Knowing ‘That’, Knowing ‘Why’ and Knowing ‘How’ – Aligning Perspectives and Assembling Epistemes for a Transdisciplinary Analysis of Questioning Sequences in Executive Coaching

Graf, Eva-Maria & Frédérick Dionne (2021). 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. AILA Review 34/1 (Special issue: “Developing shared languages: The fundamentals of mutual learning and problem solving in transdisciplinary collaboration”), 56-77. 

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.