“Translational Skills and Interdisciplinary Education” – SILT (Utrecht University)

Students with solid training in inter- and transdisciplinary programmes, tracks, or minors emerge as “integration experts” and bridge-builders between different academic communities, science, and society (Bammer 2020 et al.; Hoffman et al. 2020). During this session, we will collectively explore the more modest hypothesis of such students becoming also, or in part, “translation experts”. One possible road for students to become translation experts is through exposure to productive misunderstandings, i.e., by using such misunderstandings as discursive spaces generative of connective and integrative dialogue. The translation expert works across disciplinary divides and is interculturally sensitive. The question remains, however, of how to teach translational expertise when such expertise varies among the teachers who, themselves, are not translation experts. By visiting a set of cases of translation that are relevant to the TiM community, we will both reflect on translation expertise per se and strengthen our own translational/integrative muscles. These cases question the “inter” of interdisciplinary, human-computer interaction, and interspecies communication; the “trans” of transdisciplinarity; and learning from bad translations (like learning from errors).

Suggested reading 

• Gabriele Bammer et al. (2020). ‘Expertise in research integration and implementation for tackling complex problems: when is it needed, where can it be found and how can it be strengthened?’ Palgrave Communications 6 (5). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0380-0.pdf.
• Sabine Hoffman et al. (2020). ‘Integration experts: developing a new profession.’ INTEREACH Webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_-Ak-ezRso.

The session will be moderated by SILT (Subjects in Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching). 

SILT is one of the research themes of Transmission in Motion. The research group “SILT” borrows from and adds to the Scholarship of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning – “SoITL” – but also reflects on SoITL as a subject of research. This implies that interdisciplinarity is both practiced and studied—as both a buzzword and a practice. What can interdisciplinary teaching and learning bring to academic settings, students, and researchers today? What are the best practices of interdisciplinarity and what are their effects? How should the practices best look and why? How are practices of interdisciplinary teaching and learning entangled with (media) technological developments, and societal processes and challenges? The focus of the group is on interdisciplinarity as a complex theme in itself, a theme that is often mobilized for complexity. We study both students and teachers, and their situated relating.

This seminar is part of the Transmission in Motion seminar (2021-2022): “Practices of Translation”