Improving Cross-disciplinary Communication Through the Toolbox Dialogue Method

Working at the intersection of people and wildlife often involves addressing multiple perspectives and differences in beliefs and values both among researchers and the public. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative... [ view full abstract ]

Working at the intersection of people and wildlife often involves addressing multiple perspectives and differences in beliefs and values both among researchers and the public. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (http://toolbox-project.org), a US NSF sponsored project grounded in philosophical analysis, uses a dialogue-based approach to engage participants in a structured dialogue where they share their research and practice worldviews.

An evidence-based approach, the Toolbox dialogue method has both proximal and distal effects. Proximally, structured dialogue about disciplinary assumptions can enhance self-awareness and mutual understanding, strengthening the collective epistemic foundation needed for effective collaborative efforts. Distally, these cognitive effects can increase group cohesion and communication effectiveness by enabling collaborators to avoid both unreasonable agreement and unreasonable disagreement.

During this presentation, we will introduce participants to the Toolbox dialogue method, which includes a dialogue session sandwiched between a pre and post survey tool containing Likert items that highlight fundamental differences in research and practice worldviews. We will present findings from our work based on thematic coding of dialogue session transcripts to evaluate three participant learning outcomes: (1) Identify habits that guide research, influencing it in ways that can reflect differences in concept and value that are grounded in training and experience, (2) Share habits by articulating them – perhaps for the first time – and subsequently enabling the collaborators to learn more about how they operate, and (3) Coordinate habits by harnessing the differences among them through dialogue, negotiation, and compromise. We will discuss the implications of the Toolbox dialogue method for better integration of human dimensions of fisheries and wildlife in research and management.