Following Einstein's observation that "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them," there is an urgent need for collaborative problem-solving across diverse disciplines, especially in the face of complex global challenges. This necessitates the adoption of new leadership practices to transform both thinking processes and approaches to address these intricate problems. Aligned with the theme of the ITD conference on broadening and deepening education and training in inter- and transdisciplinarity, and focusing on guiding principles for teacher professionalization in this context, we will present our interdisciplinary leadership development model. This framework aims to teach integrative thinking and collaboration across differences, nurturing leaders capable of navigating the complexities of the evolving global landscape.

The core focus of our interdisciplinary leadership development model is to prepare practitioner-scholars to tackle complex issues in today's global context. Over the past 12 years, we have refined this model within our EdD in Interdisciplinary Leadership Program. Tailored for graduate education, the model is rooted in foundational learning theories, particularly andragogy, recognizing the distinct characteristics of adult learners. We contend that successful interdisciplinary collaboration requires more than the mere convergence of individuals from various disciplines; it demands a nuanced, situated mindset practiced by individuals who understand the emergent nature of collaboration across differences. Drawing on leadership-as-practice perspectives, our model emphasizes viewing interdisciplinarity as a holistic concept, transcending individual focus to consider collective and systemic dimensions of leadership development.

Our presentation will address the current lack of clarity within the leadership literature on interdisciplinarity. By exploring the interdisciplinary roots of leadership, our model enriches leadership development by fostering capabilities to address real-world complexities. We will present the interdisciplinary leadership model as a tapestry, intricately weaving together and cultivating leadership identities, practices, and outcomes through intentional mission, structure, curriculum, and instructional strategies. The model underscores the need for educators to move beyond reductionist views of leadership and embrace an emergent, process-oriented approach. Key components include diverse student cohorts, critical reflection across coursework, using an andragogical approach to student engagement, and emphasizing the importance of high-quality teaching and the recruitment and retention of faculty with diverse backgrounds. Our presentation will provide practical insights and examples for scholars and educators interested in implementing the interdisciplinary leadership development model.

Organizing and designing an interdisciplinary thesis project requires difficult choices and working around the limitations of your institutional context. To help those academics in a position of responsibility regarding this topic, this presentation will touch on 7 current interdisciplinary thesis programs at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, with the addition of a brief reflection on 2 UU pilots in development in 2024. The program distribution includes humanities, medical science, social science, university colleges, and beta science. The information was collected informally as part of multiple educational innovation projects in order to advise project leaders and educational directors. The presentation will begin by highlighting selected issues of interest particular to the individual context of each program. The presentation will close by providing a general overview of what to pay attention to when seeking to reform or organize your own interdisciplinary thesis or education program. Example topics include: how to manage and prepare your supervision pool, the variable degrees of incorporating interdisciplinary theory in the program and assessment, the baseline purpose of your thesis and your interdisciplinarity, and how to prepare and support students. The project advisor (Dr. Florian Verbeek) and the educational director of the 3-year Liberal Arts and Science bachelor program (Dr. Rianne van Lambalgen) will be present to answer questions and exchange experiences.

This presentation illustrates an intelligent tutoring system-prototype which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance interdisciplinary student collaboration. We present the methodology and system, as well as its potential application to the DaVinci Project, a Bachelor honors course where students work in teams on a transdisciplinary research project.

Theoretical Framework

Teachers can facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration in student teams using various approaches, but it is important that they apply a structured approach (van den Beemt et.al., 2020). However, coaching interdisciplinary teams can be demanding and the teacher has limited amount of time to facilitate the team. An automated method and tool can help students anytime, anywhere, and in this way democratize and personalize interdisciplinary education even further. However, there is little research available on supporting interdisciplinary teams using AI-methods, with most current research focusing on other collaborative settings such as crowdsourcing or business (see Zhou et al, 2018).

Intelligent Tutoring system

In this project, we aim to address aspects of team performance, using Tuckman’s theory that identifies different stages of team performance (Tuckman, 2001) This is relevant during the interdisciplinary problem solving process, in case of creating interdisciplinary teams (forming), but also when students need to address their frictions for epistemic stability (Horn et.al., 2022). Through the methodology and accompanying tool, we aim to encourage functional disagreement as defined by Horn et.al. (2022) by addressing misunderstanding, disagreement and conflict.

The proposed methodology and digital coach will be applied to enable students to learn from each other during the interdisciplinary life cycle. The tool will support teams on two crucial elements of their collaboration, i) team formation, where it will use optimization algorithms to match students from different disciplines into harmonious teams, and ii) collaboration, where it will use generative-AI to coach those teams have more effective conversations about their disciplinary perspectives.

Prototype

In this presentation we will present an overview of the methodology and a prototype of the intelligent tutoring system, and present a case study of its application in the DaVinci Project. We evaluate the use of this prototype in forming multidisciplinary groups for transdisciplinary teamwork and we assess how the students can benefit in their interdisciplinary conversation from support through Generative-AI and what important properties should be added to the intelligent tutoring system to encourage constructive conflict. Finally we will reflect on how the system can be used to mobilize the role of the teacher as coach to facilitate interdisciplinary learning.

References

Van den Beemt, A., MacLeod, M., Van der Veen, J., Van de Ven, A., Van Baalen, S., Klaassen, R., & Boon, M. (2020). Interdisciplinary engineering education: A review of vision, teaching, and support. Journal of engineering education, 109(3), 508-555.

Horn, A., Urias, E., & Zweekhorst, M. (2022, September 15). Epistemic stability and epistemic adaptability: interdisciplinary knowledge integration competencies for complex sustainability issues. Sustainability Science, 17, 1959–1976.

Tuckman, B. W. (2001). Developmental sequence in small groups. Group Facilitation, (3), 66.

S. Zhou, M. Valentine, and M. S. Bernstein, “In search of the Dream Team: Temporally constrained multi-armed bandits for identifying effective team structures,” 2018, doi: 10.1145/3173574.3173682

Higher education is facing major challenges as the nature of the problems facing humanity has changed dramatically. However, the challenges reflected, e.g., in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals cannot be understood or solved using discipline-specific education alone.

Nonetheless, while holistic and inter- and transdisciplinarity approaches are essential, is university education up to the challenge? Time and again, interdisciplinarity in practice, is overshadowed by tensions between holistic and reductionistic approaches. Although interdisciplinarity is supported in various areas, educational structures accustomed to keeping disciplines separate have found it challenging to approach complex issues. In this presentation, we examine these challenges from the perspective of thesis supervision and assessment.

We present the results of a survey, examining the supervision and assessment of interdisciplinary theses at the University of Helsinki. The authors are members of the Teachers’ Academy of the University of Helsinki, representing six different disciplines and five faculties.

The main objective of this study was to contribute to the ongoing pedagogical debate on the key challenges and development proposals for the supervision and assessment of interdisciplinary theses at the university. Based on the data, we particularly assessed the challenges, their causes, and ideas for development.

The survey covered theses at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree levels. The answers were analyzed via close reading and data-driven content analysis. We compared the age, gender, and faculty distribution of the students with the entire student body of the University of Helsinki within ten years.

We identified six major themes, three of which were from the responses of both students and supervisors. (1) Both groups stressed that interdisciplinarity should be openly encouraged and efforts made to create a tradition of interdisciplinarity; (2) Both emphasized the importance of cooperation and of lowering barriers at all levels; (3) Both underlined the desire for pedagogical coherence in guidance and assessment, and the need to clarify the criteria for assessing interdisciplinary theses; (4) Students stressed that sufficient time should be given to refining the research focus of interdisciplinary theses early in the research process; (5) Supervisors pointed out the importance of understanding their positions and resulting constraints; (6) Supervisors pointed out their workload, stress, and available resources.

The study raises several challenges that, to our knowledge, have not been similarly articulated in previous studies based on such empirical evidence. There are also many suggestions for improvement, which are summarized in the presentation.