EMBeRS: A Best Practice for Enabling Interdisciplinary Learning, Synthesis and Convergence

Many of humanity's most pressing issues are socio-environmental, and as such, require a collaborative research process that includes researchers from different disciplines and potentially stakeholders with different perspectives. A key challenge in working on these problems is that the problem scope is typically unbounded, the issues are complex and interwoven, and relevant research can be framed in a multitude of ways depending on the expertise and interests of collaborators. This presentation will outline a best practice called EMBeRS (Employing Model-Based Reasoning in Socio-Environmental Synthesis) for facilitating collective learning in interdisciplinary research teams to generate integrated research frameworks. The NSF-funded EMBeRS method is based on a synthesis of learning, cognitive, and social theories to inform design of interdisciplinary research framing activities. This presentation will describe the EMBeRS method and its pilot application in a ten-day workshop for PhD students held in 2016 and 2017. The workshop facilitated students working in teams to formulate interdisciplinary research on water and agricultural systems. Evaluation data indicates that the workshop dramatically improved participants' transdisciplinary orientation and developed skills and competencies unavailable through their graduate programs.