Achievement

Resulting from an intensive 2-day reflective retreat of IGERT Trainees and faculty, we redesigned our weekly seminar to respond to concerns of a lack of cohesiveness and integration between trainees? individual research and the collective interdisciplinary goals of our program. As a result of the reflection students and faculty redesigned the weekly seminars to increase exchanges and to generate innovative synergistic ways of reorienting individual research efforts toward more integrative and interdisciplinary outcomes. The seminars took on a Socratic format of inquiry and debate between participants to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas for integration and for translating their individual work across disciplines. The discussions that resulted made productive use of an informal learning environment and resulted in the development of several teams of students and faculty working to integrate science and water policy in southern Africa, Florida, and Costa Rica.