Project

CONNECTS - Transdisciplinary learning for societal transformation

To address grand societal challenges, joint transdisciplinary efforts of scientists, engineers, governments, companies, and citizens are required. Fruitful collaboration is challenging because of differences in background, interests, and values, or conflicting perspectives. Higher education can play a key role in the development of transdisciplinary competencies, but transdisciplinary learning finds its way into curricula only with difficulty. Through an educational design research approach, this consortium including ten higher education institutions studies the question: What are principles for designing and implementing sustainable educational configurations that enable and scaffold transdisciplinary co-learning of students, teachers, and stakeholders, aiming to contribute to societal transformations?

Introduction

There are at least three major challenges in realizing transdisciplinary educational configurations, related to:

1) enabling co-learning among students, teachers, and stakeholders in a levelled learning space,

2) scaffolding transdisciplinary learning, and

3) embedding transdisciplinary education sustainably at curricular and organizational level.

Project description

Focusing on these three challenges, a consortium of ten Dutch higher education institutions studies the overall research question: What are principles for designing and implementing sustainable educational configurations that enable and scaffold transdisciplinary co-learning of students, teachers, and stakeholders, aiming to contribute to societal transformations?

An educational design research approach is applied, aimed at formulating design principles, starting from state-of-the-art knowledge on transdisciplinary education. Multiple cycles of design, implementation, and evaluation of educational configurations in different contexts will result in nuanced, validated design principles and a deepened understanding of underlying mechanisms in different educational contexts, and established transdisciplinary educational practices. The framework with design principles will be translated into products to be utilized by teachers, teacher trainers and other groups of stakeholders.