Page 12 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Chapter 1
1.1 Importance of teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking
Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking (IDT) is important for higher education (Newell, 2010b; Repko, Szostak, & Philips Buchberger, 2014) and, in particular, for higher education in engineering (HEE), because engineers need to be able to integrate knowledge of different disciplines (Redish & Smith, 2008; Schaefer, Panchal, Thames, Haroon, & Mistree, 2012; Vale et al., 2012). In their jobs, engineers have to work in various interdisciplinary teams and therefore, it is a necessity for them to be able to understand disciplinary knowledge and to be able to integrate disciplinary knowledge in collaboration with other engineers (Adams, 2007; Schmidt et al., 2012). The ultimate goal of IDT is disciplinary knowledge integration, but other cognitive activities with respect to disciplinary boundary-crossing, such as critically appraising the disciplinary knowledge and switching between disciplinary perspectives, are also important (Nikitina, 2005). Similar to disciplinary thinking, the teaching of IDT should start as early as possible in curricula, so that students get used to thinking outside the disciplines (MacKinnon, Hine, & Barnard, 2013; Tong, 2010). By early introducing, HEE is preparing engineering students to be able to work on complex societal problems, like water supply (Chanan, Vigneswaran, & Kandasamy, 2012), sustainability (O'Byrne, Dripps, & Nicholas, 2015), and conservation of marine resources (Fortuin, Van Koppen, & Leemans, 2011). These complex problems necessitate the use of an interdisciplinary approach to achieve a comprehensive understanding of these problems, eventually, leading to the inventory of causes and solutions (Klein, 1996; Newell, 2010a; Wolman, 1977). Viewing a complex problem or phenomena from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, thereby connecting different disciplines to achieve an enriched understanding of the problems or phenomena, is the rationale of IDT.
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