Transdisciplinary Research in Graduate Engineering Education

Society faces burgeoning challenges to sustain and enhance life on earth. Smart use and management of natural resources plus proactive responses to the corresponding rapid changes within and beyond the energy and environmental fields hold promise for society to act. But such action requires future professionals equipped with transdisciplinary research abilities coupled to a broad understanding of dynamic relationships across natural, social, and engineering systems.

This NSF Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) will pilot and test transformative approaches to develop and improve engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research. This research is needed to reach sustainable solutions respecting the interdependence of natural, social, and engineering systems on local and trans-local scales that resonate globally.

This project brings researchers and graduate students from different fields of study to share spaces, conversations, analyses, scholarship, research approaches, methods, questions, and solutions through workshops and service learning projects.

This project, "Transdisciplinary Research in Graduate Engineering Education (TREE)," will create and offer workshop-based thematic modular units in three thrust competencies (intercultural competence, community-engaged practice, and qualitative and quantitative mixed research methods) and an operationalized service learning component. The TREE project will search for multi-scalar answers to two primary research questions: 1) Are the thrust competencies workshops and thematic modular units taught in the workshops able to effectively and efficiently develop and improve engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research? 2) Can the operationalization of these principles through collaborative service learning projects effectively and efficiently enhance engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research?

The project will provide new educational opportunities to graduate students engaged with local communities, sketching and running simulations on initial, medial, and final stages of dominant and subordinate processes in search of sustainable solutions. Such collaborations will support transdisciplinary thinking and problem solving and the co-construction and soft assembly of complex solutions that value the inputs across disciplines and individuals who bring multicultural insight to the decision-making table.

It will impact students, communities, and how they think about knowledge to achieve ecologically and humanly sustainable solutions. Moreover, it will lead to the design of scalable and transformative approaches based on thematic modular units and service learning, which will be shared via a well-structured dissemination plan to be adopted and used to guide other STEM graduate programs at TAMUK and across the nation.

The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.