SHAPE AND ENCOURAGE YOUR I INTERDISCIPLINARITY - Define your ways of working
Our experience: throughout our project we have remained focused on trying to make sense of how we work together, what creates our interdisciplinarity and what makes us unique. Trying to pin down these elements is incredibly difficult, so one approach we have used is to evaluate how we work together; from our style of meetings (informal, flexible, discussion based), to our favoured forms of communication (email primarily), to recognition of our core/periphery and the networks this provides us with. These, amongst other elements, help to define how we are interdisciplinary and what makes our project unique.
Why?
A vital part of being interdisciplinary is understanding how that interdisciplinarity is taking place. Otherwise, how are you going to be able to report on it during and after the project? One way of understanding your interdisciplinarity is to understand how you work together. This sits closely with the Talking about your interdisciplinarity section. This is about understanding the process of working together, as opposed to the output – what’s happening with the research.
As a team you need to try to answer the questions:
• What are you doing that is unique to your project?
• How do you work together?
Questions which may facilitate such as discussion include:
• Do you have a particular style of communication? Email? Face to face? Skype? How often?
• Do you have a particular style of meeting? Informal? Formal? Strict agenda? Written up meeting notes? Actions?
• Is there any particular language which is pertinent to your project? Acronyms, abbreviations, terms? (see Project vocabulary)
• Are there any methods or approaches which define your project? Maybe a hybrid combination of methods from different disciplines?
• Do certain disciplines/team members hold/perform certain roles?
• Do you have a core team? Is there a peripheral network of people attached to this?
• How do you evaluate your progress? Both in terms of interdisciplinarity and in terms of project success? (see Evaluate, reflect and change section).