From Interdisciplinarity to Multidisciplinarity in Critical Education Research: Complexity at Every Level

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Collaborations to (Re)Imagine Critical Studies in Education: Working Towards New Visions for Education Research

Abstract

Our urgent era, one marked by existential environmental and sociopolitical threats, requires innovative research methods and approaches to graduate education in response. This paper offers a theoretical contribution to the session’s foci through an embrace of multidisciplinarity in educational research methods, topics, and data collection. Where interdisciplinarity ossifies distinctions and differences among disciplines, multidisciplinarity acknowledges and seeks to leverage the porosity of disciplinary borders toward transformational ends. Applied to methodology, multidisciplinarity questions hegemonic epistemologies positioned as “objective” and instead asks how research can be done in ways that resist authoritarian pressures in service of addressing wicked problems. Taking a cue from environmental studies, multidisciplinarity invites critical education researchers to embrace “complexity at every level” (Schlanger, 2023) of the educational ecosystem. This paper explores how such an approach can benefit graduate researchers by examining the author’s own work to expand literacy research—an historically siloed subdiscipline—to address democratic education and intersectional climate justice in the context of a graduate program. In so doing, a new vision for education research is presented.

Author

• Jessica Masterson, Washington State University - Vancouver