Piloting transdisciplinarity among faculty and students concerned with flood management on the South Texas Gulf Coast: A four-stage model for initial collaboration.

The economic, social, environmental, and scientific interrelatedness of our ecological survival depend on shifts in how we educate the next generation of educators, engineers, scientists, and social activists. Education, both formal and informal, as well as social activism, have to find ways to cross borders, collaborating to find solutions to the pressing problems of our time. On the South Texas Gulf Coast, one of these pressing issues is stormwater management and policy, but it has been challenging to effectively engage local leaders, water professionals, researchers, and community stakeholders in the solution-seeking process. To overcome this challenge, the research team adopted a transdisciplinary methodology to pilot a four-stage model for initial collaboration activities in applied, convergent research. This paper reports on this pilot simulation to (1) test the effectiveness and (2) demonstrate the means on how to facilitate a transdisciplinary approach in engineering problem solving and education, targeting the case study of local flood management. This collaborative model for the identification, planning, and facilitation of convergent solution seeking processes is adaptable and scalable widely in addressing the five grand challenges identified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]