Page 41 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic review
learning (Newell, 1992). The second category, teacher, contains five conditions: intellectual community focused on interdisciplinarity, expertise of teachers on interdisciplinarity, consensus on interdisciplinarity, team development, and team teaching. These conditions refer to the importance of teacher teams and their professional development in interdisciplinarity as a means of facilitating the necessary understanding and integration of each other’s’ disciplines and of realizing a safe environment in which to mentor students on their journey towards interdisciplinarity (Gilkey & Earp, 2006; Graybill et al., 2006; Newell, 1992). The third category, pedagogy, includes three conditions: pedagogy aimed at achieving interdisciplinarity, pedagogy aimed at achieving active learning, and pedagogy aimed at achieving collaboration. These conditions seem to point to the necessity of learning tasks that actively engage students in applying knowledge rather than memorizing facts, in collaboration with peers in other disciplines to encourage an appreciation of ambiguity (Manathunga et al., 2006). In addition, such learning tasks need to provide students with the opportunity to gain experience of inquiry activities typical of interdisciplinarity, for instance, the negotiation of common ground (Woods, 2007). The fourth category, assessment, includes the condition assessment of students’ intellectual maturation, which seems to point to the importance of a formative assessment of IDT subskills. This category also includes the condition assessment of interdisciplinarity that suggests a summative assessment of the learning outcome IDT. Both conditions suggest assessment instruments that include a combined development and performance perspective to help teachers as well as students to analyse the progression of IDT (Field & Lee, 1992; Ivanitskaya et al., 2002; Woods, 2007).
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