Transdisciplinary Scholarship: Integrating Boyer’s Model of Scholarship with Transdisciplinary Research

Abstract

A recent article by Jahn et al. provided an excellent overview of transdisciplinarity, provided a framework for transdisciplinary research, and discussed challenges of transdisciplinarity. Some of these challenges are lessened if concepts of scholarship promoted by Earnest Boyer are incorporated into the framework of transdisciplinary research. This merger of transdisciplinary research with Boyer’s model of scholarship can be called transdisciplinary scholarship’. The goals of the current manuscript are to (1) provide a brief overview of Boyer’s Model of Scholarship, (2) integrate the Jahn et al. description of transdisciplinarity with Boyer’s Model of Scholarship, and (3) offer a strategy to address the major cognitive challenge that integration presents to transdisciplinarity. (4) I provide an example of transdisciplinary scholarship that I am conducting in Haiti. Finally, (5) the Jahn et al. definition of transdisciplinarity is tweaked by 1 word.