Page 27 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic review
understanding or IDT (see chapter 1.2). According to this definition, IDT can be considered as a complex cognitive skill that consists of a number of subskills (Van Merriënboer, 1997), such as the ability to change disciplinary perspectives and create meaningful connections across disciplines. IDT does not occur spontaneously, it can take a considerable amount of time for students to achieve an adequate level of expertise in its practice. In addition, students need help in order to be able to synthesize two or more disciplines. All too often a curriculum is called interdisciplinary when it is actually multidisciplinary: multiple perspectives are presented, without any support for the integration of disciplinary knowledge throughout the curriculum. As a consequence, in curricula on food studies, for instance, students lack the ability to integrate the required disciplinary knowledge of food processing and food microbiology to keep bacterial growth within food safety criteria. Specific support and learning tasks intended to develop IDT appear to be important.
Students have problems of working across disciplines, working in different disciplines, and synthesizing different disciplines. This poses difficulties for the development of IDT in interdisciplinary higher education. These student problems may be caused by disciplinary differences in epistemologies, discourses, and ways of teaching (Bradbeer, 1999). In addition, curricula that aim to develop IDT on a broad scale are likely to experience more difficulties than curricula that aim to develop IDT on a narrow scale. This is by virtue of the fact that, in contrast to narrow IDT, broad IDT requires the integration of disciplines across sciences (Newell, 2007). To illustrate, the aforementioned example of integration in food safety concerns IDT on a narrow scale. In the case of broad IDT, students are taught to integrate knowledge of sciences like food processing and microbiology as well as social sciences, such as management and psychology, to realize safe food production without contamination by employees (Luning & Marcelis, 2009b). This means that students also need to overcome
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