The new college prepares the ground for multidisciplinary research
by Suzy Frisch
Cultivating something extraordinary
When thinking about multidisciplinary research, Kyla Wahlstrom, director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, envisions a school classroom and all the players who typically get involved: students, parents, teachers, special education teachers, social workers, school psychologists, the principal, and other administrators.
The new College of Education and Human Development now includes programs to prepare and serve all the people in that classroom. That’s why it makes “total sense” for faculty from all of the college’s departments to investigate more avenues for collaborative and multidisciplinary research, Wahlstrom says.
“Education is an all-encompassing endeavor. It’s a natural that we would work together around issues having to do with children and learning and education and their families,” she says. “And that’s what I think is the beauty of bringing together [the Department of] Family Social Science, the School of Social Work, General College, and the College of Education and Human Development.”
As new and existing departments join together in the recast college, brought about through the University’s strategic repositioning, professors and administrators are working to cultivate research and teaching links among a large faculty with diverse specialties. The opportunities are vast, and the effort is of critical importance to both the college and the University. From President Robert Bruininks to Darlyne Bailey, the new dean of the college, “there is no priority higher,” says the summer’s interim dean, Terry Collins.
“We hope that people across the nine departments will come together in ways they haven’t been able to before. They will work with colleagues throughout the University on new answers to questions that we’ve all been struggling with for years,” Collins adds. “How can we help people in schools do their work better? How can we be of use to families in ways we haven’t been in the past? How can nine departments come together and be really, really good in ways we weren’t able to be really, really good in the past?”
Volumes of possibilities
The college’s new and existing faculty are brimming with ideas. Take Blong Xiong, an associate professor in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (PsTL), which holds most of the former General College’s programs. He is launching a research project that will evaluate school readiness programs and their effectiveness for Southeast Asian children. Xiong, who typically focuses his research on adolescents, wants to partner with other professors from the college who can add child development or early childhood education expertise.
“I’m excited about the possibility of having the opportunity to work across different departments, to look at different issues of interest. Mine would be school readiness for children,” says Xiong. “There is a lot of expertise in the college that I can tap into.”
The work of the new college will emphasize teaching and research that carries across the spectrum of human development, stretching from birth and early learning, to schooling and career development, and finally on to aging. Many professors in the college focus on individuals and families with unique needs, whether they are people with disabilities, families in crisis, at-risk youth, or those facing achievement gaps in school.
“The college is well set to be pivotal in the broad areas of children, youth, and family issues. That encompasses much of what we do,” says Richard Weinberg, director of the Center for Early Education and Development and professor of child development. “I’m very enthusiastic about the possibilities.”
Building on existing collaborations
Many faculty members are quick to note that the college already engages frequently in multidisciplinary research. Mary Jo Kane, director of the School of Kinesiology and executive director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, says that from its beginning, the Tucker Center has fostered a network of affiliated scholars and worked on research projects that bring together academics from varied backgrounds. The new format of the college only provides more opportunities for collaboration.
“The building blocks of kinesiology research—which has to do with people’s lifetime engagement in sport and physical activity and how that impacts their lives, from peer relationships to healthy aging—are a natural fit for working with the new units,” says Kane. “This just provides us a bigger platform to do the kinds of things we’ve always done. We couldn’t be happier to begin to form collaborative relationships with new college colleagues around teaching, research, and outreach.”
As Kane sees it, potential areas of new multidisciplinary research in kinesiology include projects surrounding exercise, health, and nutrition and how they impact young people as they develop peer relationships and self-esteem. Faculty from PsTL, social work, and family social science will provide interesting perspectives on these topics, she adds.
In fact, collaboration on a small scale already has begun between PsTL and the School of Kinesiology. Associate Professor Murray Jensen, who teaches general biology, human physiology, and anatomy courses in PsTL, needed a graduate student to help oversee his labs. He hired a kinesiology student who now receives funding from PsTL, helping kinesiology in vital student support. “That’s a very tangible, boots-on-the-ground example of interactions between the new units,” says Kane. The college’s new structure “opens the door for so many more relationships and collaborations.”
Similarly, Jan McCulloch, professor and chair of the Department of Family Social Science, says her department often is described as both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, meaning that people come from many different disciplines and unite their areas of expertise in research on families. As the department transitions into the new college, she says, faculty could develop future collaborations in the area of mental health in families, with family social science teaming up with social work or educational psychology on depression in youth, for example.
The area of diversity, multiculturalism, and the globalization of cultures also could have a lot of potential, says McCulloch: “There is synergy in working with families who might live here but have family in another place. How can we ensure that we increase students’ international experiences in the teaching, research, and learning arena? There could be collaboration with the existing departments from the former College of Education and Human Development who could work with us on that.”
And while McCulloch firmly believes in multidisciplinary research, having engaged in it throughout much of her career, she does want to make sure faculty aren’t rushed into projects. “Multidisciplinary situations can’t be forced. There has to be commitment from all partners in a project. Without that, projects aren’t successful,” she says.
As the various new entities adjust to a different location, the college and the University should instigate projects and create incentives for faculty to join them—not leaving all the work for creating multidisciplinary research to the faculty. That way, faculty can focus on their existing responsibilities of teaching, research, and outreach, adds McCulloch.
The newcomers
As a brand new department being built from a college structure, faculty and administrators from PsTL spent time this summer and fall meeting with various schools and departments from the former College of Education and Human Development. Sessions with the Department of Educational Psychology and the Department of Curriculum and Instruction helped all the faculty involved to discover where they match up on research topics and areas of focus, says Heidi Barajas, former chair of PsTL who was recently named associate dean for outreach and community engagement.
They found many places that faculty cross over, from curriculum and instruction’s emphasis on pedagogy to educational psychology’s concentration on urban education, access, and equity. As members of a department that focuses on postsecondary learning and bridging students from secondary education to college, PsTL faculty also will want to get involved with future teachers who are earning their licenses, Barajas says. That way they can work on developing the best teaching methods for preparing at-risk populations for college.
“There’s a natural fit between pre-service teaching folks and curriculum and instruction and with what we do here with pedagogy development,” says Barajas. “Many of us are working on universal instructional design—ways to give intellectual access to a diverse population.” She envisions another connection between the educational psychology faculty who focus on international education and PsTL, where many of the students are first-generation Americans.
Additionally, Barajas says faculty will probably take advantage of historic ties between PsTL and the School of Social Work. Members of both departments, including Barajas, worked together to develop a minor in social justice. Jean Quam, former director of the School of Social Work and senior associate dean for academic affairs and faculty development, says there is rich potential in carrying forward the social justice angle. Faculty from PsTL and social work could investigate disparities for children of color, whether it’s being overrepresented in the child welfare system or encountering the achievement gap in school.
“That’s a powerful area to look at,” Quam notes. “There is a good history with the Head Start program, that if low-income kids get some additional education and stimulation before they start kindergarten, they do as well as kids who get that in home or in the community. We could look at how to keep that going throughout school. What support can we offer families and kids? There are a lot of different models to research.”
The list goes on
Quam says the most productive multidisciplinary research will probably come from two areas of strength in the School of Social Work: violence prevention and child welfare.
The school has three centers that focus on violence prevention, and Quam believes her faculty could initiate multidisciplinary research regarding violence and its effect on children’s ability to learn. “We think children’s school performance goes down when there is violence in the family or the family is being disrupted,” she says. “That’s an area where we can contribute.”
In child welfare, multidisciplinary research is underway already between the School of Social Work and the other units in the new college. One example involves Elizabeth Lightfoot, assistant professor of social work, and researchers in the Institute on Community Integration. They are studying children with disabilities in the child welfare system and how they are treated. Quam envisions more collaborative research among social work faculty and others in child development, curriculum and instruction, or educational psychology.
In talking with social work students and alumni, Quam hears many comments about how social workers don’t toil in a vacuum after graduation. They often work closely with teachers, nurses, early childhood educators, parents, and others. So educating them from a social work perspective alone isn’t as useful as taking a holistic approach. The same goes for research, she adds. Looking at an issue from the point of view of only one discipline would turn out an answer that’s far from comprehensive.
As the new College of Education and Human Development adjusts to its structure, its leaders and faculty will be working on opening doors to foster more multidisciplinary research. “The really exciting and intellectually engaging research will require all of us to think about new ways to do that research,” says former Interim Dean Collins, “so that we get the best minds together to address the biggest problems and the best solutions.”