Addressing environmental problems requires work with researchers from other disciplines. As AESS president David Hassenzahl has indicated in his challenge, “… working across disciplines is what we must do when important questions cannot be answered by a single discipline.” In order to ensure just responses to these problems, though, collaboration should also involve the meaningful participation of community members and other stakeholders. Since complex, heterogeneous projects such as these typically include multiple perspectives and differences in belief and value, the potential for misunderstanding is rife, and the consequences of misunderstanding can be great.

The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, a US NSF sponsored project, has developed an approach – the “Toolbox dialogue method” – that is an established way of enabling heterogeneous groups to avoid debilitating misunderstandings. This method uses structured, dialogue-based workshops to enhance communication and collaboration in cross-disciplinary teams. Grounded in philosophical analysis, the Toolbox workshop enables collaborators to engage in a structured dialogue where they share their research and practice worldviews.

An evidence-based approach, the Toolbox dialogue method has both proximal and distal effects. Proximally, structured dialogue about research assumptions enhances self-awareness and mutual understanding, strengthening the collective epistemic foundation needed for effective collaborative research. Distally, these cognitive effects can increase team cohesion and communication effectiveness by enabling collaborators to avoid both unreasonable agreement and unreasonable disagreement.

In a Toolbox workshop, structured dialogue enables participants to achieve three learning outcomes:

• Identify habits that guide research, influencing it in ways that can reflect differences in concept and value that are grounded in training and experience,
• Share habits by articulating them – perhaps for the first time – and subsequently enabling their collaborators to learn more about how they operate, and
• Coordinate habits by harnessing the differences among them through dialogue, negotiation, and compromise.

The agenda for a half-day Toolbox workshop at AESS is as follows:

• Preamble. Initial plenary presentation highlighting the motivation, background, and procedures of the Toolbox dialogue method. (30 min.)
• Breakout dialogue sessions. Participants will divide into breakout dialogue groups. These sessions begin and end with participants filling out the Toolbox instrument (i.e., scoring the Likert scales associated with the survey items) using the new Toolbox web interface, with a 90-minute dialogue in between. These sessions will be facilitated by members of the Toolbox Project. Participants can opt to receive a copy of their pre and post-dialogue Toolbox instruments. (120 min. with a break in the middle)
• Workshop Debrief and Co-creation activity. Closing plenary discussion among all participants about the experience, focusing on the potential to inflect decision-making on issues relevant to environmental science and studies. This will be followed by small group discussions (with report out) of ways in which structured dialogue can work to support collaborative environmental projects that are both effective and just. (60 min.)

Workshop Co-Facilitators:

Dr. Michael O’Rourke is Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative and Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He has published extensively on the topics of communication, interdisciplinary theory and practice, and robotic agent design. Since its inception in 2005, the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative has conducted over 200 workshops around the world with more than 1,700 participants.

Dr. Marisa Rinkus is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative at Michigan State University. She has experience in participatory data collection, facilitation, and capacity building. Her research interests include stakeholder participation, community engaged research, and collaboration in conservation planning and decision-making.

Brief Workshop Description

This workshop introduces participants to the Toolbox dialogue method, an approach to enhancing communication and collaboration in cross-disciplinary teams. Attendees will share their research and practice worldviews in structured dialogue and then discuss how such dialogue could support just responses to environment, wellness, and community problems.