This contribution reports on a four-year collaborative project involving a consortium of eleven Dutch Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). The project aims to identify principles for designing and implementing sustainable educational configurations that foster transdisciplinary co-learning among students, teachers, and external stakeholders. Transdisciplinary education extends beyond multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches (De Greef et al., 2017). Whereas multidisciplinary approaches bring together disciplinary perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches synthesize disciplinary knowledge, often excluding experiential or non-academic knowledge, transdisciplinary approaches emphasize joint knowledge co-creation across academic and societal domains. Here, students, teachers, and stakeholders collaboratively engage with complex societal challenges, by shaping knowledge, technologies, behaviors, and social structures needed to address these issues (e.g., Fortuin et al., 2024; Knickel et al., 2019). In this project, each participating HEI collaborates with one of its transdisciplinary learning environments (TLEs). In these environments, students work with societal partners across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries, bringing diverse perspectives to local, regional, and global challenges with the ambition to contribute to real-world change. Designing and embedding such configurations into existing curricula is challenging, partly due to differing interests, values, and expectations among participants. The central research question guiding the project is: What principles support the design and implementation of sustainable educational configurations that enable and scaffold transdisciplinary co-learning among students, teachers, and stakeholders, with the aim of contributing to societal transformations? Using a cyclical educational design research approach (McKenney & Reeves, 2012), the project investigates three core challenges: (1) enabling co-learning, (2) scaffolding transdisciplinary learning, and (3) embedding transdisciplinary education sustainably within higher education curricula. This symposium contribution presents results from three phases of the project: Phase 1: Development of a tentative framework of design principles, informed by a literature review, an inventory of national and international initiatives, and participant feedback. Phase 2: Application of the framework in six in-depth case studies of existing higher education configurations. These cases were analysed, adapted, and compared through qualitative and quantitative methods, resulting in a more refined framework. Phase 3: Redesign, enactment, and evaluation of the refined framework in the same six cases, supplemented by six additional higher education cases to further validate and elaborate the design principles. Through iterative cycles of analysis, redesign, and evaluation, the project works towards a validated, context-sensitive framework that identifies effective strategies for fostering transdisciplinary learning across diverse higher education contexts.

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