Abstract
How can academicians who desire a sustainable future successfully participate in transdisciplinary projects? Transcending our hidden thought patterns is required. Paradoxically, the disciplinary specialization that enabled the industrial era and its metaphors now function to undermine our ability to recognize and participate in the transformational learning that is needed. In this paper, we offer a post-industrial era metaphor for transdisciplinarity—that of complex dynamic system—that has helped us to work through the unexpected experiences encountered in the process of transformative learning. These insights are based on an ongoing transdisciplinary research collaboration (2008–present) using action research methods; we focus on the faculty experience. Accepting the metaphors of complex systems, we describe the systemic conditions that seem to repeatedly reproduce the emergence of transformative learning for participants, as well as what one might expect to experience in the process. These experiences include: conflict, existential crisis, transformation and renewed vitality within the necessary context of a safe and caring community. Without the adoption of complexity metaphors, these elements would have been overlooked or interpreted as a hindrance to the work. These insights are intended to serve as socially robust knowledge to support the effective participation of faculty members in sustainability projects of a transdisciplinary nature.
Highlights
It is perhaps obvious that what academicians call “the real world” is characterized by dynamic complexity, with emergent challenges that cannot be addressed by the usual academic methods of reductionist science
We have found that an alternative metaphor—that of dynamic complex systems—offers a new frame from which to work with transdisciplinarity
If we had not shifted to viewing transdisciplinarity as a complex system, we would have concluded that these experiences were indicators of our inherent deficiency for doing the work
Summary
It is perhaps obvious that what academicians call “the real world” is characterized by dynamic complexity, with emergent challenges that cannot be addressed by the usual academic methods of reductionist science. Going further to include issues of social equity inherent to sustainability is likely to amplify the challenge by involving considerations of apparently conflicting social, environmental and economic needs [3] This requires the ability to collaboratively innovate sound decisions in the face of ambiguity, to manage paradox and emergent change. The current discourse on transdisciplinarity often draws on metaphors of “manufacturing” to describe transdisciplinary research, illustrated in phrases, such as: process, build, design, knowledge generation, knowledge products, solution-oriented transferable knowledge, prototypes and scaling-up (e.g., see [15,39]) Using these industrial era metaphors can inadvertently invoke associated value systems of efficiency, productivity, consumption, quality control, uniformity, economy of scale, profit margins and cost/benefit analysis. This example, apparently common in transdisciplinary sustainability efforts [40], illustrates that the values hidden in the industrial era metaphors are unconsciously replicated in the behavior, despite espoused commitments
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