There has been a recent push for greater collaboration across the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in discipline-based education research (DBER). The DBER fields are unique in that they require a deep understanding of both disciplinary content and educational research. DBER scholars are generally trained and hold professional positions in discipline-specific departments. The professional societies with which DBER scholars are most closely aligned are also often discipline specific. This frequently results in DBER researchers working in silos. At the same time, there are many cross-cutting issues across DBER research in higher education, and DBER researchers across disciplines can benefit greatly from cross-disciplinary collaborations. This report describes the Breaking Down Silos working meeting, which was a short, focused meeting intentionally designed to foster such collaborations. The focus of Breaking Down Silos was institutional transformation in STEM education, but we describe the ways the overall meeting design and structure could be a useful model for fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations around other research priorities of the DBER community. We describe our approach to meeting recruitment, premeeting work, and inclusive meeting design. We also highlight early outcomes from our perspective and the perspectives of the meeting participants.
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Community Roles for Supporting Emerging Education Researchers
DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager.
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- PAR ID:
- 10336267
- Editor(s):
- Bennett, Frank
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PERC Proceedings
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 172 to 177
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2021.pr.Hass
