Designing for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: A Phenomenographic Study of Course Leaders’ Experiences

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity has become a core aim of many universities, resulting in the expansion of interdisciplinary courses that prepare students to live and work in a world marked by increasing complexity, uncertainty, and rapid technological advancement. However, there remains limited clarity and agreement on the meanings, purposes, and practices of interdisciplinary education. This thesis identifies and maps out the variation in the understandings, conceptions, and experiences of designing for interdisciplinary teaching and of 23 course leaders—academics who made substantial intellectual contributions to the conceptualisation, creation, design, redesign, or enactment of interdisciplinary courses. The thesis investigates: (1) how course leaders understand interdisciplinarity, (2) how they conceive of its purpose in interdisciplinary education, (3) how they approach interdisciplinary teaching and learning in their course designs, (4) how they experience educational design processes, and (5) how they experience their institutional environment when developing and sustaining interdisciplinary courses. Together the outcomes contribute in ways that synthesising individual accounts of practice synthesis approaches cannot, showing the relationships between course leaders’ different ways of experiencing. The thesis shows that designing for interdisciplinary teaching and learning was experienced as collaborative, knowledge-centred, characterised by ongoing learning, plural, situated, and challenging. These outcomes highlight the importance of informal collegial networks, research on design practices, and conceptualising design work as knowledge work. It further discusses the potential of interdisciplinary design practices to contribute to disciplinary education and to shape their institutional environments. This thesis can be of use to interdisciplinary course leaders and others responsible for creating and sustaining interdisciplinary courses and programmes in universities.