Interdisciplinary leadership as leading learning

1. Interdisciplinary leadership as leading learning Paul Blackmore Camille B. Kandiko King’s Learning Institute, King’s College London

2. Outline of presentation • Project and methodology • Defining disciplines and leadership • Leadership as leading learning • Findings • Conclusions

8. The project • Increasing calls for interdisciplinarity • But • Structural • Socio-cultural • Epistemological differences • Some leaders engage - why and how?

9. Methodology • Literature review • Ten in-depth semi-structured interviews of interdisciplinary leaders at KCL and Melbourne • Appreciative inquiry • why engage? • what works? • principles for effective practice

10. Practice: Interdisciplinarity as a situated, socially accomplished flow of organizational activity Practitioners: Skilled, knowledgeable actors inside and outside the university Practices: Administrative, discursive, episodic Framework • Jarzabkowski’s (2005) activity-based strategy as practice method

11. A discipline • “ any comparatively self-contained and isolated domain of human experience which possesses its own community of experts” • (Nissani, 1997) • Knowledge, methodology, community

12. Interdisciplinarity • “a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches” (Klein, 1990) • Requires integration

13. Leadership • Distributed and embedded in context • “much of the work of leading is contingent … it involves dealing with the specifics of a time, a place and a set of people” • (Knight & Trowler, 2001)

14. System level - funding • Difficulties writing interdisciplinary grants • Fitting interdisciplinary work into national assessment schemes (RAE in UK) • Challenges of aligning interdisciplinary work with national funding councils

15. Institution level - recognition • Issues with traditional discipline-based reward systems: • mode of publication: e.g. government report rather than journal article or book • location of publication: generalist rather than specialist journal • time frame: interdisciplinary work takes time to develop • publication in peer-reviewed journals using unfamiliar literatures A risky business best left till later?

16. Faculty, school, department level • Tribal academic disciplines • Administrative issues: • finance • course registration • time-tabling • computer systems • “It is quite difficult to teach interdisciplinary courses … with different timetables, for instance, or different habits, different expectations, different cultures, perhaps of contact, or different entry level requirements.”

17. Leadership as leading learning • “Learning takes place within communities of practice and activity systems that have their own sub-cultures and discursive repertoires” • Knight and Trowler (2001) on leadership at departmental level

18. Learning • Tacit (Polanyi, 1966) • Social (Bandura, 1977) • Situated (Lave & Wenger, 1991) • a “dialectical model of learning in which individual and context interact in critical ways…and…are mutually constitutive” (Lattuca, 2002)

19. Identity and power • The community “provides the language in which individuals understand themselves and interpret their world” • (Henkel, 2000) • Self identity “a reflexively organised endeavour … which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives” • (Giddens, 1991)

20. Habitus • “a system of shared dispositions and cognitive structures which generates perceptions, appreciations and actions” • (Bourdieu, 1988)

21. Foucault and power • Discipline is “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology" • (Foucault, 1977) • "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" • (Foucault, 1982)

22. Task Individual Team Adair (1984) on leadership

23. Learning Identity Disciplines Leading interdisciplinary learning

24. Broader purposes “How do you make democracy work in an age of science-mediated risk … it’s actually sitting at the biggest questions we face … how we manage expert knowledge in a democracy” “the practical application and the notion that my ideas are likely to be taken up quickly … is one of the things that appeals to me”

25. Intellectual possibilities • “other ways of understanding the world, which are powerful and which can help” • “demanding and more ambitious … – it’s a leadership challenge – a way of bringing a variety of perspectives together in a coherent organised fashion” • a “mental framework on which you can hang things … more things in far fewer tasks, with a simpler context” • “tremendously stimulating for yourself as a teacher or a writer, to be writing for a discipline other than your own”

26. Establishing relationships • “you talk to people and you engage with their arguments” • “respect other people who also bother to go into primary resources, primary materials, who can argue with contrary points of view without being immediately judgemental. … play the argument; don’t play the person” • “unconditional respect for the disciplines that the person represents … a real interest in their work, their proposal, what motivates them and the kinds of concerns that they express in regard to a collaboration”

27. Building a team • Collegial - crossing functional boundaries • “it’s about empowering them, to get those things running, and then … knitting those back together again” • they “worked in that area for intellectual rewards, academic rewards, so it needs a more democratic approach” • “I don’t necessarily lead them. I see myself as support staff. … I try to be as interactive as I can. I comment on the drafts. I go to meetings. I talk about issues” • You can all bring your expertise in, but at least you need to be running in the same direction … a matter of the co-ordination of people’s understandings”

28. Motivating others • Issues to deal with: • Individual researchers absorbed by their own individual projects. • Career preparation of faculty within a discipline • Research and professional bodies with their embedded interests • Interdisciplinarity not itself a driving force. • Is there a career interdisciplinarian? • Interest in the subject should be the driver

29. Techniques for interaction • “listen to different points of view, suggest syntheses and compromises, crisscross contributions and gain help from participants … to interact in ways that are not dysfunctional and disruptive…” • “…intellectual agility … commitment to the problem … a willingness to build flexibility into the process .. and to respect that people come to the interdisciplinary table because they are experts in a field” • “the willingness to compromise with other people … to accept uncertainty … to accept that you’re not going to be able to see the world in the same way”

30. Disciplinary differences? • “People from science will want to move towards the output thing, let’s get on with it, humanities people be willing more to engage in those conversations… and I see some impatience sometimes with the scientists”

31. Intellectual environment • Ensuring that each participating department has a representative • Balancing the views of small and large groups • Making space to review terminology - “precise language” not “jargon • Using a vocabulary that embraces a wide audience • Valuing alternative disciplinary views in articles

32. Physical environment • “… if you want research, the structure has to be flexible and informal … if we can sort out where to put the coffee rooms and the toilets, the rest will follow” • “a very impressive group … but we all disappear again, and nobody talks to one another … we’ve got so much knowledge here, but the co-ordination and managing of it, never mind the social or personal side, is quite dispersed”

33. Organisational environment • Importance of early training in enabling transfer potential • How safe to take a risk? • Research assessment disincentive • Institutional recognition

34. Learning Identity Individual Leading interdisciplinary learning Learning Purposes Possibilities Motivation Environment Engagement Identity – Influenced by discipline Career stage Recognition and reward Disciplines Epistemological Cultural Linguistic Political aspects

35. Acknowledgement • This study was funded in part through a grant from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.

36. References • Adair, J. (1984). The skills of leadership. Aldershot: Gower. • Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. • Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press. • Foucault, M. (1982). Afterword: The subject and power.  In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208-226). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. • Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. • Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity. • Henkel, M. (2000). Academic identities and policy change in higher education. London: Jessica Kingsley. • Jarzabkowski, P. (2005). Strategy as practice. London: Sage. • Klein, J. T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

37. References • Lattuca, L. (2002). Learning interdisciplinarity: Socio-cultural perspectives on academic work. Journal of Higher Education, 73(6), 711–739. • Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. • Nissani, M. (1997). Ten cheers for interdisciplinarity: The case for interdisciplinary knowledge and research. The Social Science Journal, 34(2), 201-216. • Knight, P. & Trowler, P. (2001). Departmental leadership in higher education: • New directions for communities of practice. Buckingham: Open University • Press. • Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. • Ramsden, P. (1998). Learning to lead in higher education. London: Routledge Falmer.