Designing Interdisciplinary Education

Abstract

Now, more than ever, higher education faces the challenge of educating students to see beyond the limits of their own discipline and to come up with innovative integrated solutions to our contemporary problems. Designing Interdisciplinary Education serves as a foothold for interdisciplinary initiatives in higher education, whether it be programmes, minors, courses or extra-curricular activities. It offers accessible guidance and practical advice for university teachers and curriculum leaders who aim to develop, implement and sustain a successful interdisciplinary approach to their teaching at the classroom, course or programme level. The book’s ‘how to’ approach addresses several important topics such as formulating and assessing interdisciplinary learning outcomes, embedding integration in the programme design, the features of an interdisciplinary teacher, interdisciplinary teaching in practice, and didactic methods that nurture interdisciplinary understanding. This handbook incorporates numerous case studies, key advices, and exercises from a variety of interdisciplinary programmes in diverse countries. The ideas elaborated in this handbook are based on the theories and practices used at the I0nstitute for Interdisciplinary Studies, the University of Amsterdam’s knowledge centre for interdisciplinary learning and teaching.

Curricular Articulation in Higher Education: An Experience in Initial Teacher Education

“…Thus, interdisciplinarity allows for a deeper understanding of the contents being studied, since different disciplines are interconnected [21]. However, in addition to the gains in terms of articulation, we share the view of some scholars [22], who believe that interdisciplinary tasks contribute to the increase of disciplinespecific knowledge, promoting critical thinking and creativity in both teachers and students [11].…”

The Impact of Technology-Supported Interdisciplinary Integration on Critical Thinking and Creativity: The Perspective of Pre-Service Teachers

“…The participants attributed the reasons for their positive views on interdisciplinary activities to the fact that they enable meaningful learning, are associated with daily life, are more beneficial to themselves, and are effective. As de Greef et al (2017) underlined in the literature, the interdisciplinary approach enables students to see things from a broad perspective, while in the study by Repko et al (2016), it is stated that this approach method also helps students to relate the real world to their own education. In the context of higher education, this approach will contribute positively to the formation of creative environments and to the creation of a wide range of collective fields of study, as well as to innovative thinking skills (Gardiner, 2020).…”

Motion design and visual communication in the era of ‘diffuse design’ paradigm: analysis and evaluation of a didactic experiment

“…Design education becomes the only viable tool for new approaches to be acknowledged, analyzed, understood, tested and validated and for the aforementioned differences to be taken into account. Interdisciplinary, experiential, interactive and intercultural training paths that prepare to face the complexity of contemporaneity (American Institute of Graphic Artists 2017; De Greef et al 2017;Klaassen 2018;Self et al 2019) have been taken as a preferential strategy to learn the design process and to place the product, message or service in real and dynamic scenarios. As Gosling (2017) writes in a commentary on AIGA's Design 2025 report: 'design students of the present and future need to be able to […] evaluate their work in terms of its potential social, cultural, technological, economic and environmental impact.…”