Successful collaboration requires effective communication. Differences in professional, disciplinary, or cultural background can create opportunities for innovative collaboration, but they also create challenges to free-flowing communication. What follows is an account of a collaborative effort to develop philosophical tools designed to help meet these challenges—tools
Researchers typically embark on interdisciplinarity after the acquisition of disciplinary expertise. This article explores the possibility of teaching interdiciplinarity to undergraduate students who have not yet mastered or are in the process of mastering a discipline or disciplines. It focuses on junior-year students in the
The “Values and Responsibility in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science” curriculum (http://eese.msu.edu/) is a modular resource designed to be implemented by environmental science instructors who have no ethics training for the purpose of guiding students through an analytic examination of the values and policy dimensions of their
Drawing on Pennock’s theory of scientific virtues, we are developing an alternative curriculum for training scientists in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) that emphasizes internal values rather than externally imposed rules. This approach focuses on the virtuous characteristics of scientists that lead to responsible
Background Critical interdisciplinary research skills include effective communication with diverse disciplines and cultivating collaborative relationships. Acquiring these skills during graduate education may foster future interdisciplinary research quality and productivity. Objective The project aim was to develop and evaluate an interactive Toolbox workshop approach within an interprofessional graduate level
Reflexivity is a complex phenomenon. In this chapter, we are primarily interested in reflex- ivity as a process of discovering for oneself and one’s audiences the perspectival features (e.g. background assumptions, social posi- tions, and biases) that shape one’s judgments, decisions, and behaviors. So understood,
The emerging literature on the challenges of cross-disciplinary research emphasizes the critical importance of effective communication to project success, but mechanisms for developing such communication remain scarce. This chapter presents one approach to improving communication in cross-disciplinary research teams—the Toolbox method, a dialogue method rooted
Translational behavioral medicine involves experts from different disciplines and professions interacting to solve complex problems. Coordinating this expertise can be frustrated by the partially tacit nature of expertise and by the various ways in which it manifests in different communities. We describe a method—the Toolbox
In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication.
Localization aims to adapt a product so that it feels “natural” to end-users in a target locale. This suggests that without localization, the product will feel foreign due to differences in knowledge — epistemic differences — between the source and target locales. These differences arise