Teamwork, and interdisciplinary teamwork in particular, are increasingly recognized as an important part of engineering education. Engineering educators have therefore taken an interest in employing and studying teamwork in their curriculum. Yet much of their scholarship has focused on documenting student and faculty experiences of teamwork and describing programs and courses only. Examinations of the actual practices and artifacts, that students create and use to manage interdisciplinary team collaborations are an underexplored research area. However, such studies hold much potential for illuminating how teamwork is undertaken, thereby pointing to strategies for successful collaborations. Drawing on prior work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based upon a one-month ethnographic study of an interdisciplinary graduate research team, we found that the team used boundary negotiating artifacts (BNAs) to navigate their work. In this paper, we discuss the significance of boundary negotiating artifacts-which build on boundary object literature-and propose the concept as a useful framework for investigating and facilitating interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate teams. This new framework has the potential to shed light on aspects of interdisciplinary collaboration and cooperation that have previously been underexplored within engineering education.
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Beddoes et al. (2020) studied this question.