Nodes of tension: negotiating epistemic fluency in interdisciplinary co-teaching

This paper is about interdisciplinary collaboration in a higher education context. The authors have investigated their own experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration through reflexive autobiographical narrative writing and co-generative dialogue. The experience of working in a project which brought together students from different parts of the university was analysed with reference to critical readings about interdisciplinary work. The authors have identified moments of boundary crossing or ‘nodes of tension’ through which relationships were being negotiated and knowledge was being produced. The analysis of these moments shows that interdisciplinary work is intensely relational and dialogic; it takes time and involves significant labour. The authors contend that this labour is essential to building trust and openness to what is unfamiliar, and that universities which seek to promote interdisciplinary collaboration must acknowledge the significant additional work necessary to negotiate nodes of tension.


Introduction
Interdisciplinary collaboration in the university is believed to enhance collaboration, co-operation and creative thinking, which are seen as essential for working in the twenty-first century and for solving the big questions of our time (McLaughlan & Lodge, 2019). The promotion of interdisciplinarity in the university has generated policy and strategic initiatives that encourage academics to innovate and collaborate across their disciplines in ways that may be seen as driven by a performative agenda.

3
The imperative to innovate is a response to claims that universities must adapt to changing workforce and employment conditions (Bennett, 2019;Bridgstock & Tippett, 2019;Cawood et al., 2018;Dawkins et al., 2019), and concerns about graduate employability coupled with the valuing of innovation provide the conditions for the funding of initiatives that are expected to meet strategic goals. This paper presents a reflexive analysis of one such interdisciplinary initiative from the perspective of three staff members who came together from different parts of the institution, under the auspices of the Design Thinking and Interdisciplinary Collaboration initiative funded by the University of South Australia in 2018. In this paper, the authors take a critically reflective approach to analysing their experiences in a project in which design thinking was promoted as an innovative pedagogical approach through which teaching and learning practices might change.
Jill Colton and Jo Mignone, both teaching academics at the University, were brought together through this initiative to design a collaborative interdisciplinary project; we came to call this the Collaborative Narrative project. Diana Newport-Peace, was a project manager with a strategic role across the Education, Arts and Social Sciences, who had been tasked with writing up project case studies for the University. In this project, undergraduate students from the Illustration Animation Studio 4 course at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, and from the Studies in English Education 1 course at the School of Education were invited to create a narrative text in interdisciplinary teams, using a design thinking approach. The learning focus was on the design and production of a multimodal text and on the hybrid professional knowledge of illustrators and literacy educators. The project was seen as an opportunity for the students in both courses to develop cognitive resources with which to think creatively and sensitively about the problems they will encounter in professional contexts beyond university. The text production process was woven into the curriculum and assessment of each course, and design thinking was adopted as the pedagogical approach. As Jill Colton and Jo Mignone continued to reflect on their co-teaching after the project was completed, Diana Newport-Peace joined the conversation and became a critical friend. These discussions provoked us to continue to explore our interdisciplinary practice through reflection and dialogue.
The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the process of interdisciplinary teaching and learning from the three different perspectives of the authors.
Jill Colton is a teacher-educator in English/literacy education. Her motivation for participating in the project was to enable students to experience creating multimodal narrative texts with illustrators and artists who have expertise in visual design and to experiment with the design thinking process as a way of producing texts. Jo Mignone is a practice-based design studio educator in the discipline of illustration with a specialist interest in expanded illustration practice. Her motivation in participating in this project was to provide students with a variation on the traditional design studio educational model and to inform her practice by working with other educators. Diana Newport-Peace is a higher education strategist and humanities researcher. Her motivation for participating in the project was to explore how 1 3 Nodes of tension: negotiating epistemic fluency in… individual examples of teaching innovation could inform broader strategies to improve learning and teaching approaches at university.

Interdisciplinarity and epistemic fluency
At our university, interdisciplinarity is one of the aims of the Enterprise 25 strategic plan, which has a focus on preparing students for future careers, "ensuring high quality education" and integrating "interdisciplinary opportunities" (University of South Australia, 2018, p. 3). In this strategic aim, the university is following a trend seen in universities globally to promote teaching innovation through interdisciplinary learning design (Ashby & Exter, 2019;Davies & Devlin, 2010;Tan, 2017). Interdisciplinarity is seen as a solution to the 'problem' of the disciplines which are regarded as no longer adequate in the context of today's complex challenges (Ashby & Exter, 2019). Opportunities to work in diverse groups to solve problems are seen as relevant, and in fact essential, as collaboration in working life becomes increasingly frequent and complex, and as our communities and lives outside of institutions become more diverse and fluid (Davies et al., 2011;Dede, 2010). In the field of illustration, for instance, illustrators were traditionally trained to operate as sole practitioners, creating illustrations for printed matter. However, in the twenty-first century, professional illustrators are required to work across a range of platforms and be more responsive to diverse client needs (Mills, 2015). By introducing interdisciplinary approaches to teaching, Universities are seeking to respond to these kinds of changes to professional practice.
Working in interdisciplinary ways requires knowledge and understanding of one's own field in order to collaborate with others, combined with the ability to move into other fields when relevant (Mills, 2015). Disciplinary knowledge is recognised and valued within an interdisciplinary approach but the ability to move across disciplinary boundaries, to be able to combine "specialised and content-dependent knowledge", is equally valued (Trede et al., 2019, p. 179). One of the key tenets of interdisciplinary education is that collaboration can best occur when deep expertise in the core disciplinary area is combined with enough knowledge of adjacent or other fields. This duality is sometimes figured as a 'T shape' or even 'key shape' to signify the co-existence of depth and breadth of knowledge (Bridgstock, 2015;Hall, 2019). Strong disciplinary knowledge is needed but "literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines" is also essential (Davies et al., 2011, p. 11). Educating within disciplinary boundaries may predicate working within what is known, but interdisciplinarity widens the scope of possibility for transaction, collaboration and dialogue. This capacity to move across boundaries and combine different kinds of knowledge is described by Markauskaite and Goodyear as 'epistemic fluency' (2017). Epistemic fluency is the bedrock of interdisciplinarity as it enables practitioners to combine different kinds of knowledge and coordinate different ways of knowing (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017;Trede et al., 2019). The concept of epistemic fluency provides a way of understanding how people can move across and between disciplines and their associated practices and identity formations. In this paper, we seek to explore our own experiences with (and tensions around) 'epistemic fluency'.

Contextualising design thinking
The funding aim of the University of South Australia's "Design Thinking and Interdisciplinary Collaboration initiative" was to encourage academics from different disciplines to engage in interdisciplinary teaching of their joint student cohorts using a design thinking framework. The field of design thinking is broad with threads running from cognitive theory practices to productive arts and to organisational theory. Kimbell (2011) contends there are three different ways of describing design thinking. The first, design thinking as cognitive style, is situated in traditional design disciplines, where the focus is on individual designers and their intelligence as designers, as theorised by Schön (1983) and Cross (2006Cross ( , 2011. The second is a general theory of design, as explored by Buchanan (1992). This theory underpins studies into how designers undertake the act of designing, favouring a general theory of design without a special subject matter of its own. A third way describes design thinking as an organisational resource. The focus here is more on business and other organisations in need of innovation which is seen to be gained through visualisation, integrative thinking and empathy. Key texts in design thinking as organisational resource are written by Brown (2009) & Martin (2009. Jill and Jo attended University held workshops on the benefits of design thinking, discovering much of the material highlighted Brown's (2009) and Martin's (2009) conception of design thinking as an organisational resource with an attendant process and set of tools for application to a wide range of disciplines. Further reading highlighted issues in this approach, focussing on the "diluted" adoption of design thinking by non-designers (Melles, 2020, p. 4) representing a "re-assembling of some of the approaches, knowledge, and practices of professional designers" (Kimbell, 2011, p. 286). The superimposition of design thinking into unrelated fields and disciplines implies criticism of those fields as being "deficient" (Melles, 2020, p. 4). It is important to distinguish between design thinking as organisational resource and contextualised design thinking in a design discipline resulting in a concrete artefact. The former has been criticised for being applied ad hoc in non-designer fields as a superficial workshopping of ideas without the contextualisation, iteration and reflection necessitated by practice based research and creation of artefacts (Kolko, 2018). For these reasons, Jill and Jo chose to implement a learning approach to the student task informed by a designerly thinking framework (Cross, 2006) which is characterised by knowledge generation, iteration and reflection premised by the creation of an artefact.
As we co-taught in the project, and as we subsequently reflected on our praxis, designerly thinking provided a language and framework through which we could connect across the different professional and academic disciplines of 'teacher education' and 'illustration and animation'. Our understanding of designerly thinking was informed by contextualised design studio pedagogy, collaborative pedagogy studies and by theories of multimodal text production as design. Schön (1983) describes design as part of all human-centred professions where an artistic-intuitive epistemology assists practitioners to work with/in situations of uncertainty, instability uniqueness and 'values conflict'. For us, then, designerly thinking is a collective, cognitive and productive activity involving the combining of knowledge from different disciplines.
Acknowledging that multifarious versions of design thinking exist, we also turned to recent work around design thinking as pedagogy to review this concept from an educational perspective. DePalma and Alexander describe design thinking as "a pedagogical approach that builds on the notion of distributed cognition by facilitating collaboration amongst specialists possessing varied expertise" (DePalma & Alexander, 2018, p. 40). We were drawn to practices of distributed cognition and collaboration, and we assumed that this approach would enable us to draw on our collective intelligence to produce results that are greater than the results possible by individuals working alone (Curedale, 2013;DePalma & Alexander, 2018). We wanted to adopt a pedagogical approach that builds on the notion of distributed cognition by facilitating collaboration amongst specialists possessing varied expertise (DePalma & Alexander, 2018).
Prior to this co-teaching project, Jill and Jo had both employed versions of design thinking in their teaching, in quite different disciplines, enmeshed with disciplinary knowledge and outcomes. In the field of English teaching, Jill's area of expertise, text production may be understood as a design process where imagination, vision and problem solving are activated to generate multimodal compositions (Pantaleo, 2011). This approach to text production, builds on the work of Kress, who argues that communication in the twenty-first century "is constituted in ways that make it imperative to highlight the concept of design" (Kress, 2003, p. 37). It also draws on contemporary literacy practices with multimedia, which require knowledge of a wide range of modes and media (Sheridan & Rowsell, 2010). Design studio pedagogy, in which Jo has expertise, is centred in inquiry-based learning, with a problem framed by the 'project brief'. In this pedagogy, students are required to research, generate knowledge and explore possible solutions through implementation and abductive thinking, employing design to change existing conditions into preferred ones (Simon, 1969). Design studio pedagogy employs an iterative, non-linear process that emphasises exploration of preferred solutions using experiential learning and reflection with an ability to adapt thinking and easily change between 'doing' and 'thinking' (Cross, 2011). This learning approach encourages unique solutions informed by re-framing of the problem through research, divergent and convergent thinking to generate, organise and synthesise ideas and creative solutions.

Methodology
Reflecting on practice is a well-established method of professional learning and development, attributed in part to Schön (1983Schön ( , 1987. In the creation of this paper, we have taken this further, practising reflexivity to examine and understand our reflections with reference to our own positions, beliefs and values as academics working within and across our disciplinary conventions (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). In doing so, we have investigated our own professional learning and assumptions in light of our experience of interdisciplinary teaching to generate new insights into interdisciplinary teaching more generally.
Co-generative dialogue was adopted as a method of reflecting collectively on the practices we were engaging in. This is an approach to reflexive practice where our conversations became sites of data generation during the co-teaching phase and then by "together discursively evolving understandings of what happened" (Roth & Tobin, 2004, p. 4). Co-generative dialogue enabled us to explore different perspectives and draw on our practice to generate theory. As we reflected on the experience of working in an interdisciplinary team, and read more deeply into the literature about interdisciplinary practice, the key concepts that were informing our experience were identified. The concepts which became salient in our thinking were 'disciplinary identities' (Kraus & Sultana, 2008) and 'epistemic cultures' (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017). Our dialogue was informed by our developing insights into the way that academic and professional disciplinary traditions have their own language and practices, and their own epistemologies-what people know and how they know. We became aware that epistemic identities and cultural practices become so embedded in the discipline that it is difficult to be aware of them once one is inside the discourse.
The concept of working across disciplines as a 'boundary crossing' experience emerged as a key concept in our methodology (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). We found that we were engaged in 'boundary encounters' (Fitzgerald et al., 2020) and 'boundary work' (Newman et al., 2014), as we planned curriculum together, entered other teaching spaces, and negotiated different course objectives and assessment frameworks. We found that while boundaries defined what we knew, and our knowledge identities, they could be crossed or expanded. This boundary crossing generated a certain amount of uncertainty which we came to call 'nodes of tension'. These nodes are places where different knowledge and practices, different histories, and different ways of communicating all come together.
Our method in writing this paper was to expand our dialogue through shared, reflective writing through which our different perspectives could be voiced and shared. This follows Bakhtin's (1981) concept of dialogue where different voices share "diverse ideas, discourses, experiences, values and cultures" (Fitzgerald et al., 2020, p. 6). Each of the three authors wrote in response to three questions that had emerged from the series of co-generative dialogue events during and after the project. The focus of each narrative was on the concept of 'boundary encounters' derived from our reading in the field of interdisciplinary practice. It must be noted that these concepts were adopted because they resonated with our experiences and provided a conceptual language by which our experiences could be theorised. Similar approaches include the autobiographical narrative method adopted by Parr et al. (2018) in their cross-generational reflexive inquiry, and the participant narrative writing described by Fitzgerald et al. (2020) in their discussion of interfaculty collaborations.
Although we did not refer to it in this way at the outset, the practice of metaloguing enabled us to contextualise our reflexive practice, moving from consideration of our experiences to exploring aspects of theory. Our data comprised a set of metalogues (Bateson, 1972;Roth & Tobin, 2004) in which our voices as individual authors were preserved. As we circulated our writing to each other a bank of iterative comments/questions and clarifications/responses were layered into the margins around our prose. This writing informed our identification of themes which we agreed were significant and which we have analysed and presented as findings. It brought out contradictions and coherences and enabled us to revisit what we had experienced as a kind of individual and collective remembering (Roth & Tobin, 2004). This methodology activated a "richly dialogic research dynamic" and provoked critical dialogue about the experience rather than seeking to capture it objectively (Parr et al., 2018, p. 245).
Our writing about the project was framed by three questions and then shared digitally so that comments and responses could be layered over each participant's text. The framing questions were: 1. What was important to me about this project? What was I focussing on? What did I expect from it? 2. What were the 'boundary encounters' or 'nodes of tension' for me? 3. What did I discover through these 'nodes of tension'?
Through the sharing and layering of our responses a rich dialogue was cultivated in which our values, intentions, understandings and perspectives were asserted, navigated and translated. What follows is a selection of each of our responses to these three questions which we draw on in later sections of this paper.

Question 1: what was important to me about this project-what was I focussing on, what did I expect from it?
Jill: I wanted the teaching students in my course to understand the practice of creating narrative picture books as a process of multimodal design. I imagined that they would gain insights into the work of the children's book illustrator by working with illustrators to create a picture book. The focus in my course (English 1) is on understanding how semiotic systems are understood by authors and illustrators when they write and create texts. My focus was on words and images as meaning making resources and because the students in my course often struggled with producing the visual images in their texts I saw this project as an opportunity for them to collaborate with others who had the expertise in illustration that they lacked.
I have always been interested in illustration but haven't had the opportunity to develop my skills in this area. It was important to me to work with an expert (Jo) who has more knowledge and skill about illustration and visual design-and for my students to have access to her knowledge also. I expected to learn more myself about how illustrators work on their own and with others-how they compose images, how they create them and how they work with writers or written text to create stories. I thought that this would inform my lectures in my course.
I wanted to understand the design process by engaging in it myself as a way of planning the project and as a pedagogical approach to teaching writing/ multi-modal text production. I am a literacy educator and proactively seek to learn from and improve my knowledge and practice in literacy education through reading, dialogue and reflection. I was at that time reading about text production as design (Rowsell & Pahl, 2015). This is a field emerging from new literacies research and socio-semiotic understandings of text production. Design literacies resonate with functional linguistics in which the social purpose, context, audience, and conventions of genre shape literacy practices and texts.
Jo: Traditionally, professional illustration practice has been characterised by solo freelance work with illustrators responding to text developed by third parties. I wanted to expose my students to alternative ways of learning informed by expanded illustration professional practice. In recent years professional practice has widened to encompass a variety of activity including (1) illustrators working in collectives, (2) work that transforms society (rather than work premised on commercial concerns alone) and (3) authorial practice where illustrators self-generate work, for example author-illustrators. As an illustration educator teaching practice based studio courses, I engage not only in teaching the 'how' of disciplinary practice but also the 'why' and 'how in the future' to scaffold student development. This iterative model is grounded in Schön's concepts of reflection-inaction and reflection-on-action, also relating to Kolb's experiential learning cycle. For these reasons, I believed it was important for my students to gain experience in working collaboratively to challenge their preconceptions of professional practice by working in interdisciplinary ways. We designed the Collaborative Narrative project to provide an opportunity for illustration students to contribute to the fundamental development of a narrative text rather than just respond to one. In this way, students would experience the authorial process from beginning to end, instead of being brought in at the end of the creative process as a 'service technician' to illustrate a given text.
Knowing my personal strengths of pragmatic organisation and implementation, I looked forward to an opportunity to work with Jill, a passionate and knowledgeable educator, to enlarge my understanding of narrative development and alternative teaching methods.
Diana: In contrast to Jill and Jo, I came to this project late, after the teaching had been completed. My role was to put together a discussion paper summarising the various forms of teaching innovation modelled by the case studies funded by the overarching teaching and learning innovation scheme. Although the scheme was university wide, the majority of the teaching innovation projects featured were from the University Division in which I was based, and led by academics in the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education. My senior colleagues assigned me to the project because they were keen to highlight that our disciplines were at the forefront of teaching innovation for the University. At the time I was also returning to academic work, exploring twenty-first century work skills and the implications for higher education.
Having met Jill and Jo in the course of constructing these case studies, I was interested to participate in their ongoing research, as they reflected on what had occurred during the collaborative teaching pilot. For me, it was an opportunity to get under the skin of the broader initiative and to explore how the institutional rhetoric 1 3 Nodes of tension: negotiating epistemic fluency in… of learning and teaching 'innovation' translates to enhanced teaching practice in the higher education classroom.

Question 2. what were the 'boundary encounters' or 'nodes of tension'?
Jill: Having taught 'narrative' for many years as an English teacher and as a teacher educator I had a firm idea of what narrative is, what the purposes of narrative are and how narratives are created. Working with people from different disciplines created some tension around my certainties. I was challenged to explain some of the terminology that was familiar to me but which was not familiar to my colleague. A research assistant who was an illustration/design graduate was engaged to work on the project. In her compilation of a literature review about 'narrative' texts and 'picture books' she brought in a perspective of reading and producing texts that was more psychological and which I did not usually include in my lectures. I was challenged to review the psychological perspective of narrative.
I had an idea that the images and words of the picture book should be created simultaneously or in tandem. However, industry practice often sees the words written first and the images in response to the words. For my purposes (in the teacher education course) I wanted my students to understand how the juxtaposition of words and images enhances the process of meaning making and what this implies for text production as a process of design. Part of the tension was that my students did not consider themselves as writers, but rather as educators. The assignment for them was about how multimodal narrative texts are produced so that they could consider how they teach children to produce narrative texts-not about being 'a writer'.
Jo: My perception of interdisciplinary differences influenced my thinking more than I realised at the time of the project's implementation. I viewed Jill's discipline as largely text-based even though her teaching aim was for students to develop 'multi-modal' narratives. This term, 'multi-modal', is not used in illustration education and this was a node of tension as I strove to understand how this term fit with my existing disciplinary knowledge of visually interpreting text.
The illustration students were in the final year of their program, undertaking their main studio course where they develop the creative work that forms their portfolio, which is presented to future employers or collaborators. In essence, the portfolio is the distillation of the skills and knowledge learned over the course of their degree. The English 1 students were in the second year of their program and hence at a different stage of education as well as being from a different discipline. It was challenging to develop a teaching approach that equally valued each participant's experience, contribution and discipline knowledge, supported students' co-learning and knowledge generation activities, and facilitated critical partner feedback. A node of tension for me was that usually all of a final year student's illustration work contributed to their graduate portfolio. It was challenging to balance interdisciplinarity with the need for a high level of disciplinary knowledge to contribute in an effective way to the student portfolio.
This being my first experience of working in an interdisciplinary way, I had not anticipated the time required to develop the shared understandings which were vital to the organisation and delivery of a successful project. This impacted the level of mutual understanding of each staff member's discipline as lengthy time was required to jointly develop exploration, understanding and reflection.
Diana: I observed a significant node of tension in the relationship between the academics leading the collaborative narratives project and the senior and specialist university staff responsible for enhancing the university's approach to learning and teaching. My own role in the project was on the boundary between these two perspectives, from where I could see all three of the areas of difference identified by Kraus and Sultana (2008) and cited by Fitzgerald et al. (2020); "disciplinary differences", "epistemological differences" and differences in our academic and administrative "spaces" broadened our individual and collective frames of reference and enriched our reflexive practice.
There was some tension about the status of teaching innovation 'experts' working separately from discipline specialists with regular teaching responsibilities. We questioned whether 'innovation' is too readily invoked as a buzz word for things which are unfamiliar in a particular context, rather than genuinely new and transformational. Where new approaches to teaching are drawn from contrasting disciplinary approaches, this was hailed as innovation by the central team. However, the academics saw it as a simple repurposing of existing techniques and questioned whether anything 'innovative' had really occurred.
There is a tension, too, in the extent to which the success of projects such as this relies on the good will, character and generosity of participants. This is at odds with the typical pattern of work in universities in which individual academics and disciplines are conditioned to compete rather than to collaborate. My observations in this project suggest that innovation works best when individuals work extra hours to devise, deliver and follow up new ways of doing things. Academics are required to be efficient, and yet innovation takes time and the 'good will' model is unlikely to be sustainable.

Question 3: what did I discover through these 'nodes of tension'?
Jill: I have been an English teacher for a long time; teaching students in schools and universities about writing, and more recently from a multimodal perspective. My focus is on language features and text structures in the framework of functional grammar. What I 'know' about narrative derives from my knowledge of functional linguistics and semiotic theory. Moving from a linguistic-based focus on narrative where meaning is made with words, my teaching of writing has shifted to teaching of text production as a design process.
I discovered that what I take for granted as 'known' about narrative is not necessarily what someone with different knowledge 'knows'. These nuances of knowledge are evident in the language that we used but also in the practices that we assumed as 'normal'.
Knowledge of some aspects of narrative (such as plot), a concept which was so familiar to me, were challenged and refreshed hearing them explained by another person (Jo) from a different discipline (illustration studies). This in turn prompted me to reflect on my assumptions about what my students already knew about narrative.
I had considered that I had a good understanding of visual language, but working with Jo and reading the RA's literature review, enhanced that understanding. I realised how little I knew about 'visual rhetoric' which humbled me to some extent. This was a good opportunity for me to reassess what I knew (and didn't know).
Jo: Having to explain my discipline knowledge to my collaborators in this project was disconcerting at first. It made me question how I knew these things, and ask myself what had I taken for granted? I identified some previously unspoken conventions and came to question them. Working in an interdisciplinary way required me to explicitly describe disciplinary knowledge and certain teaching processes that I had taken for granted, as studio pedagogy is expected to 'imbue' students with professional knowledge, skills and concepts.
Working in interdisciplinary ways took more time, often in ways that I couldn't have anticipated, than working with staff within my discipline. I needed to explain and acknowledge my practices. Establishing shared understandings and developing a productive relationship with my interdisciplinary academic colleague took time, commitment and negotiation. The commitment to an ongoing collegial relationship with an interdisciplinary partner is not efficient but valuable to the scholarly development of staff and students.
I found discussion valuable as Jill and I worked together to adapt our conventional teaching practices to an interdisciplinary model. Subsequently, I discovered that a willingness to be adaptable in the face of unanticipated logistical tensions required a level of negotiation that I was not used to employing as an autonomous course coordinator. My ability to decouple my conventional teaching practices and be open to alternative solutions and practices was paramount. However, I could trust in the attitude, experience and knowledge of my colleague Jill as I sought to negotiate difficulties.
Working in a self-selected team was dynamic, a synergy was present as personalities and knowledge complemented and challenged each other. Different personalities had to be accounted for. For example, my usual inclination to take control had to be inhibited to create distributed leadership with my interdisciplinary colleague, Jill.
Over time, the teaching team developed a shared language in 'design thinking' but discipline-specific language still remained important to an extent. I did not feel confident using education specific terminology. Designerly thinking provided a valuable scaffold for our teaching practices and formed a bridge by which the different staff and disciplines found a joint approach to learning.
Viewing my studio teaching practices through the eyes of my interdisciplinary colleague resulted in an unfamiliar 'otherness'. However, as I invested time and effort in working with Jill, the novelty of teaching in unfamiliar ways pollinated my growth as a teacher. I uncovered my colleague's different views and practices, and experienced how students work collaboratively, all of which I found stimulating and rewarding.
Diana: Our exploration of the deliberate boundary encounters set up by the project led me to consider the latent potential of the University setting as a site for accidental boundary encounters with multitudinous disciplines operating side by side.
Despite forging an enduring collaborative partnership through the scheme, Jill and Jo agreed that the University offered few real opportunities to work across the disciplines. Collaboration is hindered by the ubiquitous constraints of internal structures and resourcing mechanisms as well as by the legacy of the multi-campus layout. My own perspective as a project manager had prevented me from seeing that despite a sustained central push to develop a university wide community of practice in teaching and learning innovation, we had not yet overcome the enduring effects of siloing activity into discrete academic disciplines. While schemes like this can be highly successful at individual or project level, there is significantly more work needed to create the conditions for sustained interdisciplinary collaboration in university teaching.
The most successful collaborations supported by the scheme were characterised by strong personal connections between the team members. Jill and Jo had met in the initial Design Thinking and Interdisciplinary Collaboration initiative workshop and developed a friendship based on their shared interests and values. Their enjoyment of working together and the trust they shared had encouraged them to develop the collaborative project and continue their research together long after it had finished. They recognised that their collaboration had required more work than the standard model of delivery, and indeed more work and time than they had anticipated at the outset of the project, however they had been encouraged to see it through because of the strength of their working relationship.
The university initiative which launched the project had provided an initial opportunity to bridge the gap between policy and practice, but a takeaway message for me is that this gap is much wider than I had anticipated and there is much work to be done to build trust between academic staff and those in centralised roles who seek indirectly to support them.

Findings
Through analysing our narrative writing, we found that there were five key nodes of tension where boundary encounters were activated. The first node of tension was around our knowledge and practice of design approaches and our understandings of 'design thinking'. Second, we discovered that our knowledge and understanding of multimodal narrative text (and narrative text production) was not always cohesive and the way we used and understood terms had to be negotiated. A third node was manifested in the encounter between different knowledges, understandings and expectations of collaborative practices; this was intensified as we entered into different epistemic spaces. Another node of tension was found between our specific institutional and course requirements for assessment. A fifth node was focussed on our conception of an innovation agenda and our purposes for innovative practice.
Through applying an analytical lens to the complex interactions between these overlapping nodes of tension and boundary encounters, we have developed new and significant insights into interdisciplinary work. Three key insights are: that interdisciplinary work is intensely relational; dialogic practice is crucial to cross disciplinary boundaries; and fluency across familiar and unfamiliar discourse and practices is enabled through trust over time. These insights are explained further below.

Interdisciplinary work is relational
Interdisciplinary teaching is intensely relational and it was the quality of the relationships between participants in the project that enabled risk taking and perspective shifting to take place. Trust was a crucial relational quality that enabled the interdisciplinary work to progress and this quality of trust developed over time through relational encounters which were an essential part of designing and enacting the coteaching project. In order for the project to succeed, we had to develop our capacity to work towards agreed goals and this meant turning towards each other's thoughts and actions. Designing the project was a problem-solving task which each of the two course instructors interpreted differently with tensions around the design thinking approach, yet the project design was accomplished through each applying their own perspective and negotiating with the perspectives of the other. Planning the project and building the relationships was hard cognitive and interpersonal work. It was necessary to interpret and respond to the problems of getting students from different programs together, communicating clearly to each group (separately and together), and ensuring that students were producing what they needed to submit for their course assessment requirements. Accomplishing these tasks across courses required us to construct "a conscientious and conscious self" which can be understood as a "fine-tuned correspondence between self, environment and social others" (Trede et al., 2019, p. 183). We found that this 'fine-tuned correspondence' was intensely relational and enabled by our capacity to tune in to each other and to the goals of the project.

Interdisciplinary work is dialogic
Boundary crossing work, which is integral to interdisciplinary projects, is enabled by communication with and feedback from unfamiliar voices. As Fitzgerald et al. (2020) remind us, rich dialogue is an essential dimension in interdisciplinary educational work and can generate new knowledge. Epistemic fluency can be enabled through the negotiating and dialoguing that occurs between individuals and between epistemic communities. Individuals and disciplinary groups invariably bring different knowledges about pedagogy (e.g. design studio practice, collaborative practice), text production (e.g. multi-modality, design process, writing for a young audience), and strategy (e.g. academic regulations, accreditation requirements, a discourse of innovation) to interpret and respond to an interdisciplinary problem. It is the difference in knowledges that can make the work transformative-or in another word 'innovative'-but only when different voices are heard and listened to. In this project, communication and feedback were not always easy; it was necessary to move away from the familiar, and for assumptions about what is known, done or said to be repeatedly challenged and negotiated. This meant that the dialogue was often challenging but necessary in the interdisciplinary work in which we were engaged.

Familiarity co-exists with the unfamiliar
Co-creation was a gradual process characterised by the co-existence of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Approaching unchartered territory or boundary crossing was made easier by initially engaging in familiar tasks such as organising meetings, navigating timetable logistics and relating our past experiences. These were a preface to the harder transactional work of imagining how different discipline knowledge and practices could be understood and integrated. A shared interest in narrative was an important unifying and motivating force at the outset of the project and interdisciplinary collaboration was made a great deal more accessible by the identification of common ground: "some common space or ground, a common 'language' which makes interaction and mutual understanding possible" (2008, p. 79). Wenger's (2000) 'modes of belonging'-engagement, alignment and imagination-emerged as crucial, with the first two providing valuable starting points to building a collegial relationship. Engagement and alignment began with sharing of past teaching experiences and the discovery of disciplinary differences generated imaginative thinking. We found that establishing a trusting work relationship where one may be respectfully challenged while negotiating shared understandings was essential to the reimagining required by the interdisciplinary work.

Conclusion
More work is needed to create the conditions for sustained interdisciplinary collaboration at university in to avoid the performativity that a 'strategic initiative' is likely to produce (Ball, 2003). Traditional academic structures, administrative procedures and campus locations separate university activities along disciplinary lines, and while this project demonstrated that these barriers to interdisciplinary work can be overcome, it also showed that doing so requires significant additional labour by the participating academics -labour which is often not recognised by the University. For real change to occur, universities will need to invest in supporting interdisciplinary collaboration by dismantling institutional barriers and recognising the work involved at the level of the individual. These practical considerations are in addition to the complexities involved in "initiating and sustaining a dialogue across differences" (Fitzgerald et al., 2020, p. 9).
Interdisciplinary work in the university takes time, trust and relational expertise because it requires people to negotiate nodes of tension as they engage in conceptual and discursive boundary crossing. These nodes of tension are generated by the meeting of different disciplinary identities and cultures, where people are engaged in working across boundaries and/or expanding boundaries. We propose that design thinking can be a useful framework in which to cultivate the relationships, dialogue and distributed expertise through which trust and epistemic fluency are generated and that, as a way in which professionals can work across disciplines to create new insights and understandings, design thinking can provide an adaptable strategy to generate epistemic fluency. We do, however, warn that the way we understand and apply design thinking is crucial, and we agree with McLaughlin and Lodge that "as 1 3 Nodes of tension: negotiating epistemic fluency in… a process, design is dynamic and iterative ….
[It] requires sustained critical thinking in relation to a problem" (2019, p. 86). Thus, we advocate for a move towards 'designerly thinking' as a more translatable concept to enable interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
The epistemologies of practice in which teachers and policy strategists participate, are representative of different ways of knowing and talking about the world, but these practices can be traversed given certain conditions. Moving across epistemological boundaries requires a level of relational trust and enough time to move slowly and thoughtfully through the process, including time for feedback and iteration. A situation where people can act knowledgably, and are flexible and adept at using different kinds of knowledge, is interdisciplinarity in action (McLaughlan & Lodge, 2019)-as is a situation where multiple knowledges can be brought together in a common purpose. Reflecting on our experience we noticed that we were building an interdisciplinary 'community of practice' (Wenger, 2000) through participation, dialogue and negotiation, shared vision and mutual trust (Fitzgerald et al., 2020). The experience generated learning for each of us, starting from our own disciplinary positions and individual motivations and growing slowly into something that was more amoebic in character, where disciplinary boundaries became more permeable. What was significant was the criticality of the relationships between us through which we grew trust, over time, through listening and communicating. This is the nexus of interdisciplinarity-epistemic fluency that is produced over time, through trusting relationships and openness to what is unfamiliar.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.