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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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Troubling Collaboration: Matters of Care for Visualization Design Study
A common research process in visualization is for visualization researchers to collaborate with domain experts to solve particular applied data problems. While there is existing guidance and expertise around how to structure collaborations to strengthen research contributions, there is comparatively little guidance on how to navigate the implications of, and power produced through the socio-technical entanglements of collaborations. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze reflective interviews of past participants of collaborations from multiple perspectives: visualization graduate students, visualization professors, and domain collaborators. We juxtapose the perspectives of these individuals, revealing tensions about the tools that are built and the relationships that are formed — a complex web of competing motivations. Through the lens of matters of care, we interpret this web, concluding with considerations that both trouble and necessitate reformation of current patterns around collaborative work in visualization design studies to promote more equitable, useful, and care-ful outcomes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1835904
- PAR ID:
- 10502114
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
- ISBN:
- 9781450394215
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Hamburg Germany
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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