Team Leadership and Transdisciplinary Team Implications

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: Transdisciplinary Team Research: Co-Constructing Partnerships and Strategies to Explore Professions Education Research Problems (Table 19)

Abstract

Transdisciplinary health professions education research can provide empirical evidence to improve teaching and learning across health professions education (HPE) disciplines. Because of the interprofessionality of HPE, it follows that inteprofessional teams are needed to explore research problems. A transdisciplinary team from six US higher education institutions explored the challenges students and faculty across disciplines faced in the rapid transition to online learning. In this presentation, we will combine a transdisciplinary research framework with social constructivist theory to gain an understanding of the leadership and team workings that led to successful research outcomes.
Rosenfield’s taxonomy of collaborative research identifies multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research where multidisciplinary researchers from different fields work in parallel to address a common problem; however, these researchers each view the problem from their discipline’s point of view (1992). Interdisciplinary researchers collaborate but still maintain a discipline specific point of view. While transdisciplinary researchers work jointly, using shared frameworks to identify and explore a problem. Transdisciplinary collaboration requires the use of perspectives and skills of the researchers to synthesize methods and develop cross-disciplinary language (Rosenfield, 1992; Tobi & Kampen, 2018). The transdisciplinary team highlighted in this session shared a common goal that was developed through discussion and review of the literature and was at the center of the process rather than the diversity of their respective backgrounds (Kumar, 1999).
“This research project will explore the impacts of the transition to online teaching modalities during the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty and students of health professions education programs. Data gathered will explore the experiences of faculty and students who utilized various online modalities examining participants’ self-efficacy with online tools, attitudes about online learning, and the factors impacting teaching and learning throughout the pandemic”.
Research teams require highly skilled, enthusiastic leadership to promote cooperation with the leader articulating the vision, establishing direction, and setting clear strategies (Stokols, 2006; West et al., 2019). By combining the transdisciplinary framework with social constructivist theory, we can consider how knowledge was constructed through interactions of the transdisciplinary team leading to the construction of new meaning. These collaborations enabled learning among researchers with interactions and relationships being central to co-constructing knowledge (Lattuca & Creamer, 2005).
The initial team development and leadership process included: researcher recruitment, identification of the research project and framework, and identification of team member strengths. This led to identification of multiple leaders who were responsible for different tasks. Sub-groups of the team were developed based on researcher strengths and project needs: literature review, IRB proposal writing, and scale development. This presentation will provide details about accomplishment of each task and how the team research model was managed. Scholars of all levels can use this model as they identify scholarly opportunities and collaborate with colleagues from different disciplines who will challenge them intellectually and scholarly (McGaghie, 2009).

Authors

• Peggy Gesing, Eastern Virginia Medical School
  Presenting Author

• Yuane Jia, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Violet Kulo, University of Maryland - Baltimore
  Presenting Author