-based thematic modular units in three thrust competencies (intercultural competence, community-engaged practice, and qualitative and quantitative mixed research methods) and an operationalized service learning component. The TREE project will search for multi-scalar answers to two major research questions: 1) Are the thrust competencies workshops and thematic modular units taught in the workshops able to effectively and efficiently develop and improve engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research? 2) Is the operationalization of these principles through collaborative service learning projects able to effectively and efficiently further enhance engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research? The project will provide new educational opportunities to graduate students who will be engaged with local communities, sketching and running simulations on initial, medial, and final stages of dominant and subordinate processes in search of sustainable solutions. Such collaborations will not only support transdisciplinary thinking and problem solving but also the co-construction and soft assembly of complex solutions that value the inputs across disciplines and individuals who bring multicultural insight to the decision-making table. It will impact students, communities, and the ways they think about knowledge to achieve ecologically and humanly sustainable solutions. Moreover, it will lead to the design of scalable and transformative approaches based on thematic modular units and service learning, which will be shared via a well-structured dissemination plan to be adopted by and used to guide other STEM graduate programs at TAMUK and across the nation.