Four things to consider to create a safe and inspiring interdisciplinary learning environment

When developing interdisciplinary courses, are educators staying too close to what’s familiar? While we all want to create inspiring and valuable courses, often academics can focus too much on the content of the course, opting to add a new perspective to well-known subject matter from their own field.

Consequently, we fail to pay attention to the design aspects that contribute to an integrative learning environment for students in interdisciplinary education. The differences in norms, values and assumptions that exist between students from different disciplines may hamper their interdisciplinary collaboration. Instead, let’s consider the material, temporal and socio-cultural aspects of the learning environment. Here, I’ll offer four considerations that teachers and educational developers can make to foster an integrative learning climate in an interdisciplinary course or programme. 

1. Where will the education take place? 

Creating a learning environment where every student feels safe means the choice of location for education is vital. The physical location in which interdisciplinary education takes place needs to equally represent different disciplines. Make a conscious choice: does teaching take place in a building normally occupied by one of the disciplines involved? Or rather in a neutral location, equally (un)familiar to all students involved? 

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The furnishings of the physical location can raise unconscious expectations among the students about the learning activities and desired behaviour that they should display. Interdisciplinary education often aims to encourage interaction and collaboration among students. Consider a space divided into groups of tables and chairs, allowing students to focus on their fellow students and encouraging them to learn from each other.

2. Will you use specific (integrative) tools? 

Of course, encouraging the exchange of perspectives between students from different disciplines is core to interdisciplinary education. Provide students with tutorials, guides and discipline-specific glossaries, offering supporting information that can help them to understand the theories, methods and perspectives used in other disciplines, and to use them in integrative processes. 

Use specific tools for interdisciplinary education to support collaboration and integration, such as the CoNavigator. Boundary objects can facilitate communication between students from different disciplines – for example, when they collaborate on a scientific paper or performance. 

If the goal of the course is to achieve integration, think about how the teaching format guides the students’ integrative learning process. Perhaps look at integrative (research) formats that specifically guide the integrative process to inform the design of your interdisciplinary course. Examples of such integrative methods applied in an educational context, referred to as integrative teaching methods, can be found online. 

3. How heavy is the students’ workload? 

Students need time to become accustomed to the aspects of interdisciplinary education that are new to them. Their workload will be different from that experienced by students in monodisciplinary education. Students gain many new impressions in interdisciplinary education, including contact with their peers from other disciplines, with different worldviews, values and norms. In addition, they’re often introduced to unfamiliar teaching and assessment methods. 

Pay attention to the inclusivity of the learning and assessment formats, as different learning and assessment formats in interdisciplinary courses have a tendency to benefit one group of students over another group.

Another important factor is the time frame for interdisciplinary education. For example, have you scheduled time for students to become acquainted and accustomed to one another? Do students have enough time to delve into new perspectives and absorb them? Does their learning take place only in the classroom, or also at home, while they’re processing all new impressions?

4. Which disciplines will you be combining and what is the balance between disciplines? 

The synergy that students experience in interdisciplinary education can affect the achievability of the learning outcomes. Students can have biases towards other disciplines, so it matters which disciplines are combined in interdisciplinary education. You should study possible biases, expectations and feelings of inequality in advance, and take them into consideration when designing your course. Consider facilitating a dialogue between students from different disciplines to create a positive effect on the hierarchies experienced by students, and on the learning outcomes they achieve during the course. 

Also, consider the balance in the numbers of students of each discipline participating in the education. Think of different scenarios in your educational design. For example, what if the balance in numbers is skewed? If there is an imbalance, learning activities could be designed to be more teacher-intensive than student-intensive, students could be assigned certain disciplinary roles, and/or the group-forming process could be handled more consciously.

The four considerations as listed above contribute to creating a learning environment in which interdisciplinary collaboration and integration can flourish. But to truly foster an inspiring, safe and accessible interdisciplinary learning climate, we need to focus on constructive alignment of learning outcomes, learning activities, assessment and the learning environment.

Jessica Oudenampsen is assistant professor of liberal arts and sciences at Utrecht University.

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Didactical Design Tool Interdisciplinary Education