How to balance tension in interdisciplinary teaching and learning

What happens when an engineer, a theoretical physicist, a data scientist, a software developer, an educationalist and a social scientist walk into a room? In our case, it was the development of an online postgraduate certificate called Design for Learning Environments which has been running since 2021 and in the planning since 2019. The programme is structured with five disciplinary-focused modules and a final case study-oriented synoptic module, designed to integrate skills and knowledge from each disciplinary module. 

Universities have the expertise to create interdisciplinary knowledge but disciplinary and institutional silos often thwart the networking of both people and disciplines. In our case, we all met through institutional projects, including the creation of a new Dubai Campus education strategy and digital learning assets. Through those discussions, we realised that we each brought different perspectives to the design of learning environments. 

These perspectives were often complementary, but also often in tension. This tension we found was useful to work through collaboratively, and we wanted to bring this to the 60-credit, postgraduate, part-time, distance learning programme. The programme is aimed at those working at the intersection of learning and technology. We have found the concept of tension useful to outline how we have balanced competing priorities across disciplines and professional practice.

• Beyond the classroom: from PhD preparation to leadership
• Fostering interdisciplinary learning in large-scale doctoral programmes
• How to achieve interdisciplinary research? Focus on the people

Getting down into the detail and teaching the course for four years has left us reflecting on the interdisciplinary approach that we adopted in line with our own practice which has broadened our network to include students of the programme. 

The tensions that we have and are still tuning and balancing are:

Depth and breadth

Each of our disciplinary perspectives on design, learning and technology have significant academic literature and professional practice to draw upon. There are many undergraduate and postgraduate programmes aligned to them. 

This presents a challenge for what is included in a 10-credit module itself, but also for ensuring that the level pitched is suitable for an audience with diverse academic and professional backgrounds. A student may go from a 10-credit data science module to a more humanities and social sciences-orientated module, usually while carrying out their own professional practice. 

We also had to ensure that we met the benchmarks for a level seven postgraduate course. Achieving a disciplinary depth and interdisciplinary breadth was a balance and tension that we had to remain cognisant of, and we had to challenge each other when we drifted into the depths of a discipline or a surface-level engagement with disciplinary knowledge and practice. Consideration of the diversity of the student cohort and a consistent pedagogical model across the modules have proved crucial.

Academic literature and practice 

The tension between theory and practice is well trodden within the academy. And what theory means to a scientist in contrast to a social scientist is very different. Having a dialogue across modules and with students to ensure interdisciplinarity doesn’t confuse, but enhances knowledge, skills and practice, has been at the core of our work. 

We reconciled this by balancing the tension of theory and practice as praxis to ensure that academic literature was used as a critical tool, to consider design decisions and action in students’ own contexts. A by-product benefit of this was that it ensured all assessment involved each student’s own context and practice, following authentic assessment principles and countering the emergence of generative AI.

Grounding and integration in practice

In the final synoptic module, we challenge students to achieve sufficient disciplinary grounding but also to integrate across disciplinary and professional perspectives. This requires students to balance a practical response to a case study, but also to draw upon at least two disciplinary perspectives to find common ground in harmony with a viable, feasible and desirable prototype solution. 

The certificate is built on the ethos that successful learning environments are created through designerly and interdisciplinary practices. Grounding and depth in the disciplines is developed within the prerequisite five modules on coding, data, design, learning theory and the impacts of technology on society, with integration both taught and assessed in the final synoptic module.

Who integrates and how is it assessed?

A module that looks for integration across disciplinary perspectives challenges us as much as, if not more than, students. The case study synoptic module requires students to frame the problem and provide a design response. This requires some form of letting go from us and presents a challenge for grading and assessment.

Summative assessment is achieved with bespoke criteria (described below). A first marker addresses the integrated whole and how well integration has been achieved, while second and third markers are experts in the disciplinary perspectives used by students. 

Implementing integration was a significant challenge for us as an academic team. We went on our own learning journey to understand what was needed to be truly interdisciplinary, and realised that the final synoptic module needed to be taught and graded differently. 

Assessing interdisciplinary practice

Drawing upon research literature on interdisciplinarity assessment, we constructed a set of grading criteria, which assessed:

• communication
• disciplinary grounding 
• advancement through integration and common ground 
• critical awareness.

Providing the quality assurance for such an innovative programme required an invested external examiner. Ours has provided us with strong advice, combined with enthusiasm for the programme, and has been key to the iterative programme modifications. 

After designing and delivering the programme, we find we are even more enthusiastic for interdisciplinary teaching, learning and assessment. We have embraced the ethos of the programme ourselves with learning by doing in a reflective and critical manner, and our teaching has opened avenues for research and impact with the students. We hope this will help others beginning their own journey to interdisciplinarity. 

Adam Matthews is a senior research fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Acknowledgement: Thank you to Nicola Wilkin, Tim Jackson, Phil Ramsden (external examiner), Jaimie Miller-Friedmann, Jon Watkins and Richard Mason for their contributions to this article.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.