Interdisciplinarity: the quest for contemporary engineering education

It is generally acknowledged that the challenges we face as a society are complex and multi-faceted, requiring the input, tools, and expertise of different disciplines. How can we then continue to teach our engineers in monodisciplinary ways if we want to prepare them for their roles as citizens, future employees, policy-makers or entrepreneurs? Interdisciplinarity is now an ideal of engineering education, one that comes with challenges. Our editorial series connects the challenges and gaps identified through research or as pedagogues with research-informed solutions and the development of tools that we can use in our classrooms or in curriculum design.

The editorial series starts with two journeys in interdisciplinarity:

My journey towards interdisciplinarity
Susan Lord (University of San Diego, USA) has been championing for decades the use of the term socio-technical to highlight the need to familiarise students with both technical and nontechnical dimension of the engineering profession. Her academic path—from dual majors in electrical engineering and materials science to feminist studies during her Ph.D.—shaped her appreciation for integrating diverse perspectives. At the University of San Diego (USD), her teaching incorporates social, economic, and environmental considerations into technical classes, emphasizing connections between disciplines. For example, circuits classes discuss conflict minerals, and materials science explores the needs of the disability community. These initiatives aim to shift engineering education from a purely technical focus to one that integrates broader societal issues.

Breaking Silos: Rethinking University Structures to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Engineering Graduate Education
Margaret Webb (Virginia Tech), Jessica Deters (University of Nebraska at Lincoln), Maya Menon (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Marie Paretti (Virginia Tech) reflect on a seven-year interdisciplinary graduate program funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, highlighting the complex interplay between individual, programmatic, and institutional factors. While students are often motivated to engage in interdisciplinary work, they face barriers such as conflicting academic requirements, departmental norms, and differing personal goals. Faculty support is also limited by institutional structures that rarely incentivize interdisciplinary engagement, leading to burnout and unsustainability. Comparative studies underscore the role of cultural and institutional contexts. For instance, universities in Denmark benefited from national support for sustainability, which fostered interdisciplinary education more effectively than the U.S.’s individual-driven approach. Their editorial calls for systemic changes in engineering education, including rethinking curricula, tenure policies, and institutional structures to embed interdisciplinarity sustainably. 

From silos to synergy: advancing interdisciplinarity in engineering education
In their editorial, Xiaoqi Feng, Julia Sundman, and Hanna Aarnio (University of Aalto, Finland) discuss the role of interdisciplinarity in engineering education to address modern challenges such as AI integration and socio-environmental dilemmas. While interdisciplinary projects confronts students with “disorienting dilemmas” that challenge personal and professional identities, they also provide opportunities for growth. The editorial provides some needed guidance on how to implement interdisciplinary projects effectively, emphasizing partnerships among educators, researchers, and industry stakeholders.

Interdisciplinarity in Engineering Education
In Reshaping Engineering Education for Interdisciplinary Competence, Henrik Worm Routhe, Anette Kolmos, Jette Egelund Holgaard (Aalborg University, Denmark) explores what it means to address ill-structured and “wicked” problems by redefining problem contexts and collaborating across disciplines. Using Aalborg University’s problem- and project-based learning (PBL) model as a case study, the editorial describes six project categories that capture varying levels of interdisciplinarity and team collaboration. These range from mono-disciplinary projects to “multiteam systems” requiring collaboration among diverse disciplinary teams. Research highlights the benefits of such projects, including the development of “extracurricular competences” like leadership and coordination. This reshaped model integrates disciplinary knowledge with personal attitudes and values, fostering engineers who can innovate and lead effectively in multifaceted environments

Interdisciplinarity in Engineering Education: a non-technical skills point of view
Ali Jaberiansari, Claire Lucas, and Francesco Ciriello (Kings College London, The UK) make a plea for the critical role of non-technical skills in interdisciplinary engineering education, given the skills gap reported by industry when considering teamwork, time management, or communication of graduates. The authors are developing a comprehensive taxonomy of skills from senior leaders, expert workshops, and literature reviews. Seven crucial nontechnical skills emerge through this research – Communication, Leadership, Problem-solving and Decision-Making, Lifelong Learning, Business Acumen, Intercultural Skills, and Socio-Environmental Awareness – that Alie, Claire, and Francesco invite engineering pedagogues to integrate into project-based learning environments, mirroring real-world engineering contexts. 

Transdisciplinarity in engineering underlines the need for robust transversal skills
The editorial by Siara Isaac, Yousef Jalali, Valentina Rossi, Joelyn de Lima (Centre for Learning Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne -EPFL, Switzerland) tresses the importance of transdisciplinarity for addressing complex, real-world engineering problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Transversal skills, including communication, conflict resolution, and ethical reasoning, are identified as critical to enabling engineers to work across diverse perspectives. However, current engineering programs often lack systematic methods to develop these skills. The authors present the 3T PLAY project’s “trident framework,” which integrates experiential learning, reflective practices, and conceptual understanding of transversal skills. They advocate for progressive, low-stakes pedagogical strategies to immerse students in tangible, skill-focused activities. The 3T PLAY open-source guidebook supports skill-building in areas like sustainability, risk assessment, and psychological safety.

Navigating the Shift to Interdisciplinary Challenge-Based Learning in Engineering Education: Introducing Challenge Up
Adina Imanbayeva, Robin de Graaf, Cindy Poortman (University of Twente, the Netherlands) advocate for Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) as a transformative approach to engineering education, equipping students to address complex, interconnected challenges. CBL engages students in solving real-world societal problems, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and integration of knowledge from various fields. However, implementing CBL requires a significant pedagogical shift for educators, who must transition from traditional roles to facilitators of student-centered, experiential learning. Recognizing this, the authors developed Challenge Up, a digital tool that guides educators in adopting CBL incrementally. It allows users to evaluate their current teaching practices, set desired CBL intensity levels, and receive tailored advice for integration.

Civic sensibilities as a learning goal in embedded ethics
Emanuele Ratti (University of Bristol, the UK) and Avigail Ferdman (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel) explore embedding ethics in engineering education, emphasizing the cultivation of moral attention and civic sensibilities as critical learning goals which can empower students to recognize ethical issues and act within professional and societal contexts. They define moral attention as the ability to identify morally relevant situations and navigate value tradeoffs. Civic sensibilities extend this framework by fostering a broader societal perspective. Engineers with civic sensibility are equipped to address systemic issues, such as resisting unethical corporate practices or mitigating the responsibility gaps in emerging technologies like AI. This includes professional actions like refusing to work for unethical organizations, addressing structural inequalities in machine learning, or countering the “move fast and break things” culture in technology. By linking moral attention to civic sensibilities, the authors propose a transformative ethical pedagogy that empowers students not only to identify “what would you do?” but also to address “what needs to change?”

As the curator of this editorial series, my hope is that these contributions will further extend our conceptual understanding of interdisciplinarity and support its implementation in engineering education.

Diana Adela Martin (Co-chair SEFI Ethics SIG, University College London, The UK)