Chapter overview

The chapter explores the learning that occurs for students in interdisciplinary higher education. Students in interdisciplinary higher-education courses and curricula develop competences for continuing their study paths successfully and for their future careers. Besides integration, such competences are mainly critical thinking, collaboration and communication. The chapter outlines processes towards competence development as well as the concrete competencies gained, and how.

Carolyn Haynes and Jeannie Brown Leonard (Extract 1.1.1) explain how students develop insights into interdisciplinarity itself and how their integrated academic identities are formed over the course of a BA programme. Ria van der Lecq's study (Extract 1.1.2) builds on the research of Haynes and Leonard. Van der Lecq demonstrates how interdisciplinary liberal education empowers students to take ownership of their learning and become self-aware young adults, positioned within a broader context of others with diverse disciplined and integrated academic identities. Hannah B. Love, Jennifer E. Cross, Bailey K. Fosdick, Elizabeth Tofany and Ellyn M. Dickmann (Extract 1.1.3) highlight how team teaching and learning supports students in the latter process of gaining contextual insight and developing collaborative skills. Michael J. Stebleton, Lisa S. Kaler, Kate K. Diamond and Crystal Lee (Extract 1.2.1) and Carl Gombrich (Extract 1.2.2) zoom in on the link between interdisciplinary liberal education and employability. Again, both metacognitive understanding and inter-and intrapersonal skills are highlighted as key factors.

Chapter overview

Once an interdisciplinary higher-education course or curriculum has been designed, many aspects of teaching and learning need to be implemented practically. The chapter brings together literature on these practical aspects, including teacher feedforward and teacher feedback, aspects of interdisciplinary, intercultural and technology-supported team dynamics, and student reflection during and upon the interdisciplinary learning process. Keeping up-to-date on these practical matters helps avoid common mistakes in implementing interdisciplinary higher education.

The first key text in this chapter is from Ilja Boor, Debby Gerritsen, Linda de Greef and Jessica Rodermans (Extract 4.1.1). This text explores the theory and practice of powerful feedback, while recognising that the most powerful methods are peer-and self-assessment. Another way to scaffold student learning is through the use of technology. Rianne van Lambalgen and Febe de Vos (Extract 4.2.1) discuss the use of digital and non-digital collaborative tools for integration-based interdisciplinary higher education. They demonstrate how such tools may help negotiate individual and team-based understanding of disciplinarity and knowledge integration. Annemarie Horn, Eduardo Urias and Marjolein Zweekhorst (Extract 4.3.1) guide us through the dynamics as they play out within multidisciplinarily composed student teams conducting interdisciplinary research. Referring to research of the differing roles of students in such teams, they present a nuanced, research-based framework in which integrative competencies are complemented by two additional reflective competencies they term ‘epistemic stability’ and ‘epistemic adaptability’.

Chapter overview

The chapter explores the learning that occurs for teachers in interdisciplinary higher education. It highlights how teachers develop competencies for both their current and future careers, while also gaining personal and professional satisfaction. The chapter outlines these developmental processes, the specific competencies gained, and how they are acquired through dialogical practice, as well as through reflection and scholarly learning.

Svetlana Nikitina's work on interdisciplinary cognition (Extract 5.1.1) clearly and convincingly outlines a set of ‘moves’ that foster the development of an integrative mindset. Novice and experienced interdisciplinarians will recognise their own potential or actual growth within multidisciplinary research or teaching teams. The metacognition stimulated by Nikitina's work will further enhance educational pedagogies and didactics. Katrine Lindvig and Lars Ulriksen (Extract 5.1.2) extend the novice-to-expert continuum to the institutional level, explaining how interdisciplinary pedagogies and didactics are often marginalised within institutions, even as students explicitly recognise their benefits.

The next set of key texts reflects collectively on the changing role of teachers in interdisciplinary higher education: from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’ (Alison King and Charles D. Morrison in Extracts 5.2.1 and 5.2.2), from ‘guide on the side’ to ‘impresario with a scenario’ (Anthony Weston in Extract 5.2.3) and from ‘sage on the stage’ and ‘guide on the side’ to ‘meddler in the middle’ (Erica McWilliam in Extract 5.2.4).

Chapter overview

The volume builds on existing academic literature on interdisciplinary teaching and learning, making it a research-informed publication. To help readers’ efforts also become research-informing, the volume includes a chapter on research of interdisciplinary higher education. While educational research is growing in both scope and significance, it is not a new field. This concise chapter delves into Boyer's historical scholarships of integration and teaching, while also outlining the key differences and similarities between disciplinarily conceived empirical educational research and practice-based ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’ (SoTL). The chapter concludes by presenting a model that illustrates a spectrum between structure and openness in the research of interdisciplinary higher education.

Chapter 2 of Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate has been republished as Extract 7.1 in this volume. In this chapter, Boyer introduces the innovative scholarships of integration and teaching alongside the traditional scholarships of discovery and application. This volume stands on Boyer's shoulders, as the saying goes, since most of the key texts republished here represent a form of the scholarship of integration, teaching or both. Extract 7.2 by Maria Larsson, Katarina Mårtensson, Linda Price and Torgny Roxå illustrates how the scholarship of teaching occupies a diverse space that includes, bluntly put, top-down paradigmatic forms of educational research and bottom-up exploratory forms of intervention-based SoTL. This volume has benefited from research in both traditions and the work that it aims to be generative of will hopefully do the same.

The volume Key Texts on Interdisciplinary Higher Education responds to the growing demand to educate for interdisciplinary research (see, for example, Lattuca, 2001; Lyall et al, 2011, 110– 15; Szostak, 2024) and for the burgeoning profession of ‘integration experts’ (Hoffmann et al, 2022). Interdisciplinary research is conducted in multidisciplinarily composed teams and works towards integrated understandings of or solutions for complex fundamentally academic or societally driven questions or problems. Integration experts work as bridge-builders in a wide variety of fields, including multidisciplinary academia. They have experienced what it means to use a specifically disciplinary lens in research, but they have also been trained to take in a disciplinarily neutral position. The latter self-positioning of the integration expert is conducive to facilitating conversations between and collaborations of disciplinary experts with varying backgrounds.

The necessity to educate for growing knowledge about and expertise in integrationist interdisciplinarity makes it urgent to construct a research base that can be used by designers of and teachers in interdisciplinary higher education. These designers and teachers want to improve, update or benchmark their own knowledge and skills before teaching others. They have their own disciplinary backgrounds ranging from STEM through SSH to FPA. Given the prominence of interdisciplinarity at higher-education institutions worldwide, many of these educational designers and educators will have crossed thematic boundaries in research and/or teaching. Not many, however, will have oriented themselves towards the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity itself.

Disclaimer: This is not an exhaustive overview. The authors have attempted to have as broad of a view as they could. However, it is unavoidable that worthwhile initiatives were missed. The authors would also like to mention that there are geographical and linguistical limitations to their research. The authors are both Dutch and English speakers, working from the Netherlands. This means that sources in other languages might have been missed and that a significant bias in their online searches for geographically European sources might be noticeable. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this overview provides a starting point for anyone interested in finding like-minded people, initiatives and tools to work with in interdisciplinary higher education.

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.