‘Knowing that’, ‘knowing why’ and ‘knowing how’: Aligning perspectives and assembling epistemes for a transdisciplinary analysis of questioning sequences in executive coaching. A research journey

Eva-Maria Graf & Frédérick Dionne
University of Klagenfurt
Abstract

Our contribution maps the journey towards setting up a transdisciplinary, interprofessional collaboration between coaching practitioners and coaching researchers from the fields of Applied Linguistics and Applied Psychology. The goal of such a project is to build a community of interest around a common cause, i.e., a practically relevant, language-based coaching problem (in our case, questioning practices in executive coaching), and to collaboratively solve the problem on the basis of assembling and integrating the various epistemes. The purpose of our contribution in the form of a travel report is twofold: firstly, to theoretically and conceptually discuss the challenges and affordances of aligning perspectives and assembling epistemes for such a transdisciplinary research project; Secondly, to present the available epistemic bases and offer first empirical results from our applied linguistic research and our cooperation with Applied Psychology that served as the basis for conceptualising the project Questioning Sequences in Coaching (Graf, Spranz-Fogasy, & Künzli, 2020). We end this travel report by critically assessing the transdisciplinary character of the current project and by envisioning another kind of cooperation between coaching practice and coaching research as the future destination of our research journey.

Keywords:
Table of contents

In this paper, we want to report on our journey as applied linguists (and – one of us – as practising coach) towards analysing questioning sequences in executive coaching from an interprofessional, transdisciplinary research perspective. Our journey will transpire in various phases and has two primary travel companions at its onset: the professional, language-based helping practice ‘executive coaching’ and ‘Applied Linguistics’, our own disciplinary activity. The envisioned destination is the establishment of a community of interest built around aligned perspectives, assembled epistemes and a balanced epistemic authority to gain transdisciplinary insights – based on interprofessional collaborative research between coaching practitioners, applied linguists and psychologists – into a “common cause” (Widdowson, 2018, p. 141), here, questioning practices in executive coaching. Our journey is characterised by a gradual integration of various epistemic assemblages, i.e., epistemics of different experience and different expertise (i.e., practical coaching knowledge, applied linguistic knowledge and applied psychological knowledge) in the context of an emerging community of interest, motivated by a shared problem-defining and problem-solving interest to develop a language- and context-sensitive exploration of a shared object of interest (i.e., questioning sequences in coaching) beyond their own ontologies and epistemologies. The purpose of this travel report is both theoretical and empirical. Firstly, we aim to theoretically discuss the epistemic affordances, requirements and challenges of (setting up) a transdisciplinary research project. Secondly, we aim to present the first empirical results from our own applied linguistic research and our cooperation with Applied Psychology that lay the basis for conceptualising the project Questioning Sequences in Coaching, which is discussed as the interim destination on our journey to a truly transdisciplinary research endeavour.

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