IB3A70 Case Study: From Interdisciplinary Practice to Interdisciplinary Pedagogy

Bio
Dr Eleanor Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the Warwick Business School within the Information Systems Management and Analytics (ISMA) group. She leads modules on Operational Research and Strategic Planning(IB3490/IB4080)and Problem Structuring: Facilitating Purposeful Analysis (IB3A70),and also teaches Project Management.
Contact details can be found on her WBS page Link opens in a new window
Project Summary
With an extensive background teaching qualitative Operational Research, Eleanor chose to focus her Case Study on the third-year undergraduate elective module, Practice of Operational Research (recently renamed Problem Structuring: Facilitating Purposeful Analysis). This module is open to students from across the university, and mainly attracts students from the Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics and Economics (MORSE)BSc programme.
Guided by interdisciplinary pedagogical concepts taught on the course, Eleanor explored interdisciplinarity in the context of Operational Research, analysing early texts to demonstrate the presence and impact of interdisciplinary work. In today’s practice, interdisciplinarity continues and is supported through Problem Structuring Methods (PSMs). This preliminary work oriented Eleanor’s case as she explored how interdisciplinary practice could be translated into interdisciplinary pedagogy within the IB3A70 module.
Eleanor’s preliminary work identified authenticity as OR’s signature pedagogy. Focusing upon the teaching challenges associated with delivering authenticity in both classroom and assessment, the first part of Eleanor’s case evaluates the authenticity of the current module content and delivery. This considers the physical context, social relations, and assessment details, concluding that authenticity is achieved through students’ engagement with and evaluation of real-world problems.
Eleanor then reflects upon threshold concepts and how sharing workplace experience can support students’ understanding of how to achieve social process facilitation. To further support students as they share their own personal perspectives Eleanor had already introduced choice of topics into her seminars, evolving new exercises each year. Since completing the PGA, Eleanor has extended this work to begin gathering student-generated content to use as the basis for seminar exercises (2024-25 cohort).
Eleanor’s portfolio also includes reflection on practitioner capabilities and aspirations, on how integration occurs within OR interventions, and on how interdisciplinarity emerges and is made explicit and intentional. This collage-based reflection yielded insight that inspired specific ideas for developing the module. A focus on the importance of integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches emerged and a model is shown that maps how PSMs generate dialogue to support interdisciplinary working.
Finally, Eleanor created a shareable template, the basis for a community artefact to which other faculty could contribute. In the illustrative example produced, Eleanor indicates how module content could be developed to support a portfolio-based assignment and potentially a two-stage exam.
Eleanor’s project not only analysed how to further embed interdisciplinarity into an existing module, but also demonstrated how that analysis could be guided by interdisciplinary principles of reflexive practice and the creation of a community artefact. Learning from this course continues to influence Eleanor’s work as she promotes academic debate concerned with the integration of qualitative and quantitative analyses, develops and runs reflective workshops for OR practitioners, and collaborates with WBS colleagues to develop research and resources associated with developing authentic assessments.