Using interdisciplinary dialogue to understand the influence of identities on undergraduate research experiences

To face twenty-first century challenges, an effective undergraduate education must prepare its students with interdisciplinary competencies: reflexivity, perspective seeking, and integrative thinking that reaches across disciplinary silos. As such, higher education has begun to shift towards societally engaged models that engender interdisciplinary collaboration. However, much of the work on interdisciplinarity focuses solely on intellectual concerns, missing out on key opportunities to center personal spheres of knowledge. To address this gap, we implemented interdisciplinary dialogue as a practice-based approach to facilitate conversation on how identity, privilege, and access shape undergraduate students’ experiences in mentored undergraduate research settings. Between 2021 and 2022, we facilitated four peer dialogue workshops with students participating in discipline-based summer undergraduate research programs (n = 54) where peers among different disciplines discussed how personal and disciplinary identities influence access to opportunities, choices in research, research process, and relationships. Thematic analysis of conversations within these dialogues revealed how students conceptualize the role of their own and others’ identities when describing their reasons for doing research, how they gained access to and navigated research spaces, and how they conducted the research itself. Undergraduate students described research as being highly personal as they consistently discovered, iterated, and embodied their unique identities throughout the research process, and adding a point of peer dialogue allowed students to explore these perspectives. By showcasing the ways that students articulate and negotiate their identities as researchers in dialogue with one another, we demonstrate the value in incorporating these discussions within interdisciplinary higher education.