Exploring transdisciplinary education

Abstract

Because wicked Sustainability Problems (WSPs) are complex, multi-scaled, value-laden, ill-structured, and difficult to address (for example see Lonngren et al., 2016), teams that include engineers and others with expert knowledge are needed to effectively manage WSPs relating to environmental stress and declining ecosystem health, including WSPs stemming from resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, and climate change. How do we educate engineers to successfully engage in such transdisciplinary teams? What is transdisciplinary education? This paper explores aspects of these questions. First, we review areas of education literature relevant to transdisciplinary teaching and learning, including frameworks such as “Threshold Concepts” (Meyer & Land, 2006) and “Empathic Thinking” (Walther et al., 2017), and pedagogies reported in the literature, including “Value Analysis”, and “Learning Communities” (McGregor, 2017). We introduce the design-based research methodology (DBR) as a framework for developing transdisciplinary education, and we offer a review of the engineering education literature relevant to transdisciplinary training. Next, a case study employing DBR is presented. This case, inspired by the work of Tejedor & Segalas (2018a) and others, extends the work presented by Morgan et al. (2018), which reports a novel sustainable development workshop experience for masters-level graduate students, organized and hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in the spring of 2017. A second workshop was deployed in June of 2018, during which students from a variety of backgrounds and institutions gathered in UPV to create locally relevant, sustainable, conceptual designs for the built environment. The DBR case study focuses on this 2nd workshop, during which survey, interview, and focus group data reflecting both the student and the facilitator experiences, were collected. An initial interpretation of this data is presented. This paper contributes to engineering education for sustainable development because it emphasizes a meta- framework which conceptualizes the development of transdisciplinary education experiences and which has the potential to enable faculty to reflect on and improve novel transdisciplinary experiences