The climate transition, energy supply and technological development are just some examples of areas where knowledge from several disciplines needs to come together to find relevant solutions. Engineering students are therefore often given the opportunity to work on interdisciplinary projects. But the term "interdisciplinary" encompasses widely differing ideas about what the teaching should involve and what students are actually expected to learn. This is shown by a study in which researchers interviewed 18 teachers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, Aalto University in Finland and Aalborg University in Denmark. The paper is published in the Journal of Engineering Education.
Bringing students together or integrating knowledge
One key difference lies in what teachers choose to emphasize. Some focus on bringing together people from different disciplinary backgrounds. Others emphasize how knowledge, theories and methods from different disciplines are brought together. When the focus is on collaboration, it becomes important to form student groups with a range of expertise. When the focus is on knowledge, a key question instead becomes which disciplinary perspectives students need to draw on in the project.
"Research on interdisciplinarity in engineering education tends to borrow theories of interdisciplinarity from other disciplines, which raised the question of how interdisciplinarity is understood within engineering education," says Tom Adawi, professor of engineering education research at the Department of Communication and Learning in Science at Chalmers and one of the researchers behind the study.
A new model for building a shared understanding
To establish a shared understanding of interdisciplinarity, the researchers used the interviews and previous research to develop a model consisting of four dimensions for understanding interdisciplinary education. The perspectives are not mutually exclusive but can overlap and be combined within the same course.
Knowledge cross-pollination: Encountering fundamentally different disciplines as a source of learning transfer.
Integrating knowledge: Integrating and synthesizing multiple disciplinary perspectives for (a more) holistic understanding.
Envisioning cooperative role: Interdisciplinarity is only seen through the cooperation of specific experts and what they contribute.
Open entry across disciplines: Interdisciplinarity here denotes openness, whereby learning is non-gated regardless of disciplinary background.
The model is intended as a tool to help teachers discuss their expectations and make informed choices when developing their teaching.
"For a teaching team, for example, it can help clarify what students are expected to gain from a joint project. Should they primarily learn to understand each other's expertise and coordinate their work? Or should they also develop shared ways of defining problems and integrating knowledge?" says Adawi.
Whose knowledge gets a voice?
The study also highlights that disciplines do not always meet on equal terms. The article refers to previous research showing how engineering and the natural sciences tend to dominate interdisciplinary collaborations, while the humanities and social sciences are marginalized and assigned a more supportive role.
"When teachers plan teaching across disciplinary boundaries, they therefore also need to reflect on which perspectives are given space and who gets to define the problem," says Adawi.
