My research group at UCL, Extreme Citizen Science, was kind enough to allow me to attend the Teaching Through Research workshop at The Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris. When I received my acceptance letter to the workshop, I excited but nervous, in that most of the attendees seemed to be mid/late career academics, and I have yet to do my upgrade from MPhil to PhD candidate. Nevertheless, I saw this as a great opportunity to accelerate the progress of the experiments I’m planning as part of my work, with the help of some great interdisciplinary researchers from around the world, as the aim of this workshop is to help those attending to develop an interdisciplinary teaching/learning activity to launch within the next 24 months. Through my work, so far, I’ve identified challenges/suggested solutions to interdisciplinary research from my literature review, ones encountered in published interdisciplinary research projects that involve GIS (as well as relevant GIS concepts, based on the Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge [GIS&T BoK]), and some practical work with a few interdisciplinary groups to find the following:

• “Difficulty Collaborating with Other Disciplines” is cited as the most common challenge in interdisciplinary research in the literature review and has been verified through the published studies and practical work
• Though “Provide Training on Technical and Supplemental Skills” was the most cited suggested solution in interdisciplinary research, published studies and practical work more often suggested “Building Relationships” as a solution
• The most important GIS&T BoK Knowledge Area’s geospatial concepts appears to be “Geospatial Data”, thus signifying what matters to most when using GIS in interdisciplinary research

So, bearing these in mind, through my research, I suggest that we offer a training programme in “Geospatial Data” to help those from various disciplines involved in interdisciplinary research projects that use GIS to learn how to collaborate and build relationships (encompassing all the findings from literature, published studies and practical work). I’d like to do this in a Problem Based Learning approach to focus on real-world relevance with the various teams that I’ll be teaching, as part of the case studies for my work, and deliver the material online to some and face-to-face for others, to also measure which mode is more effective in facilitating interdisciplinary thinking, as set forth in “Teaching and Learning in Interdisciplinary Higher Education: A Systematic Review” (Spelt et al, 2009, p. 372), and uptake of relevant GIS concepts.

The first experiment will be with the Challenging RISK team; as I formally start on that project in May, I need to start designing the GIS teaching/learning activity ASAP, and I hope to lay down the structure for that, as well as carry it forward for the future ones, in this workshop.