The title of my First-Year Seminar was “What Is a Discipline?”. While my Writing 5 sought to examine learning on the individual-level, my First-Year Seminar focused on how disciplines shape and are shaped by the ways we make knowledge and communicate with each other in academia. In addition to examining how academic disciplines are practiced and maintained, we crafted and completed a term-long research project that studied a community of disciplinary writers at Dartmouth College.
For the second phase of the project, we were asked to respond to craft an Introduction, Background, and Methods. In this document, we introduced our research question to a scholarly audience, framed our question for the audience within existing scholarly conversations, and summarized our methods of study.
Phase 2: Introduction, Background, and Methods Revision
Introduction
The field of environmental studies champions itself as an interdisciplinary community. The Environmental Studies department (ENVS) at Dartmouth College prides itself in drawing upon concepts and methods from the natural and social sciences as “complementary lenses” through which to view our complex socio-ecological systems (Undergraduate). A cursory glance at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) home page reveals that this emphasis on interdisciplinarity is a common trend. The AESS claims to support 1000+ interdisciplinary environmental programs and “improve communication across boundaries that too often divide the traditional academic disciplines” (Home Page).
Despite the emphasis placed on the integrated approach of the field, an array of circumstances and conventions demarcate natural sciences from social sciences. However, as the boundaries are not always easy to discriminate, environmentalists may identify themselves differently from the external definitions of their disciplinary domain. The stress on interdisciplinarity suggests that individuals engage in both the natural and social dimensions. On the other hand, the flexibility of the boundaries between the natural and social sciences may lead to confusion and instability between the two enterprises. Individuals situated in a natural science sub-discipline such as soil science may not feel obligated to participate in policymaking. Likewise, an individual who specializes in environmental policy may choose to focus exclusively on the application of social sciences. The extent to which individuals adopt the interdisciplinary character of the field of environmental studies is unclear.
Meeting the interdisciplinary needs of readers begins with understanding the activities that create them and their role in the knowledge system. As a product of the natural and social sciences, environmental studies is prone to the same variability in rhetorical strategies witnessed in the comparison across disciplines. A unified synthesis of the field requires understanding the interplay between a broad range of disciplines. In order to answer the question of whether the interdisciplinary character of the field is adopted at the individual-level, I will study the publications of professors in the ENVS department to observe differences in writing conventions between the two landscapes. Examining the divergence in writing conventions will improve our understanding of the rhetorical strategies that facilitate the transfer and coordination of knowledge between the natural and social sciences. This knowledge of rhetorical strategies will allow us to understand the ways in which these subsections interact to shape the field of environmental studies.
Background
Because academic disciplines are specialized fields of study, students and scholars alike struggle with communicating across subjects due to differences in language and concepts. As Krishnan (2009) notes, focusing exclusively on the narrow concentration within a single academic discipline may hinder the exchange of ideas and impede the progress of research. To overcome these limitations, researchers must utilize concepts and methods from more than one discipline. Scholars such as Wagner (2010) and Garner (2013) define interdisciplinary research as the integration of concepts, techniques, methods, and data from different fields of established research. In order to successfully engage in interdisciplinary research, experts must first be familiar with the rhetorical processes which create and disseminate facts in texts within their field (Geisler 1994).
Scholars like Krishnan, Garner, and Wolfe support Geisler’s claim, pointing out that effective integration of aspects from multiple academic disciplines requires recognition of the boundaries that distinguish areas of study. Because disciplinary boundaries shape the norms and practices of the field, rhetorical conventions are not universal across academic subjects. In addition, because the definition of disciplinarity is not clearly defined (Krishnan 2009), it is often difficult to identify disciplinary boundaries and when they are crossed (Garner et al. 2013). Wolfe et al. claim that facilitating the transfer of knowledge requires students to identify similarities while familiarizing themselves with the differences.
Major advances in research are often situated at the interface between disciplines. While there is interest in promoting interdisciplinary research, conducting research that spans multiple disciplines faces many challenges. Geisler (1994) states that the domain content, or “what is accepted as true in a given field”, is “intimately related to the rhetorical processes underlying the reading and writing of texts”. However, the differing norms and writing conventions across fields of study impede the integration of knowledge. Natural and social sciences have fundamentally different means of identifying research questions and methods, which gives rise to differences in use of language (Garner et al. 2013). The difference in writing conventions such as grammar patterns and jargon exacerbate this division.
On one hand, writing in the natural sciences focuses on the natural aspects of our world. Natural scientists use papers to describe observations and draw conclusions, focusing on hypotheses and experiment outcomes. Writing a natural science paper entails addressing a problem, gathering and analyzing unbiased, relevant information, formulating a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, evaluating the results of this experiment, and arriving at a conclusion (Rhetoric and Composition/Writing in Sciences). The features of writing in the natural sciences stem from a focus on a specialized audience and the collaborative and de-personalized nature of natural science research.
On the other hand, the social sciences are concerned with the study of human behavior, the values of people, and the interactions between people within a society. Writing in the social science requires choosing a topic, making a claim, providing evidence to support your claim, and convincing the reader that your claim is valid. In the social sciences, there is a tension between 1) an objective, scientific voice versus the need for an authoritative, personal voice; and 2) the need for quantitative data versus the desire to qualify data (Writing Conventions in the Disciplines: Writing in the Social Sciences). While both natural and social scientists use a passive voice (Rhetoric and Composition/Writing in Social Sciences), there are significant differences in the use of pronouns and jargon (see Table 1).
| TABLE 1 | |
| Writing Conventions in the Natural Sciences | Writing Conventions in the Social Sciences |
| Highly specialized, discipline-specific jargon | Mingling of discipline-specific jargon and conversational language |
| Uses the plural “we” | Straddles the boundary between “we” and “I” |
| Source: Writing Conventions in the Disciplines: Writing in the Sciences | Sources: Writing Conventions in the Disciplines: Writing in the Social Sciences
|
Interdisciplinary research entails complex intellectual and social structures and processes that synthesize concepts from two or more disciplines. Citation analysis, a common bibliometric technique, is another measure of interdisciplinarity. According to Wagner et al. (2010), citations are the closest reference to the source of knowledge creation and integrative action. The occurrence of discipline-specific citations from other subjects reveal an integration among fields, as the percentage of citations outside of the discipline of the original publication is a common indicator of interdisciplinarity (Wagner et al. 2010). Specifically, Wagner et al. (2010) emphasize the importance of the number of disciplines cited, the evenness of the distribution, and the degree of difference between the categories.
Methods
Research Site
I will study publications by eight core faculty members of the ENVS department at Dartmouth College. I will gather a total of thirty-two publications, four from each of the professors, and sort these publications into the natural or social science categories based on the title and the abstract. According to the profiles on the department website, these eight professors cover an eclectic mix of subject areas from the natural sciences and social sciences (see Table 2). The faculty in this department are experts in the field of environmental studies who have each published several peer-reviewed research papers within their niches. Each letter represents one of the professors.
| TABLE 2 | |
| Professors Specializing in the Natural Sciences | Professors Specializing in the Social Sciences |
| A. biodiversity and conservation
|
E. environmental policy and governance / natural resource management / environmental social science / social-ecological systems
|
| B. forest biogeochemistry / carbon, nitrogen and trace metal cycling / soil science / ecosystem science / energy and the environment / environmental science
|
F. environmental and ecological economics / discounting, sustainability, and intergenerational fairness / applied growth theory / welfare economics / social norms, well-being, and pro-environmental behavior / economics of climate change / economics of energy efficiency / valuation and governance of ecosystem services
|
| C. sustainability science / sustainable aquaculture / integrated food-energy systems / fish genetic conservation / conservation biology / environmental risk analysis / environmental risk assessment and management of genetically modified fish / environmental policy
|
G. nature-society relations / transnational river basins / environmental politics / environmental history / politics of scale / political ecology / sustainable development
|
| D. ecosystem ecology and soil biogeochemical cycling / climate change and ecological response in Arctic and Antarctic systems / arctic policy / ecology and environmental law | H. forest ecology and management / human dimensions of wildlife management / tribal natural resource perspectives / tribal resource management systems / traditional ecological knowledge / linking ecological and human dimensions of environmental issues
|
Questions
While the field of environmental studies is notorious for its interdisciplinary nature, this may not be true on the individual-level because of the division between natural and social sciences. In addition, the rhetorical differences between disciplines are entangled with the way domain content is produced by discourse communities. Thus, I am interested in studying how participants navigate the transitions between these entanglements.
Have natural and social scientists formed separate domains within the field?
- Do researchers who specialize in an area of environmental social science focus exclusively on the social science concepts underlying their topic? Or do individuals take the holistic approach that the field is known for, incorporating elements of the “other” side?
- Does the tendency to cross these boundaries fluctuate from individual-to-individual and/or from topic-to-topic? How extreme are these fluctuations?
To investigate whether the interdisciplinary nature of environmental studies manifests at the individual level or only as the field, I will examine how the writing conventions of these two categories converge and diverge. Asking these questions will allow me to identify the boundaries between these two categories and when and how often they are crossed. By pinpointing the perimeters, I can work towards understanding how the two halves of this field come together to produce work that is unique to the study of human-environment systems.
Procedure 1: Key Word Analysis
I plan to identify and quantify the writing conventions using AntConc. After importing the publications into AntConc to see which words occur most frequently, I will comb through the results and identify the frequency of discipline-specific jargon. Key word analysis will allow me to examine how closely individuals adhere to the common trends of their sphere, be it the natural or social sciences.
Procedure 2: Pronoun Use
As Table 2 notes, natural and social scientists also differ in their use of pronouns. Natural scientists tend to use the plural “we”, while social scientists straddle the boundary between “we” and “I”. Thus, I will also utilize AntConc to code the publications for the frequency of the words “I”, “me”, “my” and “we”, “our”, and “ours”. Again, investigating the use of pronouns will allow me to examine the degree to which an individual sticks to the methods of their faction.
Procedure 3: Citation Analysis
In addition to coding the publications, I will analyze the citations of two publications from each professor. I plan to use Excel to record:
- The main author, title, and publisher of the original publication
- The category the original publication falls under (natural or social)
- The main author, title, and publisher of the citation
- The category the citation falls under (natural or social)
I will measure the extent to which each publication cites and integrates literature by going through the spreadsheet and noting the number of disciplines cited, the distribution of citations among disciplines, and the disparity between these categories. Mapping these interactions provides a basis for determining the extent to which different authors participate in the interdisciplinary research that environmental studies is known for.
Bibliography
Garner, J., Porter, A. L., Borrego, M., Tran, E., & Teutonico, R. 2013. Facilitating social and natural science cross-disciplinarity: Assessing the human and social dynamics program. Res Eval, 22(2): 134-144. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/rev/article/22/2/134/1609050/Facilitating-social-and-natural-science-cross.
Geisler, C. 1994. At the Boundaries of Expertise: Transforming apprenticeship in an Instructional Situation. Chapter 12 of Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise. Retrieved from https://canvas.dartmouth.edu/courses/20288/files/2709239/download?wrap=1.
Home Page. Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences. Retrieved from https://aessonline.org.
Krishnan, A. January 2009. What Are Academic Disciplines? NCRS Working Paper Series. National Centre for Research Methods. Retrieved from http://www.forschungsnetzwerk.at/downloadpub/what_areacademic_disciplines2009.pdf
Rhetoric and Composition/Writing in the Sciences. September 2014. Retrieved from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition/Writing_in_the_Sciences#Resources_to_Use.
Undergraduate. Dartmouth College Environmental Studies Department. Retrieved from http://envs.dartmouth.edu/undergraduate.
Wagner, C., Roessner, D. J., Bobb, K., Klein, J. T., Boyack, K. W., Keyton, J., Rafols, I., & Borner, K. 2010. Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 165(2011): 14-26. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157710000581.
Writing Conventions in the Disciplines: Writing in the Natural Sciences. University of Connecticut Writing Center. Retrieved from http://wcenter.hartford.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/261/2014/03/Writing-in-the-Natural-Sciences.pdf
Writing Conventions in the Disciplines: Writing in the Social Sciences. University of Connecticut Writing Center. Retrieved from http://wcenter.hartford.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/261/2014/03/Writing-in-the-Social-Sciences.pdf.
Wolfe, J., Olson, B., and Wilder L. January 2014. Knowing What We Know about Writing in the Disciplines: A New Approach to Teaching for Transfer in FYC.” WAC Journal, 25: 42-77. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol25/wolfeetal.pdf.