When confronted with Uncertainty and crisis, higher education has historically turned to interdisciplinarity as a means of promoting innovation. This was the case in 1970 when OECD hosted the Interdisciplinarity. Problems of teaching and research in universities conference (Apostel, 1972). In current European higher education policy, interdisciplinarity is an integral part of the green transition, transnational higher education collaboration, and development of competences for an increasingly technologized labor market (Jæger, forthcoming). Many universities respond to such policies by encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration in research and education.

This paper will qualify the debate on interdisciplinarity in higher education by investigating a current case involving an interdisciplinarity project at a Danish PBL university. We ask: which general takeaways emerge from analyzing a current interdisciplinarity project initiated as a catalyst for higher education innovation and SSH/STEM-integration, from a social- and human science perspective?

The case project elements

Collaboration between STEM and SSH programs: As part of the 2022 to 2026 strategy to be a mission-oriented university, the university management encourages educational programs to increase collaboration across disciplinary and departmental boundaries, particularly in the form of collaboration across the SSH/STEM divide.

New skills in focus: The goal of the new interdisciplinarity project is to educate graduates with advanced collaboration skills, phrased as a “focus on holistic thinking”, “ability to work across disciplines” “affect and adapt to the development of society” and “enhance students’ ability to transcend their own disciplinary domain and engage in cross-boundary cooperation” (AAU Strategy 2022–2026).

Transdisciplinarity as the end goal: the university encourages collaboration projects that range from relatively limited interaction between disciplines and programs (but still ensuring that students become familiar with ‘foreign’ disciplines) to collaboration forms that require students to engage in joint problem-solving through integration of disciplinary perspectives and engagement of external partners. Later, cross-program get-to-know activities are likely to become mandatory. Study activities that require individual students to work in project groups composed of students from different disciplines will be arranged as elective modules.  

Theoretical-Analytical approaches

Though interconnected, we distinguish between two dimensions of interdisciplinarity (Hultengren 1979) in our analysis:

A) The epistemological dimension relates to the processes of scientific work
The promotion of interdisciplinarity as an institution-wide innovation project may intentionally and unintentionally unsettle disciplinary self-conceptions and question established boundaries between research fields and programs. In order to investigate the implications of such disturbances, the proposed conceptual framework enables an analysis of differences between disciplines (with a particular focus on differences between SSH and STEM disciplines (Bernstein 1999; Abbott 2001)), different levels of interdisciplinarity (we propose a tripartite typology distinguishing between “borrowing” (Klein 2018), “trading zone interdisciplinarity” (Collins, Evans & Gorman 2019) and transdisciplinarity), and the translation of disciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary integration in teaching and learning (Jensen, Ravn & Stentoft 2019; Brassler 2020).

B) The educational-organizational dimension relates to the formation of certain competences in students

When we preliminarily turn to the existing practices of interdisciplinarity within the case university, we identify shared characteristics by several programs within the SSH faculty. This leads us to inquire into the historical background of these programs. Mostly forgotten today it turns out they share a period in the 1970s where a specific pedagogical tradition, the problem-oriented project pedagogy tradition (Hultengren 1976, Illeris 1974), was very influential. According to this tradition the project work of students is student-directed and problem-oriented, and problem-orientation “entails interdisciplinarity”, because it is the identified authentic problem - and not the traditions of the discipline – that is guiding the choice of theory and methods (Illeris 1981:15,99). The emphasis on interdisciplinarity within the tradition is inspired by the OECD 1970 conference and social critique (Hultengren, 1979).

Case study Insights regarding implications of large-scale interdisciplinarity projects are reached through a case study approach. The data informing the case study consist of university policies (mission statements), concept papers produced during the project’s planning phase, records of seminars, workshops and meetings held during the project’s piloting phase, and finally presentations of initiated pilot projects at program level. The study aims for a nuanced understanding of the project’s underlying rationale and its implications as it unfolds in local contexts and seeks to realize the ideals of a descriptive case study (Flyvbjerg 2006, Gerring & Cojocaru 2016). Insider action research As the involved researchers are members of the academic staff of the case organization, and as one or more of the researchers participated in several of the activities constituting the project’s planning and pilot phase, we take inspiration in the “insider action research” approach (Coghlan & Holian 2021). The insider action research (IAR) approach characterizes a type of research conducted by organizational members into organizational change processes that involve “real organizational issues” (Coghlan & Holian 2021, p 14), in other words not projects or experiments initiated for the purpose of research. IAR draws on collaborative relations to organizational members and units and deep contextual knowledge. As positioned in the university’s PBL research unit (Institute for Advanced Studies in PBL), a unit that is directly involved in managing the case project, the researchers are a position to both follow the project closely and, to some extent influence it within the boundaries set by the university leadership. Deep contextual knowledge also includes intimate understanding of an organization’s history and its intellectual and cultural roots. Thus, the study includes a literature and document study of interdisciplinarity’s role in the foundation of the case university as a Danish reform university (Andersen & Keldsen 2015) based on problem- and project-based learning. Hermeneutical-phenomenological research paradigm Following Blaikie’s (2009) work on research design we take a range of elements into consideration before commencing serious empirical research processes, to reflect major design decisions and their implications on other elements. Blaikie (2009) distinguishes between ontological assumptions, epistemological assumptions, research strategy (methodology), data methods, subject theories, ethics and analysis. Following the hermeneutical-phenomenological research paradigm we assume the lifeworld as our ontological foundation (Feilberg et_al,2018), the understanding knowledge-guiding interest as our epistemology (Habermas, 1971), and the hermeneutical circle as our research strategy with interplay between parts and whole, description and interpretation.

The case study is expected to provide a detailed description of the multiple understandings of interdisciplinarity involved in a strategic change project promoting interdisciplinarity across programs and departments, of the varied realizations of interdisciplinary teaching and learning as a consequence of the project, and the different forms of institutional and pedagogic ‘frictions’ that project implementation entails. Based on the case study, we expect to be able share findings and take-aways regarding the following themes: Enriched understanding of the complexity of interdisciplinary encounters as they occur between disciplines and programs as a consequence of the project. Is it, for example, possible to reach forms of interdisciplinary integration that go beyond “borrowing” and develop common ontological, methodological and conceptual platforms across differing ontological and epistemological assumptions, in projects that combine SSH and STEM programs? And how does the disciplinary complexity of individual programs impact collaboration across program and department boundaries? Sharpened ontological, epistemological and theoretical concepts helpful for the understanding of differences between disciplines involved in interdisciplinary collaboration, and for analyzing levels of interdisciplinary integration. Development of context-sensitive pedagogic approaches to the facilitation of interdisciplinary encounters in higher education. Strategic promotion of interdisciplinarity will only result in the desired learning outcomes if interdisciplinary collaboration makes sense to the involved teachers and students and the questions and problems they purse.

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