ABSTRACT
It was ten years ago that my colleagues and I fi rst wrote about ‘interdisciplinary’ doctoral education and supervision pedagogies (Manathunga, Lant and Mellick 2006). Although, as Klein (1996) emphasizes, ideas about interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity have been around since at least the 1930s, transdisciplinary doctoral education was still a relatively new phenomenon at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century. To emphasize this, we called our piece ‘Imagining an interdisciplinary pedagogy’. We reviewed a number of doctoral programs around the globe that claimed to be interdisciplinary and developed a number of ‘key dimensions of a potential interdisciplinary doctoral pedagogy’ including:
• relational, mediated, transformative and situated learning experiences; • intercultural knowledge and skill development; • enhancing candidates’ higher order thinking and metacognitive skills; • enhancing candidates’ epistemological understandings of their original
discipline. (Manathunga et al. 2006, 368)
We also suggested that there was a need to follow four principles:
• create spaces for interdisciplinary dialogue – relational; • engage in interdisciplinary interaction with others and with the texts and
tools of a number of disciplines – mediated; • synthesize disciplinary knowledges in order to produce original, creative
ideas and futures – transformative; • create personal, interpersonal and communal intellectual contexts conducive
to interdisciplinary exchange – situated. (Manathunga et al. 2006, 369)
If anything, the imperatives for transdisciplinary research and doctoral education have become even stronger in the last 10 years. This was especially brought home to me in my recent role as an external reviewer of an effective transdisciplinary Doctor of Social Science program in Canada. Increasingly, doctoral candidates
conduct research that moves across and between the university, industry, business, community and other sectors. The need for both supervisors and candidates to have excellent intercultural communication skills and knowledge in order to navigate the multitude of sub-cultures, discourses and languages associated with transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research (Manathunga 2009) has become even greater. All of these trends require supervisors who have high levels of epistemological fl exibility so that they may help their doctoral candidates to engage sensitively and equitably with diverse disciplinary, sectoral and cultural knowledge. These trends also mean that supervisors need effective teamwork skills in order to manage increasingly complex transdisciplinary supervision teams. Therefore, it is highly likely that recent insights into effective transcultural supervision pedagogies (Manathunga 2014) may also have resonance for the development of a refl exive approach to transdisciplinary doctoral education and supervision.
