CONNECTS is researching design principles of transdisciplinary education, to create a framework that can be used by educators to incorporate transdisciplinary learning into higher education curricula. The project will employ over 10 distinct case studies to identify and validate design principles to scaffold and enable co-learning and foster transdisciplinary competencies that ultimately contribute to societal transformations.
Challenges in integrating Transdisciplinarity in Education
Joint transdisciplinary efforts of researchers, engineers, governments, companies, and citizens are needed to address grand societal challenges. Higher education can play a key role in developing transdisciplinary competencies and overcoming challenges that stem from differences in backgrounds, interests, values, and perspectives of the various actors involved.
However, integrating transdisciplinary learning into curricula remains challenging. These challenges occur, for example, when combining curriculum requirements of students from different faculties or allocating resources to support collaborations between societal and higher education actors.
A new framework for Transdisciplinary Learning
The CONNECTS project will develop, implement, evaluate, and integrate design principles for transdisciplinary learning into a comprehensive framework. These principles will describe the characteristics of transdisciplinary educational configurations that enable and support co-learning and that allow organisational embedding of transdisciplinary configurations in higher education curricula.
Educational design research to integrate theory and practice
The project adopts an educational design approach to construct a framework validated by design principles. This involves developing a framework based on a literature review on transdisciplinary education and an empirical inventory of experiences with existing transdisciplinary initiatives. The existing educational configurations are then analysed and adapted, and new configurations are created, based on the design principles.
At least 10 diverse cases will be employed to accomplish this. Each consortium member will bring a case to the project. The cases will be used to corroborate, adapt, elaborate, and/or specify the general design principles for transdisciplinary education as well as validate the robustness of the framework. Through different cycles of design, adaptation, and cross-case analysis, the aim is to collectively develop and advance co-creative educational approaches that can contribute to addressing complex societal problems.
The Athena Institute is coordinating a case within the project consortium entitled The Transdisciplinary Global Health Challenge and leads methodology and data analysis for the entire project.