For the second project of our course, you will work with a classmate(s) from a discipline different than your own to propose research to investigate and solve a problem shared by your two fields. Ideally, this will be an extension and application of the inquiry work you’ve already done, or it can be an entirely new interdisciplinary topic you are both interested in and speaks to both of your fields. You will propose a solution to your issue, drawing on the background literature from your disciplines to create a context for your reader, but focusing on the details of your solution.
First, you will draft and post a Team Agreement for completing the assignment and a Problem Statement (see Module Calendar for details) together and complete an Annotated Bibliography as you compile sources for your Research Proposal. Next, you will use feedback on the statement and your collected research to draft a longer Research Proposal that offers a solution to the problem you’ve identified through new research approaches.
This assignment brings to bear the strengths of your individual fields, but such problem-solving also has the opportunity to transcend the limitations of those fields in ways you have read about so far this semester. As Repko notes: “Today, interdisciplinary learning at all levels is far more common as there is growing recognition that it is needed to answer complex questions, solve complex problems, and gain coherent understanding of complex issues that are increasingly beyond the ability of any single discipline to address comprehensively or resolve adequately” (p. 3).
The primary component of this project is the Proposal Report. In this report you (and your partner) will describe the interdisciplinary problem you have chosen, its background and support in the research literature, your methods for solving the problem and why you chose those methods, any limitations of your approach, and the implications of your approach. Your Proposal Report should also be accompanied by an abstract of approximately 150 words.
Unit 2 is a logical extension of the disciplinary analysis you did in Unit 1 and the research work you have been doing since then. You’ve each gathered literature on your issue from within your disciplines, and now you are taking that knowledge about how your disciplines think and write about the problem and using those insights to blend together an interdisciplinary approach for new research on the issue. In short, you are proposing hypothetical research that draws upon the methods and findings of both disciplines. Ideally, this research will be a hybrid of your two disciplines. You, of course, will not actually carry out this research; instead, you offer new research ideas using transdisciplinary approaches to solve (or help solve) the problem. Proposing this research is the rhetorical challenge of Unit 2.
In terms of style and diction, this is where the audience analysis we have discussed this semester really comes into play. You need to employ the formal, scholarly conventions of language and tone from your disciplines and also account for assumed knowledge of sophisticated terms from each discipline.
