Testimonial

CONNECTS - Developing principles for designing and implementing sustainable, transdisciplinary educational configurations

Tackling major societal issues requires joint, cross-disciplinary efforts by scientists, engineers, governments, businesses and citizens. Fruitful collaboration between these groups is challenging due to differences in background, interests, values or conflicting perspectives. Higher education can play a key role in the development of transdisciplinary competences, but transdisciplinary learning is only implemented in curricula to a limited extent.

It seems as if we – in the Netherlands – are actually doing a lot on this topic, compared to much international literature. We have to invent how to really get students and stakeholders to learn
Researcher

A consortium of 11 Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences partners from eleven higher education institutions collaborate in a design-oriented research program that develops principles for designing and implementing sustainable, transdisciplinary educational configurations. It seeks to enable and support transdisciplinary – boundary crossing - collaborative learning between students, teachers and stakeholders for the benefit of societal transformations.

A literature review and empirical exploration of eleven Dutch cases show:

  • Little knowledge on how to actually design for, support and optimally use co-learning/co-creation between students and external stakeholders.
  • While talking about transdisciplinarity, in practice the examples are mostly about collaboration between students from different disciplines (eg. interdisciplinarity). Also consulting transdisciplinarity (i.e., students work on an assignment for an external commissioner) is found more often the participatory transdisciplinarity (Möbjork, 2010) in which students and external partners are co-learning in an equal collaboration.
  • The Dutch empirical cases offer more insights regarding fostering co-learning, while also here, actually designing for co-learning is lacking. Some lessons learned:
  • Having a real physical space outside the educational institute where students and stakeholders meet regularly
  • Having learning objectives that require students to show learning with and from external partners
  • Having regular reflective and feedback sessions to explicate learning and insights
  • Challenging students constantly to get out of the “executive role”, stressing that no one has the answer and everybody is learning
  • Paying explicit attention to impact: how do you want to make a sustainable impact? What can be a follow up, either for the community/next student group?
  • Assessment of co-learning/co-creation across educational programmes and external partners is a bottleneck
  • Embedding this type of learning within educational programmes is challenging. Most designers stress that they need to do concessions to get it into the educational system and silos.

What is next?

Building on these insights, a first set of design dimensions for transdisciplinary learning configuration for co-learning is being developed.

This is used by 6 Dutch cases to assess their current course, identify their ideal situation, and make (small) changes in their 2024-2025 round. The revisions are evaluated – by students, teachers and stakeholders - leading up to revised design dimensions/principles.

A follow up will be done in 2025-2026, which will also include 6 additional validation cases.

Many more insights are gained, which can be followed on the CONNECTS website or by joining the LinkedIn group.

Judith Gulikers (Education and Learning Sciences), Karen Fortuin (Marine Sciences, Earth Systems and Global Change) and Hanh Tran (Education and Learning Sciences) are involved in the CONNECTS project.

To find out more about CONNECTS, please contact Judith at judith.gulikers@wur.nl.