Philosophical Tenets of the IGERT in Urban Ecology Program

Being reflective and adaptive, this program is continually evaluated and adjusted as we discover effective strategies and identify opportunities for improvement. Several philosophical tenets serve as guiding ideas, precepts, and values. These tenets are a visible part of the program, are distributed to participants, and are frequently discussed, clarified, and elaborated.

1. An integrated view begins with established disciplines. Our intention is not to establish a new discipline but to work in an evolving network of multiple disciplines. Students earn degrees from established academic units. No new degree-granting program is proposed here.
2. A multidisciplinary program is more than just experience in a collection of disciplines. Our program aims to produce researchers who can move among various disciplines with a confidence based on an understanding of (and willingness to learn) specific disciplinary tools, techniques, epistemologies, and values.
3. Solution of complex problems requires collaboration. We aspire to educate scientists who are more collaborative and interdependent than typical of most existing graduate programs. All components of our program require collaborative skills.
4. Effective collaborative groups have flexible participants. Graduate students, undergraduates, postdocs, faculty members, and others are involved in the enterprise. The IGERT community provides a research capability that is a flexible, invertible hierarchy. Community members must be able to shift among group roles of leadership and support depending on the task at hand.
5. Faculty members are also students. IGERT faculty members are selected based upon their willingness to operate in this flexible network of learning and teaching. We do not presume to know how best to organize an optimal interdisciplinary enterprise. Rather, we see IGERT as a research project designed in part to learn how to do that.
6. The IGERT program is graduate-student centered. Although faculty members are ultimately responsible for the IGERT program, students take an unusually high level of responsibility for organizing and operating classroom, experiential, and research programs.
7. There is more than a single track to understanding. Innovation requires a diversity of views. Although we focus on a core of IGERT Fellows, we deliberately incorporate IGERT Associates, i.e., students interested in urban problems, whose academic aspirations enrich the IGERT program core. Diversity of view benefits both Fellows and Associates.
8. Our goal is to understand how we understand. Our program is deliberately reflective and self-conscious. We are interested both in understanding the world and the processes, group dynamics, collaborative structures, and methods that best lead to this understanding. Members of the IGERT community continually examine the ethical and value dimensions of their work.
9. Our approach is experiential and empirical. An understanding of urban ecology is gained by engaging the city as a research laboratory. Field studies form the core of our knowledge, supplemented by laboratory experiments and models.
10. Research questions are motivated by both basic and applied objectives. We will fully engage public concerns yet we seek to identify scientific principles of general application (i.e., to other cities, social groups, ecosystem types).