Interdisciplinarity in Engineering Education

Henrik Worm Routhe, Anette Kolmos, Jette Egelund Holgaard (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Still more and more engineers are facing Ill structured and wicked problems. Problems that may be hard to define. Industry and society expect that engineers can take an active part, not only solving the problems, but most importantly, also be able to define and understand the whole context and the problems. Engineers need not only solve others’ problems; indeed, they need to participate in the formulation of the problems. Because many of these problems cannot be solved within disciplinary boundaries, it becomes crucial that engineers have the competences to collaborate with other professions and work across the disciplinary boundaries. For engineering education, it means change and reshaping. A change or a reshaping of engineering education, moving away from the disciplinary approach towards an interdisciplinary setting. 

With point of departure at Aalborg University, where problem- and project-based learning is the pedagogical model, students are used to identify, analyze and solve problems in projects, organized in disciplinary teams. To qualify the discussion of interdisciplinarity, different project types and different organizations a model has been described. A model introducing six different categories, see Figure 1.

These six different categories illustrate the variation and different project types, which reflect the need from industry, where generic competences, personal attitudes and values combined with disciplinary knowledge constitutes the future engineer.

In figure 1 top-left, the discipline project illustrates the mono disciplinary team. When student teams are collaborating with other teams, within their own discipline we have categorized it as inter-team projects, top-right. The situation where student teams are collaborating with other engineering teams in a teams-of-teams constellation, what we have defined as narrow interdisciplinarity, we have categorized it as system projects. Our research indicates that students can work successfully in both these inter-team and system projects, where there often is a boundary object. In these projects the boundary object may be immaterial such as a software system or physical such as an electrical vehicle or a wind turbine. Moreover, our research indicates that students develop what appears as extracurricular competences, participating in these projects.

When student collaboration involves students from very different disciplines, what we define as broad interdisciplinarity, the students are challenged. Our research indicates that students working together in a broad interdisciplinary team are challenged, as they are not capable of transforming the generic competences from the disciplinary team collaboration to the broad interdisciplinary setting. This type of project is what we have categorized as a mixed-micro project. When the setting involves disciplinary teams-of-teams solving larger problems, what we have categorized as M-projects, the challenges seem to be identical.

Further our research indicates that in projects involving teams-of-teams, or what is defined as multiteam systems illustrated in the right column in Figure 1, coordination, management and leadership becomes important competences. Indeed, these competences are often tacitly expressed in the literature, especially leadership; however, it is important to express these competences for the students to be able to develop these important competences. Furthermore, our research illustrates the complexity of leadership in multiteam systems and the necessity of making space for students to develop especially leadership.

This interdisciplinary PBL project – InterPBL – has been founded by the Poul Due Jensen Foundation.