Imagining just futures through interdisciplinary pedagogies: cultivating communities of practice across the sciences and humanities

1 Introduction

This case study describes an ongoing effort at James Madison University (JMU) to support interdisciplinary collaborative pedagogical development to engage students in exploring issues of ethics and justice related to science and technology.^[1] For context, JMU is a public university in a rural area of Virginia in the United States that was recently categorized as R2 within the Carnegie Classification system, indicating high research activity. Yet it is primarily an undergraduate institution, with a little over 21,000 undergraduate students in Fall 2023, an average student/faculty ratio of 17:1, an average class size of 25 students, and approximately 98 % of classes taught by professors.^[2]

As part of a larger multi-institutional effort funded by a collaborative National Science Foundation grant,^[3] the co-authors here came together in the Fall of 2021 to participate in a series of workshops aimed at developing interactional competence between faculty in social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields by focusing on critical Science, Technology, and Society (STS) pedagogies. Interactional competence refers to having sufficient knowledge to become conversational and to engage with somebody in another field around social and ethical questions (Conley and Fisher 2019).

STS, which also stands for Science and Technology Studies, is a highly interdisciplinary field itself that broadly draws on social science and humanities approaches to examine science, technology, and knowledge production. STS pedagogies, particularly at the undergraduate level, often bring various STS concepts, frameworks, and practices to bear to engage the social, ethical, political, and legal dimensions of science and technology. These often include but are not limited to some core ideas, only a few of which are articulated here: that artifacts have politics (Winner 1986); that science is social (Fleck 1979; Kuhn 1970; Latour 1987) and not value neutral (Haraway 1988; Harding 1993); that technological development is highly contingent (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Pinch and Bijker 2012; Wyatt 2008); and that to study sociotechnical systems requires attention to power dynamics and both material and discursive dimensions (Barad 2007; Haraway 1989).^[4] STS pedagogies can be found not only within STS programs but often in engineering, design, computer science, sociology, history, anthropology, geography, communication, and other disciplinary and curricular settings.^[5] Within STEM education contexts, STS-informed pedagogies often support learning objectives related to critical thinking, human-centered design, stakeholder engagement, communication, public interest technology, and ethics.

The grant was designed to support the iterative development and evaluation of a framework for using STS pedagogies to forge new communities of practice across the humanities and sciences. Here, we focus on specific practices and results of the JMU implementation. By ‘community of practice’ we are drawing on Lave and Wenger’s attention to the relationship between community and knowledge, and particularly their argument that a community of practice involves more than technical knowledge and skill, constituting “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991, p. 98). Indeed, the co-authors of this case study, all part of the JMU implementation, came to understand themselves as an interdisciplinary community of practice that is well-positioned to continue developing ethically engaged STS-inflected pedagogies across the curriculum. How did this occur and why does it matter?

Following a brief rationale for supporting interdisciplinary, collaborative pedagogical development and the details of the workshop implementation, faculty participants share individual vignettes through which readers will learn: 1) What motivated them to participate? 2) How did they come to recognize and value the collaborative group as a community of practice? 3) What did this community of practice afford for their pedagogical development and professional and personal growth? 4) What are their key insights with respect to cultivating such communities?

The authors will conclude with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges of cultivating such interdisciplinary collaboration and pedagogy at JMU, with an eye toward providing situated but relevant takeaways for establishing such programs in other institutional contexts.

2 Rationale

Students need basic understanding and core competencies related to science and technology, and particularly related questions of ethics and justice, regardless of their majors. While general education programs typically aim to introduce students to concepts and methods in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, these are often taught quite separately by faculty who have expertise in their particular fields. Yet students need exposure to thinking holistically across these disciplinary frames in order to practice engaged citizenship in a democracy and address complex 21st century problems (Stoller 2020).

Collaborative teaching provides one avenue for integrating expertise across disciplines to support interdisciplinary pedagogies. Yet it is notoriously challenging to achieve effective and sustainable interdisciplinary collaborative teaching arrangements at both a personal level (Di Giulio and Defila 2017) and in relation to institutional structures that struggle to accommodate faculty teaching outside their departments or to provide full teaching credit for a co-taught class (Holley 2019).

What if faculty could learn from each other, collaboratively develop mutually informed pedagogies, and form a community of practice to support ongoing work toward more integrated pedagogies that engage the social and ethical dimensions of science and technology? We suggest that creating the infrastructure to support cultivating small teaching communities of practice that span STEM, humanities, and social science fields can partially address the needs outlined here. Such a community of practice can then collaboratively work to create interdisciplinary pedagogies, resulting in integrated curricula implemented both “within and across disciplines” (Cheek 2021, p. 14), and the reconfiguration of “the educational space as a site for pluralist/transdisciplinary dialogue” (Burnard et al. 2022, p. 168). In the classroom, each member of this community of practice is teaching by herself. But she enters the classroom informed and supported by the community, with new resources, insights, methods, materials, and grounding in a diverse set of perspectives.

3 Implementation

This framework for developing an interdisciplinary community of practice has four key elements: 1) There is a shared ethics- or justice-related theme that draws faculty together from fields that span various STEM disciplines as well as those in the humanities and/or social sciences; 2) Undergraduate students participate as collaborators; 3) STS theories, practices, and pedagogies serve to bridge and orient faculty toward each other; 4) There is a focus on developing new pedagogies informed by STS and by the collective participants’ disciplinary and teaching expertise, with no one field set up to merely serve the needs of the other.^[6]

Our shared theme was “Imagining Just Futures in Relation to Science, Technology, and Society.” The Co-PIs of the grant who are trained in STS – York and Conley – issued a call for four faculty to participate. In selecting participants they ensured that at least two taught in science or engineering fields and two in humanities or social science fields, that participants had identified a spring course they were scheduled to teach in which they would be willing to integrate new material related to the theme, and that they committed to attending the workshops. Within those constraints, York and Conley prioritized identifying a group whose spring teaching plans suggested potential for a vibrant exchange of ideas.

The resulting faculty cohort (co-authors of this paper) represented departments of Biology, Justice Studies, World Languages and Cultures, and the School of Integrated Sciences. The courses they were teaching included, respectively, a General Education course on Contemporary Topics in Biology; an upper level course on Disability and Justice; a General Education literature course on the topic of Humans, Animals, and Machines; and an interdisciplinary course on Global Infectious Diseases. Each faculty member was able to recruit an undergraduate student as well, for a total of nine students who were paid as research assistants. York and Conley trained the students to co-facilitate four 2.5-h hybrid workshops with faculty that were designed to cultivate interactional competence and introduce STS pedagogies. Two final hybrid meetings with faculty provided an opportunity to workshop new course module designs with each other.

The first two workshops used Juicy Words and a modified Sociotechnical Integration Research (STIR) protocol to identify points of connection between faculty courses. Juicy Words is a pedagogical technique developed by Conley that asks students to identify words, phrases, and/or passages in a text that elicit a personal response. The aim is to facilitate students’ attention to text and to spark their own intellectual curiosity. ‘Juicy’ is purposefully humorous and abstract; it suggests that there isn’t a right or wrong answer and the reader should attend to their own feelings, whether they be surprise, interest, anger, etc. In the workshops, students identified words and phrases from the faculty members’ syllabi and selected readings to invite broader discussion and elaboration of different disciplinary jargon and perspectives. STIR is a protocol designed to support “midstream modulation,” a method through which social scientists facilitate reflexive engagement with values and ethics in everyday decision-making that occurs in STEM practices (Fisher et al. 2015). Adapted for this workshop by Conley and York, students identified opportunities for topics that might arise at the intersection of each course and that could potentially be suitable for a new module; led conversations then about alternative ideas for modules; facilitated discussion about considerations to explore concerning these different ideas; and finally guided faculty toward a tentative decision about a topic to continue exploring together.

In the second and third workshops, students led faculty in doing Creative Anticipatory Ethical Reasoning (CAER) to collaboratively imagine just futures in relation to the selected topics of genetic editing and robotics, with each topic approached from both social and technical perspectives. CAER is a pedagogical approach developed by York and Conley that draws on scenario analysis, design fiction, and ethical reasoning frameworks to support hands-on and robust engagement with STS concepts and practices (York and Conley 2020). In the fourth workshop, students developed and presented key STS concepts (or concepts taken up in STS) to the participating faculty. Working with York and Conley, the students selected the particular concepts as ones that both resonated with themselves and that they thought would be particularly relevant to the faculty in their teaching. These included technoableism (Shew 2020), standpoint theory (Harding 1993), and design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020), among others.

In the spring semester, faculty integrated their new pedagogies into their spring classes. In most cases, one or more other faculty participants and student research assistants were able to observe the implementation. Finally, we collectively reflected on the experiences of the workshops and the pedagogical outcomes.

4 Faculty perspectives

5 Discussion

The complex opportunities and challenges that our graduating students will encounter increasingly require holistic and integrated perspectives that cut across knowledges and methods in the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields. Yet, to support such pedagogies across the curriculum, institutions of higher education need to provide the infrastructure for faculty to work together in a meaningful and sustained way. Our experience at JMU notwithstanding, the observation that “while interdisciplinarity in principle is accepted, in everyday practices on campus it is the disciplines that count” (Sørensen and Traweek 2022, 180) still resonates.

What we are proposing here builds on but exceeds one-to-many faculty professional development opportunities, where faculty might attend a workshop to learn a technique or tool. Here, the STS faculty who convened the workshops provided one kind of expertise related to STS pedagogies and STS methods for building interdisciplinarity. But each of the other participants also contributed knowledge and expertise that were essential to the cultivation of a community of practice that could support truly interdisciplinary pedagogies that were accessible and appropriate for very different courses. Moreover, the knowledge and expertise that each brought was not merely transferred from one to the other. Rather, through our extended engagement we had the opportunity to teach and learn together, challenging each other’s and our own disciplinary dogmas.

This included learning from the undergraduate student participants, whose co-facilitation helped faculty to explore new concepts and practices in ways that were not steeped in jargon. Students also contributed their insights and affective responses to STS concepts and to various approaches to teaching and learning.^[7]

To highlight several insights shared above, doing this work effectively required a shared ‘matter of concern’ articulated here as the theme; participants’ interest in and commitment to interdisciplinarity; collaborative space and time coupled with thoughtful design and reflexive practices to cultivate caring relationships that were in turn necessary to build trust; and a design that worked with the regular challenges of scheduling and workloads to ensure that faculty could participate without it being just one more burden or obligation.

While this case reveals the power of individual investment in collaboration, there is also a need for increased institutional investment, systemic changes, and infrastructure that supports interdisciplinary collaborations. At many institutions, competition for resources fuels territoriality that challenges connection. Sørensen and Traweek note that “at most universities interdisciplinarity work cannot rely on the stable institutional infrastructure that would support those engagements” and that “confining interdisciplinarity to discretionary resource allocation severely undermines it” (2022, 181). Creating structures that are supported by the institution, potentially through centers for teaching and learning, would help ensure that such opportunities become part of the culture–not just exceptions that happen in extraordinary circumstances.

Indeed, as our grant ends, our own ongoing efforts are constrained by working within the norms of heavy teaching and service loads and disciplinary and departmental siloing. We are currently exploring a layered approach that involves leveraging resources from our Center for Faculty Innovation to support regular meetings of a faculty interest group; developing a course structure hosted through the STS Futures Lab to support student involvement in facilitating workshops with members of the faculty interest group through which students would learn skills in STS, group facilitation, qualitative methods, and communication; and a proposal to create an instance of an existing upper-level general education course focused on critical thinking that a community of practice like ours could co-develop and then rotate through as individual instructors.

This case study outlines a framework and rationale for developing interdisciplinary communities of practice across the sciences and humanities to support integrated STS-inflected pedagogies related to ethics and justice. Such pedagogies can be informed by the community, but taken up and implemented in discipline-appropriate ways for different STEM, social science, and humanities classes. The framework necessarily needs to be adapted to each institutional setting, with specifics depending on faculty interest in pedagogy and the shared theme; participants’ areas of expertise, including the knowledges and skills of whomever is inspired to organize and facilitate the initiative (who may or may not identify with STS specifically); the institution’s existing dynamics with respect to siloing, interdisciplinarity, and teaching loads; and individual capacities with respect to time and labor.

For us, this work is difficult and takes time and care, and it is also deeply rewarding. We value the opportunity to be in collaboration and to have thought partners across the institution as we imagine just futures with each other and with our students.