Growing Transdisciplinary Roots in the Peruvian Amazon: Lessons from the Field

摘要

: Although promising advances in transdisciplinary scholarship have been made over the past several decades, the successful integration of disciplinary perspectives has yet to be realized. One avenue for fostering transdisciplinarity is experiential education at the graduate level where scholars are brought together in applied research contexts to solve complex problems. As graduate students in an applied conservation science program, we describe an experiential learning program that facilitated the development of research proposals and created transformative experiences. In this program we engaged in a field course in the Tambopata National Reserve and Bahuaja Sonene National Park in the Department of Madre de Dios, Peru, which was designed to teach us how to effectively engage with and learn from our peers. As a critical reflection on this course, we present five keys to transdisciplinary scholarship that were instrumental for interfacing with scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: 1) develop a common language, 2) cultivate connections with your peers, 3) assert your worth, 4) know the assumptions of your field, and 5) recognize ideological differences. Each key to integration facilitated the process of integrating different forms of knowledge and learning about how to most effectively translate environmental policies into practice.