Universities need to move interdisciplinary professional associations to the next step

As more academics become interested in inter- and transdisciplinary learning and teaching, what is the best way for us to share good practices? How can we use them to set standards and for accreditation? And what would it mean for inter- and transdisciplinary education to be institutionalised? Communities of practice play an important role, but are not enough. We also need professional associations and international peak bodies.

Communities of practice work well within institutions to share good practices and lessons learned. For example, starting this year, everyone enrolling in an undergraduate degree at my university will be expected to develop the “capability to employ discipline-based knowledge in transdisciplinary problem-solving” by the time they graduate. A university-wide community of practice is playing a key role in sharing practice lessons and developing new teaching collaborations. This includes developing resources for teaching about teamwork and streamlining that teaching across multiple courses, covering all parts of the university.

• A framework to develop communities of practice
• Why we need a new model for professional development credentials
• What a transdisciplinary lens brings to university teaching

Communities of practice can also work across institutions. Working groups or special interest groups attached to professional associations are a common model. For example, a working group on integration experts and expertise has been figuring out what expertise is required for cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral integration, what it means to be an integration expert and how integration expertise can be fostered and institutionalised.

Another working group has reviewed how to make toolkits more effective in bringing together methods, processes, concepts, heuristics, frameworks and other resources for inter- and transdisciplinary education. 

Beyond communities of practice

But when it comes to setting standards, certification and institutionalising inter- and transdisciplinary education, communities of practice are not enough. Unlike disciplines that achieve these goals through well-established, large and powerful professional associations and peak bodies, inter- and transdisciplinarity are still relatively unorganised. They are characterised by small and relatively new associations, and an absence of peak bodies.

I am the president of one of those small associations, the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance). The two cross-institutional working groups described earlier are two of the communities of practice that we support. We will soon establish a new working group on education and training to provide an ongoing forum for discussing and sharing the issues related to inter- and transdisciplinary teaching.

For a professional association such as ours, to move from supporting communities of practice to leading discussions about standards and accreditation, as well as to forming peak bodies focused on institutionalisation, we need to focus on the following three issues.

First, how can we be truly global? The relative newness of inter- and transdisciplinarity, at least in widespread acceptance of them, means that we have an opportunity to advance globally, combining expertise and experience from around the world, rather than first establishing ways forward in the Global North and exporting them to the Global South. 

Second, how can we muster the necessary resources? The ITD Alliance is at that most difficult of stages in the life of a professional association, when the opportunities for action and impact are considerably greater than the financial and personnel resources available to meet them. We are looking for imaginative ways to attract the necessary volunteer efforts and fuel a virtuous cycle, where impactful activity attracts members and funding, leading to more meaningful activity, attracting more members and funding, and so on.

Third, we also need to ask whether inter- and transdisciplinarity is actually the right focus. The growing interest in inter- and transdisciplinarity has been stoked by concern about urgent and complex societal and environmental problems. We have realised that discipline-based approaches are not enough and that not only multiple disciplines but also communities, decision-makers and other affected parties should be involved. But inter- and transdisciplinarity are not the only recognised ways of crossing disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. Other approaches include systems thinking, action research, post-normal science, community operational research, design science, the science of team science, implementation science and the decision sciences. 

Many of these approaches are much older than inter- and transdisciplinarity, but what unites us is that almost all the professional associations that we have given birth to are small, with memberships in the hundreds or, sometimes, the low thousands. This is tiny compared with the behemoths that are discipline-based. Small size, coupled with the fragmentation of effort across multiple diverse and unconnected professional associations, means that we are largely invisible, and have no influence at research policy and funding tables. 

An effective peak body needs to harness all that disparate effort, maintaining the distinctiveness of existing approaches and exploiting the overlaps. This would have benefits for what we teach too. For example, on the topic of integration, there would be huge benefit in bringing together insights from inter- and transdisciplinarians, systems thinkers, action researchers, post-normal scientists, implementation scientists and more. Much could be profitably done, but we need to find a way out of the vicious cycle of fragmentation, limited resources and little influence. 

Where do we go from here? If we are serious about impacting complex societal and environmental problems, we need to consider not only the micro-level and communities of practice, but also to lift our gaze to the macro-level. We need to look at the ongoing development of inter- and transdisciplinarity and other approaches, and how they can most effectively work together through professional associations and peak bodies. 

Gabriele Bammer is professor of integration and implementation sciences at the Australian National University, and president of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. 

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