Science facilitation: navigating the intersection of intellectual and interpersonal expertise in scientific collaboration

This essay defines scientific facilitation as a form of interactional expertise and explains how facilitating scientific teams requires skills in managing interpersonal interactions as well as understanding how different types of disciplinary knowledge integrate in the creation of new knowledge. It explains how this expertise may be developed through metacognition and provides examples of how scientific facilitation could be more widely incorporated into research by describing three pathways: developing facilitation skills among scientists leading teams, using broadly trained facilitators, and using specialized science facilitators. The strengths and risks of each path are discussed, and criteria are suggested for selecting the right approach for a given team science project.

Amanda E. Cravens, Megan S. Jones, Courtney Ngai, Jill Zarestky, Hannah B. Love