Journal Clubs As Pedagogy For Interdisciplinary Graduate Education

This paper explores the idea of the journal club as an alternative pedagogy that can help to prepare engineering graduate students for academic and professional life, particularly in interdisciplinary settings. A journal club is a group of graduate students and faculty members which meets regularly to discuss recent journal articles in a specified area of research. Members take turns selecting articles and leading critical discussion of the work. Journal clubs are one method for preparing graduate students for professional life on a number of levels: (1) they familiarize the student to the latest research, methods, and publication trends, (2) they facilitate dialogue and critique among students and professors at all levels of experience, and (3) they allow a space for consideration of interdisciplinary concepts that might not be satisfied by classroom discussions or lab experience alone. We used literature from the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate and theory of Communities of Practice to frame our study of an interdisciplinary engineering journal club. Systematic analysis of qualitative field notes and transcripts reveals that these benefits are indeed transferable to engineering and that journal clubs serve purposes which may not be met by other aspects of graduate education.