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By integrating the insights of academic researchers and stakeholders from outside the academy, transdisciplinary research promises to help address complex challenges that threaten the safety and well-being of people the world over. This promise has led to the development of systematic efforts to train graduate students to conduct transdisciplinary research, and there is increasing interest in transdisciplinary education in the graduate training literature. This article discusses the promotion of integrative ability in transdisciplinary graduate students, focusing specifically on an educational approach that fostered transdisciplinary skills in a complex, transdisciplinary, international and multi-year project dealing with invasive alien woody plant species in eastern Africa, the “Woody Weeds” Project. Graduate students in the project were expected to collaborate with each other, with senior scientists, and with stakeholders in several work packages to conduct research addressing the project’s goals. Research success required integrating perspectives across many differences, including different disciplines, institutions, languages, nations, and cultures. The Woody Weeds graduate student training program was designed to help students meet integration challenges across these categories of difference. Using the Woody Weeds training program as a framework, we offer a set of ideas for others interested in designing programs that can produce graduate students capable of conducting international, transdisciplinary research by fostering the integrative consciousness of individual students and the integrative capacity of student teams. We critically assess the extent to which the training program enhanced integrative ability using interviews with participants, outputs of the project, and the author team’s experiences. 

Abstract The importance of interdisciplinary approaches for research and education in environmental studies and sciences is well known. Integration of the multiple disciplinary approaches taught in separate courses required within these undergraduate majors and minors, however, remains a challenge. Program faculty often come from different departments and do not have time or space to integrate their own approaches with each other, resulting in individual ways of understanding interdisciplinarity. Secondly, senior capstone, thesis, or other project-based degree requirements often come too late in an undergraduate education to design an integrative project. Students would benefit from prior training in identifying complementary or divergent approaches and insights among academic specializations—a skill built from raising interdisciplinary consciousness. We present a workshop designed to enhance undergraduates’ interdisciplinary consciousness that can be easily deployed within courses or co-curricular programs, specifically summer research programs that are focused on dedicated practice within a field of study. The central question of this project is: How do we facilitate interdisciplinary consciousness and assess its impact on our students? We propose a promising, dialogue-based intervention that can be easily replicated. This dialogue would benefit academic programs like environmental studies and sciences that require the interaction and integration of discipline-based norms. We found that our dialogue intervention opens students’ perspectives on the nature of research, who research is for, epistemological differences, and the importance of practicing the research process, a unique educational experience. These perspectives are crucial to becoming collaborative, twenty-first century professionals. 

Despite institutional efforts, growth in the number of faculty of color has largely plateaued, limiting research innovation and other benefits of diversity. In this article, we seek to understand structural barriers to faculty equity by (a) detailing a theory of epistemic exclusion within academia and (b) applying the theory of epistemic exclusion to the specific context of faculty departmental reviews of scholarly research (e.g., annual review, promotion and tenure review). Epistemic exclusion is a form of scholarly devaluation that is rooted in disciplinary biases about the qualities of rigorous research and identity-based biases about the competence of marginalized group members. These biases work in tandem to systemically and disproportionately exclude marginalized scholars (e.g., people of color, women) from the academy. In the context of faculty departmental reviews, epistemic exclusion can happen in formal systems of evaluation through criteria, metric, and application exclusion. It can also occur informally during interpersonal interactions and communications through legitimacy, contribution, and comprehension exclusion. In this article, we detail each of these types of exclusion, how they may interact with each other, and their consequences. We assert that epistemic exclusion threatens the diversification of academia and offer suggestions for equitable evaluation practices and reducing epistemic exclusion within higher education broadly.