Beyond barriers and supports: A systems interaction analysis of how microsystems work together to shape interdisciplinary development in engineering graduate education
Margaret E. B. Webb, Marie C. Paretti, Holly M. Matusovich, Lisa D. McNair, Robert WeissAbstract
Background
Interdisciplinary graduate education (IGE) operates through an ecosystem of departments, disciplines, expectations, and responsibilities. Within IGE, despite decades of policy initiatives and millions of dollars invested, engineering graduate students continue to struggle with developing and maintaining interdisciplinary identities and motivation. These struggles suggest the need to move beyond isolated programmatic interventions and employ systems‐level approaches to understand IGE.
Purpose/Hypothesis(es)
This study employs Ecological Systems Theory to examine how salient microsystems interact to shape engineering graduate students' experiences of IGE through proximal (i.e., what students directly encounter within settings) and distal (i.e., influences from settings students did not inhabit) processes. Specifically, we ask how IGE microsystem interactions shape students' identity‐based motivation.
Design/Method
This study is the third phase of a longitudinal qualitative case study of a US National Science Foundation‐funded interdisciplinary program. We analyzed interviews with eight engineering graduate students and six program faculty to identify microsystem interactions and characterize their impacts on students' motivation using deductive coding, pattern coding, and visualization techniques.
Results
We identified four primary microsystem interaction patterns that involve both proximal and distal processes of development: Supportive Reinforcements, Compounded Barriers, Negotiation‐Intensive Contradictions, and Transformative Tensions. Notably, we found interactions occurred across time, with both past and future microsystems impacting present experiences. Similarly, interactions often had cascading impacts across multiple microsystems.
Conclusions
Because of interactions across microsystems, sustainable change in IGE requires coordinated action across multiple stakeholders to strategically align system functions, identify leverage points at generative interactions, and develop networked resilience spanning institutional and external partnerships.