Ways of Knowing and Becoming: Learning Together in a Graduate Course on Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Developing as a scholar is a critical aspect of graduate school. In this article, we use an autoethnographic approach to explore our experiences in a newly redeveloped interdisciplinary graduate course. The course was designed to emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship and to encourage students’ awareness of their own developing epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments. In this paper, we identify themes that arose from the final class paper, in which the students/researchers reflected on our development as emerging scholars. Through this course we developed an understanding of the value of interdisciplinarity, the cultural embeddedness of knowledge, and our own responsibilities as researchers in relation to social structures of power and marginalization. Our analyses of our experiences suggests that reflections on our own positionality and axiology are important for developing our identities as emerging scholars and that becoming a scholar may be more about the process than an end goal. We conclude with a discussion of how our learning in this course may be relevant for other instructors and emerging scholars.

Keywords

• interdisplinary
• graduate teaching
• critical perspectives
• Indigenous ways of knowing
• axiology