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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1354621

I'm not half and half: Navigating being a 'both' in discipline-based education research (DBER)

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, United States
  • 2 Carleton College, Northfield, Vermont, United States
  • 3 University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Through years of conversations, three discipline-based education researchers used a duoethnographic process to interrogate their own Discipline-based Education Research (DBER) identities. We present a description of how these individuals navigate being a 'both,' gathered through reflections, discussions, and deeper research to explore perspectives of our professional identities and what we perceive those identities look like to our peers, supervisors, and trainees. Our own definitions and eventual realized identities as a 'both' emerged through this research process. We envision that science faculty have multiple roles, demands, and identities; at the most basic level, they are 'both' an educator and a researcher. In the unique case of discipline-based education research (i.e., scholars studying the teaching and learning of science often in science departments), some faculty find an overlap between complementary yet sometimes competing research agendas (i.e. biology research (BR) and discipline-based education research (DBER)) of which they do 'both.' This paper has two key contributions. First, it articulates this side-glancing process of our navigation of being a DBER 'both,' leveraging each of our unique perspectives and the literature. Second, it represents how such an exploration may be useful to other interdisciplinary researchers in understanding and embracing all parts of their identities.

    Keywords: Discipline-based education research, Duoethnography, Faculty, narrative identity, figured world

    Received: 12 Dec 2023; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Holt, Sung and Lo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Emily A. Holt, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, United States
    Stanley M. Lo, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, 92093, California, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.