Date of Award

Fall 8-28-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

School of Education

First Advisor

Katherine Cho

Abstract

This study explores the process, conceptualization, and understanding interdisciplinary collaborations through a lens of organizational learning. More specifically, this research focuses on the barriers, challenges, definitions, and self-constructed metrics with a health sciences campus, situated in a religious institution in the Midwest. Through a single institution qualitative case study, this research interviews 16 participants, spanning across program coordinators, directors, and individuals in both operations and administration, to examine how a school of health sciences housed at an academic medical campus, operates across disciplines and departments, to advance interdisciplinary collaborations that foster a more productive and engaged workforce. Findings illuminate the positional differences and priorities for interdisciplinary collaboration, with program coordinators more focused on the execution of roles while those in administration and operation emphasized the need to build both internal and external awareness—or what they describe in part as brand management. Directors revealed the ways they felt pressure to drive collaboration and be the visionaries, and across the board, geography and the role of space was a consistent topic of conversation. Implications for this work not only allude to the strategies and barriers for interdisciplinary collaboration, but also point to the ways this work leads to concerns of burnout and reflect larger dynamics of workplace culture. This study contributes to the body of knowledge regarding how interdisciplinary collaboration occurs and the need for incentivizing initiatives for both staff and faculty.

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