Donald Ropes is Professor of Learning and Development in Organisations at Inholland University of Applied Sciences. His research is on learning in complex environments, specifically how we can help people and organisations to become responsive: able to absorb shocks, adapt and thrive in new situations and look for challenges that can be turned into opportunities. For more than ten years, Professor Ropes has been working on advancing Design Science Research as a way to contribute to organisations’ development while at the same time expanding organisational learning theory.

Dr. Nagib Callaos is the Founding President of the a 32 years old Multi-Disciplinary Organization oriented 1) to solve real life problems which mostly require multi-disciplinary teams and inter-disciplinary research/communication and 2) to synergistically relate all disciplinary and inter-disciplinary departments of the University Simon Bolivar with private and public corporations. He also was the founding president of several organizations on research, development, and technological innovation and, for many years, consultant in Information Systems.

In this workshop the presentation will be limited to 20 minutes from the two speakers, then Professor Donald Ropes will engage the participants with each other in a a mock-up version of an interdisciplinary project meeting. After making and introduction to the concepts of analogical thinking, interdisciplinary communication, and interdisciplinary research, participants will work in groups of two or more and come up with ideas about three aspects of inter-and transdisciplinary work, namely the state of the system (épistémè), what the new system should look like(praxis, poïesis) andhow to change it (phronēsis). The context will be our own teaching and learning paradigms. During the workshop data will be gathered on the topic of promoting and implementing interdisciplinary research ,which will be used for further discussions in the conference, as well as for the potential a multi-author article and/or for a special issue of the jounral similarly to how it was described above in the conversational session on “The Intellectual Rigor of Interdisciplinary Communication.”

Professor Donald Ropes has a large and diversified experience on the method to be used in this workshop and, by experience, he knows that it is very effective for interdisciplinary work. This method will also produce data that we can use to write a paper for next year’s conference, as well as for the potential multi-author article (short research-based essays) and/or a special issue of the journal.