Building interdisciplinary and cross-cultural awareness in conducting environment research: Use of Canada-US transboundary experiences

The University of Washington's NSF – IGERT ("Multinational Collaborations on Challenges to the Environment") begins with a series of courses that are designed to build community among participants and prepare graduate fellows for subsequent international collaborations in environmental problem-solving. These courses focus on the following four questions: (1) How do disciplines and their practitioners vary according to epistemology and workplace culture? (2) What does it take to do effective cross-disciplinary research, what models are currently available, and can we envision our own models? (3) How do cultural, disciplinary, and institutional identities influence our perceptions of the environment, and (4) What constitutes effective and ethical multinational research in an unequal world?  This year's cohort of nine PhD students, 3 student instructors and four faculty began the experience with an eight day, intensive, placed-based field trip in Washington and British Columbia that revolved around discussions with stakeholders representing different perspectives on shared environmental problems between the US and Canada.  Students adopt lessons learned from the Canada-U.S. trip and coursework to craft and implement a pilot study on management of invasive species in New Zealand and to address human-land use history in a national park in China.