As humanity faces increasingly complex challenges there is a rising demand for students and professionals with interdisciplinary competence. The Center for Interdisciplinary Education, INTED, addresses these needs by helping students, teachers, leaders, and stakeholders develop the skill set needed to tackle these challenges, and in leading change at the university level. The main goal is to become an international hub for research-based integration of interdisciplinary competence in education. We will do this by developing approaches and pedagogies and establishing a research basis for them, developing a culture for interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and disseminating the results. Students are at the heart of INTED, bringing together students from the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at UiO to develop students' interdisciplinary competence. Students are included in the center's leadership team, making them key partners in every aspect of the center. The center started its activity in 2023 and has employed three student co-leaders, with backgrounds in different disciplines. These students were involved in shaping the center's strategic plans and ambitions, even in writing the center application, as well as designing and participating in the center’s interdisciplinary activities. Our student leaders also have responsibilities in the interdisciplinary facilitator program, in interdisciplinary workshops as both facilitators and leaders, in research projects, development teams, recruiting students, and with dissemination.

In our presentation, we describe the activities that the student leaders are involved in, such as workshops, summer projects, facilitator programs, and other center activities. We will also discuss our vision for student participation. We believe student involvement benefits the center in different ways. Students have resources that the center builds on in shaping the center and its activities to better fit the needs of both today’s students and the future demands of the world. Further, the center benefits from having a continuous dialogue with students, enabling us to tap into students' engagements and interests in order to develop interdisciplinary workshops and student activities. It also provides students with a unique opportunity to develop into leaders and representatives for their discipline, enabling them to take charge of both their own and their peers' education.

We wish to share our experience as student leaders and share how students partake in INTED’s goals and leadership. By highlighting our experiences, we hope to give insights into how one can involve students more proactively in the leadership of an interdisciplinary center. For the second half of the presentation, we wish to invite the audience to give input, share ideas, and reflect upon student involvement and leadership in academic centers. What are the challenges of giving students the leading position in developing interdisciplinary processes in a higher education institution?

Complexity is perhaps the most essential characteristic of our present world and societies. Reality has rendered multilayered and multi-leveled. This is the reality of the times in which we live; this is the complex actuality in which we must live, work, and lead. Thus, the current complexity that societies face requires leaders and people in general to embrace a more appropriate mindset since mindsets guide how we interpret what we observe from the world and from our interactions because every mindset represents a theory from which one interprets the world. Numerous scholars, thinkers, and researchers have agreed that many of the current knowledge-systems that guide leaders’ mindsets tend not to be appropriate to understand and to respond to the complexity of our multi-levelled and multi-dimensional relationship with the world.

It has been my experience that many graduate programs that claim to be interdisciplinary, are interdisciplinary mainly/only in name because they do not include much regarding the development of the necessary abilities to carry out interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary practice. Even though there has a been a lot of talking regarding the urgent need for collaborative work and research to address the complex problems that the world and our societies are facing today, educators, researchers, professionals, and people in general still struggle engaging in effective interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary practice. With that in mind, I embarked in the task to design and create of a course that introduces doctoral students to the necessary abilities, attitudes, and transformation for interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary practice.

My presentation will address the current lack of clarity regarding the application of interdisciplinary theory and practice within interdisciplinary doctoral programs. I will present the various models and frameworks that have been intricately woven together to assist students develop the necessary abilities, attitudes, and identities that they need to increasingly become interdisciplinary beings/individuals. Key components include reflexive practices, the need for integrative worldviews, the role of intercultural development in interdisciplinary practice, the importance of intellectual and cultural humility, and interdisciplinary leadership.

As part of the presentation, I will include videos of conversation with some of the students who have taken the course. This will be a creative way to integrate contributors from all sorts of backgrounds in my presentation. I will also present/show how journeying with the students throughout the duration of the course (and beyond) render a journey of collaboration and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary practice and transformation.

Diversity in organizations is shown to improve creativity and innovation if members identify as part of the group and teams are able to leverage the unique perspectives of all individuals. For interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research teams, supporting diverse disciplinary perspectives is imperative. However, disciplinary differences are only one aspect of diversity in any team that needs to be considered. To improve demographic diversity in research environments, it is important to create inclusive spaces that encourage, see, hear, and support the unique, personal perspectives that researchers bring. In this study, we build upon a dialogic intervention that fosters interdisciplinary consciousness to elicit discussion on identities in research. We conduct this intervention with undergraduate researchers as a means to stimulate thinking about diversity of disciplinary, epistemological, and individuals’ personal perspectives in a group of students who are likely to continue working in research environments through graduate school and careers beyond. Undergraduate research programs are ripe for integrating interdisciplinary training because they are growing in number as a well-supported high impact learning experience, and they often bring together students practicing different forms of disciplinary inquiry. We argue that we can create more inclusive research spaces by centering students’ perspectives and facilitating open dialogue on how identity, privilege, and access shape decision-making and interactions with others. Between 2021 and 2022, we facilitated four dialogue-based workshops with students (n=59) participating in summer undergraduate research programs at Binghamton University, a doctoral granting institution classified as R1 with very high research activity within the State University of New York system, where peers discussed how identity influences access to research opportunities, choices in research, research process, and relationships. Through transcription and coding of these dialogues, we thematically analyzed how students discussed their experiences in research, factors surrounding their entry into research spaces, and perceptions of their own identities in relation to others while conducting research across disciplines and epistemologies. We found that undergraduate researchers view research as highly personal as they are consistently discovering, iterating, and embodying their unique identities throughout the research process. We highlight these student perspectives to better understand how we can adapt our practice as educators and research mentors to prioritize student interests towards the goal of creating inclusive research environments to support diversity—disciplinary as well as individual identities—in its many forms.