Across the disciplinary Bridge: Being an Interdisciplinary Researcher

As Khwan did, I also presented in the UoM Interdisciplinary Symposium on 31st January 2014. It was a really exciting experience (yet quite daunting 😀 ) sharing with many people from different disciplines. However, I felt quite at home as well as I see many familiar faces in the room. Thank you very much for the support everyone 🙂

In my presentation “Narrative of Indonesian Science and Mathematics teachers’ experiences of Interdisciplinary Curriculum” I talked about the experiences of Indonesian teachers of being an interdisciplinary practitioner when they had to teach their curriculum in English.

In addition, I also shared my experiences of interviewing the teachers who reside on different home discipline from me. Based on what I experienced, being a researcher who is foreign to the participant home discipline may be quite a challenge, and we have to be prepared with the unknown, to know as much as possible of what might be on the other side of the ‘bridge’. I remember two interesting comments from my dear friends Khwan and Diana Busra: ‘You are lucky to have the bridge to reach the other side of the river, otherwise, you have to swim there” (Kwan) and Diana continued  “But, if you do not have the bridge and have to do the swimming, just make sure that you swim with style’ 😀

Apparently, as what Richard said after my presentation, my research involve quite complicated interdisciplinarity element in which I am attempting to cross the bridge to reach the science and mathematics teachers domain, meanwhile the teachers were also trying to cross the bridge towards my home discipline, TESOL. Interesting 🙂

If you would like to see my slides, please click the link below 🙂

Fitri-UoM Interdisciplinary Symposium