Page 39 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic review
2.5 Exploration of research questions
2.5.1 Which subskills that constitute interdisciplinary thinking within the context of interdisciplinary higher education are mentioned?
Five subskills, divided into two categories, seemed to be important to become capable of IDT (see Table 2.1). The first category, having knowledge, consists of three subskills: knowledge of disciplines, knowledge of disciplinary paradigms, and knowledge of interdisciplinarity. These subskills suggest the importance of disciplinary declarative, procedural, and paradigm knowledge, such as the characteristics of natural and social scientific theories as, for instance, classified by Szostak (2003), supplemented with knowledge of interdisciplinarity, such as knowing the differences between disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity. Acquisition of these types of knowledge appears to be required for enabling students to step beyond the disciplinary theories and methods in order to make connections between disciplines, to identify disciplinary contradictions, and to consider opportunities for integration at a meta-level (Boix Mansilla & Duraising, 2007). In particular, explicit attention to the students’ exposure to disciplines and meta-coordination seems to be important to avoid their feeling overwhelmed and losing the curricular thread (Eisen et al., 2009; Manathunga et al., 2006).
The other category, having skills, consists of higher-order skills and communication skills. Higher-order skills indicate the necessary ability to search, identify, understand, critically appraise, connect, and integrate theories and methods of different disciplines and to apply the resulting cognitive advancement together with continuous evaluation (Boix Mansilla & Duraising, 2007; Ivanitskaya et al., 2002; Woods, 2007). Inherently, this also requires the ability to change disciplinary perspectives, to switch between depth and breadth, and to transfer new knowledge structures to other appropriate contexts. Communication skills
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