National Interdisciplinary Education (NIE) Conference

In an ever more complex and interconnected world, that is faced with grand societal challenges such as climate change and food security, future generations need to interact, learn and work together with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures, within and outside the academic world.

That is, they need Boundary Crossing Competence: the ability to recognize, seek, appreciate and utilise tensions that arise when different practices meet,  in order to learn from each other and to co-create new transformative pathways for copying with ongoing challenges.

In recent years, more and more universities have created inter- and transdisciplinary learning environments in their educational programmes. Such programmes make learning across the boundaries of disciplines, cultures and sectors an implicit or explicit goal of the education they offer. Where interdisciplinary education focusses on bringing different (academic) disciplines together, transdisciplinary learning focusses on including non-academics, or societal partners in the learning process and context. Both interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity bring different boundary crossing challenges to education, that can result in rich learning opportunities for students and non-academic partners.

The 5th National Interdisciplinary Education conference will bring together teachers, researchers and students to explore opportunities for inter- and transdisciplinary education to foster students’ – and other learners’ – ability to learn and work together across boundaries and develop their own professional identity. 

This event has ended; you can check out this blog to read more about the event as well as see the manifesto drawing from the discussions that took place during the conference.