Final report from the research project InterPBL
Intro
All together, these have been five busy years with the luxury of time to reflect and further develop our early results. In engineering education, the concept of interdisciplinarity has been used in general terms for all types of collaboration among disciplines, no matter if these were within engineering, across engineering and science, or even across social sciences and engineering. As the knowledge and cognitive component in collaboration is a core, we started out to study the concept of interdisciplinarity for a higher degree of distinction in interdisciplinary collaboration. Find the final report here
In our review, we found that the knowledge and cognitive components are basic as the foundation for collaboration; however, knowledge will be combined with elements of culture and learning. Therefore, the collaborative aspect is complex because various disciplines are establishing themselves as communities of practice, which encompass many elements beyond just knowledge. These aspects can be challenging to articulate. Even the learning of generic competencies such as communication and management is taught and learned differently in various disciplines.
We have focused on the learning of interdisciplinary collaboration and found that within engineering there might already be an integrated interdisciplinary knowledge dimension, which is often described as "black boxing". In system projects, various work packages are black-boxed, and normally what is needed to know is the purpose, overall methods, and product. It is not necessary to know all details and deeper expertise knowledge for collaborative knowledge construction. In other words, interdisciplinary collaboration is nothing new - and in engineering practice this is the most common collaboration pattern.
When we approach disciplines as communities of practices embracing several subdisciplines, which can be borrowed or loosely coupled in different ways, knowledge exchange and compatibility become important. Therefore, we see interdisciplinary collaboration as a core across existing disciplines. We have moved from identifying specific interdisciplinary competencies to identifying core boundary-crossing competencies as a broader concept embracing the interdisciplinary competencies.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is a matter of learning and understanding different perspectives like collaboration across other types of boundaries. Learning to understand different perspectives, no matter if these are actions, attitudes, cultures, disciplines, or organizational structures, is a learning of a methodology.
As disciplines can be regarded as communities of practices, new interdisciplinary programs will form communities and establish organizational self-understandings and cultures. We will claim that even students from interdisciplinary programs will need to learn to cross the boundaries to other interdisciplinary or disciplinary programs. In engineering practice, no matter the educational background, there will be a need for working across educational backgrounds. That is a further argument for seeing boundary crossing as one of the future core competencies.
Establishing new interdisciplinary programs might be one strategy for educating boundary workers who are able to facilitate the learning of different disciplinary, cultural, or organizational perspectives. However, the major strategy for interdisciplinary learning in engineering education should address the existing disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, the InterPBL project does recommend that the students learn to cross the disciplinary boundaries as an educational strategy for learning interdisciplinary collaboration.