Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning

Why Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning?  

Interdisciplinary learning addresses the growing need to tackle real-world issues and solve complex problems that go beyond the boundaries of a single discipline, allowing us to form a more comprehensive understanding by integrating different disciplinary perspectives.  

Features of Interdisciplinary Learning

The primary feature of interdisciplinary learning is making cross-disciplinary connections and integrating cross-disciplinary perspectives to address an issue. Unlike multidisciplinary learning, which draws from different disciplines independently and within the boundaries of each discipline’s domain, interdisciplinary learning works to construct a coherent whole across several disciplines.

 Interdisciplinary Teaching Processes

1. Approaches 

   Suitable approaches to interdisciplinary teaching often centre around collaborative problem solving or research and inquiry. These approaches leverage the diversity of students’ disciplinary backgrounds, thereby creating opportunities for them to understand multiple perspectives and co-construct new knowledge and insights. Examples include Problem-Based Learning (PBL), Team-Based Learning (TBL), Design Thinking, and Experiential Learning with an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning.

2. Co-Teaching
   Co-teaching can enhance students’ interdisciplinary learning experience through the exposure to diverse expertise. It also allows instructors to be role-models of interdisciplinary learning, as they personally  demonstrate collaboration and sharing across their disciplines.

Assessment

Assessments that best encourage and capture interdisciplinary learning are ones that create the authentic desire and need for students to reach beyond a single discipline in order to adequately address a problem. Examples include research projects, proposals, solutions and prototypes, which require students to analyse, synthesise and harmonise cross-disciplinary links into a coherent whole. As these are complex tasks, students may benefit from thoughtful and instructional scaffolding, guidance, and feedback.

Enabling Technologies 

Interdisciplinary learning could benefit from the use of collaborative platforms such as Mural, Padlet and GoogleDocs.