Chapter overview

The chapter discusses the understudied topic of the challenges of institutionalising and governing interdisciplinary education within siloed colleges and universities. It offers both reflective insights and practical guidance with a focus on the preferred types of individual and collective leadership emerging from research of interdisciplinary higher education. The chapter situates developers of and teachers in interdisciplinary courses and curricula within the broader context of their colleges and universities, highlighting subtle yet significant dynamics that are all-the-more felt by the volume's readership.

Katrine Lindvig's key text (Extract 6.1) highlights her well-known distinction between the ‘loud’ and ‘soft’ voices of interdisciplinary higher education. While the loud voices often have the institutional power to recognise, support and reward integrative efforts, those with soft voices face a dual challenge: they don't always feel supported by their institutions, yet they work hard to advance the interdisciplinary educational cause. In this way, Lindvig, along with her colleagues Catherine Lyall and Laura R. Meagher (Extract 6.2), has defined the working life of interdisciplinarians as ‘the art of managing interstitiality’. This clear and convincing description has been adopted by Yuzhuo Cai and Antti Lönnqvist (Extract 6.3), who argue for the necessity of actively organising agency around interdisciplinary higher-education initiatives. Merel van Goch (Extract 6.4) offers a heuristic that enables agents of change to bring greater specificity to their work within the institution.

Chapter overview

Successful interdisciplinary higher-education courses and curricula are characterised by the use of integrative research methodologies to inform and guide pedagogies and didactics. Although developed within a research context, the core message of this volume is to apply these methodologies to educational design. The chapter outlines ten well-tested integrative methodologies that can offer such guidance to designers, teachers and – eventually – students. The methodologies are rooted in various academic disciplines, allowing readers – each with their own disciplinary background – to find both familiar concepts and new insights. The chapter is actionable, offering examples of interdisciplinary teaching that incorporate integrative research methodologies.

The chapter starts with the interdisciplinary research process of Allen F. Repko and Rick Szostak (Extract 3.1.1). This disciplinarily neutral ten-step process has already been used, tested and adapted in various educational contexts. One such context is the BA programme in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University. Christian Pohl, Julie Thompson Klein, Sabine Hoffmann, Cynthia Mitchell and Dena Fam (Extract 3.2.1) as well as David P.M. Lam, Maria E. Freund, Josefa Kny, Oskar Marg, Melanie Mbah, Lena Theiler, Matthias Bergmann, Bettina Brohmann, Daniel J. Lang and Martina Schäfer (Extract 3.2.2) theorise and practice integration for transdisciplinary research. Both sets of colleagues refer to peer-reviewed educational literature to make their claims. Leah Greden Mathews and Andrew Jones (Extract 3.3.1) have published a peer-reviewed paper on systems thinking in integrationist interdisciplinary higher education.

Chapter overview

The chapter argues that designing interdisciplinary higher education is best done by working from an integrationist vision. But there is more specificity to the design of interdisciplinary higher-education courses and curricula than just integration. The chapter engages with how to constructively align interdisciplinarity in education and provides an overview of the content and technicalities of interdisciplinary intended learning outcomes (ILOs), interdisciplinary learning activities (ILAs) and assessment. ‘Boundary crossing’ as an educational phenomenon that the interdisciplinary learning process both caters for, and constructs, forms an essential part of the discussion.

Elsbeth Spelt, Pieternel Luning, Tiny van Boekel and Martin Mulder (Extract 2.1.1) were among the first scholars to develop a research base for constructively aligned interdisciplinary higher education. The focus on student perception of this alignment makes their empirically informed theoretical work directly actionable. Iryna Ashby and Marisa Exter (Extract 2.1.2) reflect on various options for constructive alignment using – implicitly – the snowflake model of interdisciplinary teaching. (For the model, see the Introduction to this volume.) Jeannie Brown Leonard (Extract 2.2.1); Elsbeth Spelt, Harm Biemans, Hilde Tobi, Pieternel Luning and Martin Mulder (Extract 2.2.2); and Jessica Oudenampsen, Enny Das, Nicole Blijlevens and Marjolein van de Pol (Extract 2.2.3), each base their work on a concept referred to in this volume as ‘disciplined interdisciplinarity’ for the study and formulation of interdisciplinary ILOs. According to the research of Karen Fortuin, Judith Gulikers, Nynke Post Uiterweer, Carla Oonk and Cassandra Tho (Extract 2.3.1), a special role is reserved for boundary crossing – a fundamental process for high-quality education in general and particularly valuable in interdisciplinary higher education.

Although I’ve not lived there in years, I still call Burntwood home. If you’ve never been, I’m not entirely surprised. To give people an idea of its location, the residents of Burntwood spend half their life referring to it by its proximity to Cannock, Lichfield, Walsall or, if all else fails, Birmingham.

At the end of a slip road on the M6 Toll, Burntwood is a small ex-industrial town. In the early 1860s, the quest for black gold reached the area, and communities built around the town worked in the mines. By the end of the century, the population had reached 2,000, and it had become an established presence within the industrial landscape of the West Midlands. Following the closure of the mines nearly a century later, the town's population doubled as the area became an overspill for predominantly working-class families from Birmingham and the Black Country.

Nowadays, Burntwood has a population of around 27,000. With housing development over the last 70 years, it's slowly but steadily grown. That said, it's still a small town. When a McDonald's opened next to the Morrisons back in the early 2010s, it was a very, very big deal.

Now I’m a bit older, I love going back to Burntwood to see my parents. It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, or at least knows someone who does.

Being a boy from a working-class town profoundly influenced my relationship with the world around me. It guided my interests, friendship groups and thoughts about the future. It set expectations for my behaviour and the way I treated people. These unwritten rules dictated how safe I felt to engage in education, and which emotions were permissible to display openly in front of others. During childhood, personal circumstances entwined with these expectations, leading to my experience of acute anxiety. I missed several years of formal education and was eventually excluded from school at age 13.

For the next decade, how I was expected to ‘be a man’ played an influential role in decisions to take drugs, engage in sexist behaviour and get into fights. Conflicting messages about what I had to do, and whom I had to be, led to bad decisions. A cycle of hurting myself and others. Chasing validation and acceptance from friends so that I could feel better about being me. In the world that I was a part of at the time, to be successfully masculine often meant inflicting harm. It could be physical or emotional, and it always came at a price. Shame. For each instance of hurt inflicted on to others, a small erosion of self-worth followed. In time, wounds deepened. Like many of my friends, I turned to self-medication. A drink, a smoke or a pill to temporarily numb the psychological and emotional sting of how it felt to be me. It's only now, after many years, that I have the tools to critically reflect on the journey. To develop and communicate an understanding of what may have been happening and why.

While it's my hope that the conversations which have taken place so far have been interesting, it is also hard to escape or excuse the fact that, up until this chapter, none of the voices heard within the book come from individuals under the age of 30. In other words, the people interviewed in this book are recounting experiences of boyhood which involved calling people on landline telephones, using Ceefax to get the football scores and buying a disposable camera to take on holiday with you. A different world. While many individuals have conducted research or work regularly with young men, none of our voices can speak with the authority of lived experience. An expertise on what it's truly like to be navigating adolescent life as a working-class young man today.

In a post-pandemic Britain, currently undergoing the greatest cost-of-living crisis of a generation, the edges of socio-economic inequality are sharper and the cuts are deeper. With the rise of the manosphere and social media influencers such as Andrew Tate,1 working-class boys’ place within society is constantly debated and discussed by the media, politicians and educators alike. Within all of this, there is a notable lack of space given to the voices of those who feel the consequences most keenly, the real experts in what it's like to navigate these challenges: the young men themselves.

So far, I have gone to great lengths to challenge some of the common stereotypes surrounding young working-class men. To dispel myths surrounding an innate ‘aggression, laziness and apathy’ which are all too often attributed to the group with little evidence to justify the claims. Rather than continue to engage in conversation surrounding who they are not, this chapter takes a slightly different approach. It instead talks about who they are likely to be. Not from a place of assumption, but from one of evidence. It describes how these same ‘disruptive’ young men often hold responsibilities which directly contest the sweeping generalisations which are all too often made about them. That, as young working-class men, they are disproportionately likely to hold caring responsibilities for close family members within the home.

In the autumn of 2022, I was sat at a makeshift desk in my studio apartment, having an online meeting for work. As my job involves regular interaction with schools, colleges, youth, community and third sector organisations, I was chatting with a representative from a charity called MYTIME Young Carers. Based in Dorset, MYTIME work to support young people who have caring responsibilities for a parent, sibling or close relative. As the meeting progressed, the face floating on my laptop screen went into a little more detail about what ‘counts’ as a young carer.

As a little boy, working for a university wasn't exactly high up on my list of desired career destinations. In fact, I didn't even know that the job I do existed.

Day to day, my role involves leading a small team to design and deliver creative projects with young people from backgrounds which are underrepresented in higher education. The work aims to provide opportunities to engage with creative subjects like animation, film or model making. For young people from more middle-class backgrounds, chances to engage in this type of learning are regular and numerous. For the young people we work with, they most certainly are not. With the decimation of creative subject provision in English state schools since 2010, the sparsity of opportunity to study creative subjects at GCSE level has, unsurprisingly, been experienced most significantly by young people who are already likely to feel the tight squeeze of socio-economic inequality.

In our work, we do our level best to swim against the tide. Attempting, despite the increasingly stark disparities in opportunity with secondary school curriculums, to cultivate the conditions whereby studying a creative subject at university could be framed as an expectation by the individuals we work with. Not as a fuzzy dream or ambition, but something they perceive as achievable and probable if it's something they’d like to pursue.

There is a significant omission in the previous chapter. For the last 7,000 words of this book, we’ve been discussing the experience of working-class young men through a narrow lens, one which provides exclusive attention to predominately White, deindustrialised, working-class communities in regions such as the Midlands, the North of England and South Wales. But what of the other young working-class men? Those who may reside in the UK's bigger cities like London, Birmingham or Manchester? If we are going to get to grips with what being a young working-class man in education means, then we need to widen our gaze, embracing a diversity of experiences which come with differing locations, cultures and social histories.

As a White, now middle-class man, it is unlikely I’d be sanctioned for overlooking knowledge and experiences which don't come from White, middle-class sources. In fact, it happens all too often. And as someone from a small, predominantly White working-class town in the West Midlands, I could be let off by arguing that I don't have the required foundation of lived experience to speak about such experiences with any sense of legitimacy. I don't know what it's like to grow up in London, and I will certainly never be able to understand what it's like to navigate our educational systems and structures as a young working-class Black man. All of these things, however, make it more important that they are discussed.