Zen and the art of transdisciplinary postgraduate research: workshop resources
- Publisher:
- Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS
- Publication Type:
- Working Paper
- Issue Date:
- 2009-09
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Increasingly, researchers and research students are engaged in problems that
require approaches that transcend disciplines, at least in part because problems of
society are increasingly complex and interdependent and cannot be tackled
adequately from specific individual disciplines – in these realms, the whole must be
greater than the sum of the parts.
Supervising research students working in these ways brings particular challenges.
Prominent among these challenges is the question of how to recognise and ensure
quality in the processes and outputs of their labours when they are drawing on
disciplines, theories, and methodologies with deeply different ways of understanding
the world around us.
An ALTC Fellowship sought to shed light on both the summative criteria that might
be helpful for evaluating the outputs of such research – a thesis, papers, etc – as
well as the formative processes supervisors and students might use to engender
such criteria. These workshop resources are intended to provide a structured way in
to talking and learning about, and developing responses to, the quandaries in this
space. They are complemented by two resource documents – one focused on
quality criteria and another focused on ideas for good practice.
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