When interdisciplinarity comes from student coursework

I work in cognitive science and linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. The research I’m involved in is often interdisciplinary, although my teaching is usually situated within one discipline or sub-discipline. I also work in the scholarship of teaching and learning, with an emphasis on principles and methods of “alternative assessment”, a move away from grading and ranking and towards growth and collaboration. One way I’ve put alternative assessment into practice is by allowing open-ended projects or unessays: assessment whose format and content are developed by the student, usually through dialogue with the instructor. While an individual course or module might be grounded in one discipline, that’s not to stop students from learning about the world through additional lenses.

Since 2021, my students have submitted final projects in a range of formats, including comics, podcasts, mockumentaries, video essays, knitting essays, Instagram linguistics influencers, soliloquies, art projects, TikTok videos, children’s books, video games, designs for psycholinguistic experiments, BuzzFeed-style quizzes, meme “listicles” and op-eds (I’ve not yet seen interpretative dance, music pieces or board games, but I imagine this is only a matter of time). The content has also been varied: from in-depth explorations of the material discussed in class, via additional subjects that we didn’t have time to cover in the course, to high-level overviews for a general audience. Students enjoyed this assessment format very much, including the process of developing and scaffolding it. Importantly for our current discussion, some of these assignments produced novel provocations that spoke to multiple disciplines. In other words, students took intellectual and creative risks in their work.

But one does not simply tell a student to take intellectual risks. Students must trust that the instructor really is interested in the students’ own hot takes, rather than in them giving the “right answers”. And they must rest assured that their grade won’t suffer as a result. This is where the core insight of the alternative assessment movement is relevant, and while it’s based on decades of empirical research and theoretical nuance, I’ll summarise it as follows: Grades. Ruin. Everything.

Yes, marks and grades buy you some compliance, some control, and some short-lived external motivation. And yes, there will always be variance between individuals. But by and large, grades shift the mindset from learning - which is collaborative, interdisciplinary and joyous at its most natural - to trying to get the best grade (which can lead to many of the things we dislike about our job, including unnecessarily adversarial relationships between staff and students). A substantial literature dissects these issues and related ones, like the inherently inequitable practice of ranking people against each other.

I won’t try to unpack these issues here, or give you a blueprint for implementing alternative assessment and unessays (although I will mention one specific method below, namely self-assessment). Instead, I want to look back at some highlights from the 2026 conference and see how alternative assessment fuelled some of my favourite talks. I’ll then discuss what we can learn from that in terms of how our institutions work.

Selected highlights from the 2026 conference

The conference kicked off with Helena Good’s delightful keynote. She mentioned how meetings around education are often ones where colleagues react with “Yes, but”, when ideally we want everyone to be saying “Yes, and”. This reminded me of the pushback many alternative graders get when we suggest more authentic assessment methods. Another interesting point had to do with the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report and its top 10 skills for future jobs, which led to a discussion of how these skills are themselves interdisciplinary in nature. This summary looked to me a lot like the Times’ Top 100 Graduate Employers report, which noted that “Very few, if any, of the country’s top employers recruit graduates based on their academic record [...] move away from academic achievement to demonstrating the broad range of skills”.

One of the perks of attending a conference slightly out of your area - like this one was for me - is getting to learn about concepts and frameworks you aren’t familiar with. Christopher Shoop-Worrall’s presentation was very helpful in framing “student vs learner”, with an explicit nod to equitable assessment. Another parallel arose in Courtnay McLeod’s talk, where she highlighted that 100% of graduates in Bauer Academy’s master’s programme in senior leadership received a Distinction. For an alternative grader like me, this seemed natural: if students come to learn and we do our job guiding them, then they should do very well. A grade distribution that is heavily skewed towards Firsts seems like a much more desirable outcome than any “normal” distribution.

These issues really came together in two other presentations. The first was Peter Hochenauer’s account of commitment-based assessment in his master’s course. Hochenauer made a number of great points, including that creative energy doesn’t emerge automatically but can be facilitated through appropriate choice of assessment, which ultimately means more transparency and more agency for the students. I agree completely, having run courses that rely on self-assessment for a number of years now (also called ungrading or collaborative assessment). The second presentation was the final panel by Jenny Scoles and students Sara Albakri, Sora Choo and Polly Dipper, whose interdisciplinary course was similarly ungraded, and likewise helped give students agency.

Noticing these cases in the same conference led me to wonder whether there was anything distinctly interdisciplinary about the design of these courses. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, I think the answer is a combination of “yes” and “no”, as I explore in the final part of this post.

Why interdisciplinarity?

The question I pose for our concluding discussion is why we find alternative assessment in interdisciplinary teaching. We can identify an answer by looking at individuals and at institutions. Instructors who work and teach in interdisciplinary frameworks might be more open to being reflective about their own teaching, or to trying new things. There could be many reasons for this; for reasons of space, I want to follow the thread to structural issues instead.

When thinking about our higher education institutions, I propose that alternative assessment is easier to swallow when it’s cordoned off in the part of the curriculum designated as “creative”. Especially in the UK, universities have been argued to work primarily within a corporate mindset, rather than as institutes of knowledge, collaboration, learning and growth. This attitude leads to low resourcing of pedagogy, and accordingly poor understanding of it at the managerial level: why promote self-assessment, for example? Sounds dangerous. At the same time, if a programme is labelled as “interdisciplinary”, that label can send a signal to students, parents, colleagues, managers and regulators: the students want to do something loopy so we let them, because this is the part of the university that allows experimentation and creativity; don’t worry, we promise it won’t happen anywhere else! I half-jokingly call this the Stitch Effect, or Principle 626, after the misunderstood super-powerful alien Stitch (”Experiment 626”) from the film Lilo and Stitch: institutions tolerate interdisciplinary teaching and interdisciplinary learning, which inherently includes alternative assessment, only when it’s tightly sealed in a box and won’t escape.

Interdisciplinary learning is all about taking intellectual risks. Scholars of education have come up with many useful ways to think about these issues: constructivism, bricolage, critical pedagogy, self-determination theory, alternative assessment, and so on. I would say that all true learning is interdisciplinary learning in some way, which means that those of us with expertise in assessment and those of us in interdisciplinary teaching have the same goals when challenging the structures we work in. Interdisciplinary studies are a natural fellow traveller for decades of work on education, and in particular for the growing movement of alternative assessment. Let’s help Stitch out of his cage.

—

Thanks to my students for their collaboration and inspiration, and to Carine Abraham and Peter Hochenauer for comments on a previous draft.

I’m a secondary school maths teacher. But I’ve had a dream since I was a student myself to step beyond the maths and run interdisciplinary workshops. This term, I finally had the opportunity to do so. The setting: a 45-minute session to groups of our incoming, unsuspecting, year 12s here at Impington Village College (also known as Impington International College to our IB-studying sixth formers). The challenge: how could I set both myself and our soon-to-be sixth form students up for synthesising success in just a 45-minute session? The literature was stacked against me, telling how hardly any schoolteachers are trying this, and those who are trying this aren’t having much luck. But with countless excellent university examples behind me and a truly wicked problem up my sleeve, here’s how it went…

Will AI make or break society in the next 10 years?

This was the question that met our future students as they entered the room. Inspired by ARU’s Ruskin Modules, I wanted a question that was painfully pertinent and likely to create quite the stir. Which it did. Once this stir was settled, students were introduced to:

i) what interdisciplinarity can do (mainly: solve wicked problems);

ii) what it is not (mainly: synthesis-less multidisciplinarity or subject-less project based learning);

iii) where they’ll meet it (mainly: within the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme through Theory of Knowledge and an Interdisciplinary Extended Essay);

iv) and finally what it is (mainly: the integration of disciplinary perspectives).

With our question and our principles established, I briefed students on how we would be approaching interdisciplinarity. For this, I drew on Repko in the form of Utrecht University’s Four Stage Model of Interdisciplinarity.

Step 1: Start with a problem that lies beyond a single subject

As you’ll realise, this was already done. It’s the one that met students when they entered the room

Step 2: Explore this problem from multiple disciplinary perspectives

For this, conceptually, a “spokes model” was used whereby the problem is placed in the centre and different perspectives come from this, similar to the spokes of a bicycle wheel:

Logistically, this meant that students chose a source pack (containing three different articles, reviews, or academic study summaries) from art, biology, economics, geography or psychology. Then for some movement, with students joining the other “subject specialists” on a table. Here, they got 5 minutes of independent reading before 5 minutes of discussing their chosen disciplinary perspective as a group.

Step 3: Finding Common Ground

In true Repko style, next came the messy beginnings of reconciling the differing disciplinary perspectives. For this, students returned to their original tables, and each had 30 seconds to stand up in front of their group as they summarised their discipline’s perspective.

Step 4: Synthesising Perspectives

Finally, it was time to attempt that integration. With a new scribe (first birthday of the calendar year), groups picked 2 of the 4 disciplines represented to begin “synthesising” to create an integrated viewpoint on AI’s future. The room was buzzing. After just 5 minutes, a spokesperson was chosen (last name of the group alphabetically) who had just 45-seconds to state their group’s chosen disciplines and the headline of their interdisciplinary perspective.

Student Step 1: Linking, Comparing, and Connecting

These were the explicit cognitive labels that students gave their thinking. “We’ve linked geography and biology…”, “By comparing psychology and economics…”, “A connection between art and psychology…”. Each time I heard one of these verbs my heart sank: ah, the students haven’t quite understood the brief, they’ve gone for the wrong cognitive process. Or maybe it wasn’t wrong, it’s just not yet complete. Maybe students naturally start by comparing, contrasting, and connecting. Our job as teachers is then to push them further towards “synthesising” and “integrating”.

Student Step 2: Parallel Perspectives

Moving beyond just the cognitive label, students’ linguistic choice of connectors revealed arguments built on parallel perspectives. “AI supports developments in both health research and also in town planning”. I was impressed by this astute ability to identify identical arguments which appeared in multiple perspectives but stumped as to how to encourage these parallel lines of reasoning to converge into an integrated response.

Student Step 3: Conceptual Hooks

A possible route to convergence is one I’ll name here “Conceptual Hooks”. What these parallel perspectives seemed to speak of was shared concepts or themes, present across the disciplinary perspectives, which may be the stepping stone to an integrated approach to the problem. Students began discussing concepts that were present within the perspectives of multiple disciplines, such as: responsibility, human expression, efficiency, quality of life. Could such conceptual hooks be used to further drive integrated perspectives?

Student Step 4: The Integrated Headlines

In truth, my initial spoiler may actually be underselling what the students achieved in those brief 45-minutes.

“AI poses a threat to emotional expression” (art and psychology)

“AI may diminish individuals’ quality of life” (geography and economics)

“AI usage raises issues as to who should take the credit / blame for new knowledge and decisions” (art, geography, biology, psychology)

This is what 16-year-olds are capable of in just under an hour. They may only be headlines, but each carries such power and such potential. What could they achieve in a 6-week programme? On a year long course? During 7-years of secondary school education?

So, where next?

What was so wonderful about this workshop was that, despite being totally new to interdisciplinarity (even featuring some questionable spellings of “disciple” and “prospectus”), students all had something to say, and they kept on talking! But there were several things missing.

First, we needed models or at least scaffolding of what an “interdisciplinary perspective” actually looks like. How is it structured? How does it use language? And how does it not use language? The students wanted to know what they should be saying, and I didn’t know exactly how to respond without simply telling them an answer.

Next, we needed holistic disciplines. Despite my previous calls to feature collaboration across multiple subject teachers when designing interdisciplinary programmes, my only external “experts” when planning this workshop were the various sources that Google and Copilot (ironic, I know) had sourced for me. I fear that this led to our subjects feeling flat. As incoming IB students, this is no significant worry as all our students will soon critically analyse each discipline, its content, methods, and perspectives, during their Theory of Knowledge lessons. But in a typical state comprehensive, how are we ensuring that students appreciate subjects beyond exam syllabi?

Finally, I know that there were absent disciplinary perspectives. One group’s thinking on the legal implications of discoveries made using AI was crying out for a political perspective whilst another discussion on optimising efficiency versus climate impact needed a suitable mathematical model to graph the options. This openness to adding further disciplinary perspectives, a reactionary and reflexive process, feels messy and daunting but is probably a necessary consideration.

With these possible edits in mind, I’m excited to run this session again, and again, and again, to any year group and any school that is crazy enough to give interdisciplinarity a try. Because, as I said to each group of students as our session drew to a close: this is how to future-proof our education.

For further details and access to the resources used in this workshop, please contact jstell@ivc.tmet.org.uk

References:

ARU’s Rusking Modules: https://www.aru.ac.uk/student-life/support-and-facilities/careers-and-employability/developing-your-employability/ruskin-modules

Utrecht University’s Four Stage Model (adapted in this blog!): https://www.uu.nl/en/education/educational-development-training/knowledge-dossier/a-four-stage-model-for-interdisciplinary-learning

IB’s Theory of Knowledge: https://ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/dp-core/theory-of-knowledge/

IB’s Extended Essay: https://ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/dp-core/extended-essay/

You are warmly invited to a public lecture I have organised, and hosted by the Teacher Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy Hub at Moray House School of Education and Sport, as part of the Stewart Alan Robertson Lecture Series, funded by the Robertson Endowment:

Teacher Agency for Interdisciplinary Curriculum Making

Speaker: Professor Mark Priestley (University of Stirling)
Date: Thursday 25 June 2026
Time: 17:00–19:30

Location: In person at G.1 Paterson’s Land, EH8 8AQ, and online on MS Teams

Agenda

17:00–17:30: Registration and refreshments
17:30–18:30: Sharing practice from PGDE tutors: IDL and curriculum making
18:30–19:30: Speaker: Professor Mark Priestley

This hybrid public lecture will explore teacher agency as a central feature of interdisciplinary curriculum making for social and environmental sustainability.

The event opens with a panel of Moray House tutors who will share insights from their work supporting student teachers to engage in interdisciplinary learning (IDL) curriculum development.

In the second half, Professor Mark Priestley will respond to the panel, drawing on curriculum theory, policy, and practice to examine the role of teachers as curriculum makers in the Scottish context. His response will foreground ecological understandings of teacher agency and highlight the critical importance of interdisciplinary approaches in addressing complex global challenges.

Full event details are available on our website:
🔗 https://edin.ac/42i2KhW

This is a free, hybrid event, and registration is required. Please register via the Eventbrite link on the webpage.

About the Speaker

Professor Mark Priestley is Professor of Education at the University of Stirling. His research interests focus on school curriculum theory, policy, and practice, particularly the processes of curriculum making across different layers of education systems. He was Lead Editor of The Curriculum Journal from 2018 to 2024, is a member of the Scottish Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Board, and is Co‑Convener of the EERA Network 3 (Curriculum). His publications include Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach and Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice within and Across Diverse Contexts.

For any enquiries, please contact MHSES-REI-Events@ed.ac.uk.

We hope you can join us.

Ramsey

As a practitioner-researcher in school-level interdisciplinarity, there were two particular reasons to get excited about the recent Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute. First, that there would be other teachers present. Thanks to a generous donation from The Royal Society of Edinburgh, this marked the first year that schoolteachers could attend the conference on a fully funded bursary. Second, that the conference would be in Scotland, where, unlike in England, “interdisciplinarity” is featured within the national curriculum for school students, known as Curriculum for Excellence. Here and now was the opportunity for thinking: if we were to introduce interdisciplinarity into every secondary school classroom in England, how would we do it? And so, surrounded by like-minded educators and inspired by countless successful university projects, I began to formulate the advice I’d give to the hypothetical schoolteacher wanting to turn their class into an interdisciplinary wonderland…

Step 1) Start with a Question.

A community conundrum. The UN Sustainability Goals. A student’s personal inquiry. What all the best interdisciplinary projects seem to have in common is a wicked heart. Or should I say: a question that falls beyond the boundaries of any single discipline, necessitating the integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives or methods in its comprehensive comprehension and resolution. If you want to design an interdisciplinary project for your students, don’t start with the disciplines or schemes of learning: start with a question so complex and frustrating that it cannot be sufficiently answered by only one subject. In asking this question, you motivate, drive, and require the interdisciplinary thinking you hope to encourage. How is AI going to change society? Should we all go vegan for the environment? Can we create empathy for the villains of history? All good projects need a good start point, and for interdisciplinary projects, this good start point tends to be a wicked one.

Step 2) Call for Collaborating Colleagues

Interdisciplinary learning does not require that every teacher become a polymath overnight. Teachers are subject-specialists, and that’s how they should remain within the interdisciplinary process. It is the students, accustomed to existing across multiple subjects as their timetables require, who actually engage in the interdisciplinary thinking, who are required in someways to become polymaths. Within this, the students must be exposed to varying disciplinary perspectives on the same wicked problem, and this can best be done by multiple subject teachers, each sharing their discipline’s take on the question at hand. A successful classroom interdisciplinary project is therefore likely to involve a revolving cast of teachers from different subjects, not a single classroom teacher attempting to wear different hats that do not belong to them. Multiple perspectives will require multiple colleagues.

Step 3) View the Disciplines Holistically

School subjects are so much more than their exam syllabi, and it is important that any interdisciplinary project acknowledges this fact. As a maths teacher, I recognise that my subject is often reduced to numbers and graphs. But in solving complex problems, those wicked questions at the heart of interdisciplinary projects, there’s only so far that numbers and graphs can take us. If instead we view maths as its holistic discipline, as an academic way of thinking and doing, suddenly we have pattern spotting, abstraction of rules, systematic proof. The habits and methods of maths as a discipline are far more powerful than its topic contents; such is true for all school subjects. Teachers must be clear on what their subject has to offer and ensure that this is communicated both to their students as well as their interdisciplinary colleagues. Do not fall for subject cliches or disciplinary caricatures. Do not diminish a discipline’s power by taking a reductionist view. Instead, view each discipline richly.

Step 4) Scaffold the Skills

It’s all very well looking to university modules for inspiration, but at the end of the day, our students are younger and undoubtedly less academically experienced. Significantly so. As such, we cannot expect them to have the sophisticated cognitive skills possessed by undergraduate students. If we want students to be able to move flexibly between disciplinary perspectives and eventually synthesise these into an integrated whole, we’ll need to nurture those skills. This isn’t an insurmountable task, and indeed one that educators have begun to tackle as they aim to foster similarly complex critical thinking skills through sentence starters, prompt questions, targeted teamwork. Through a process of modelling and scaffolding, teachers can hope to nurture the perspective taking and synthesising skills required by interdisciplinary thinking, but this will likely need to be an explicit activity that teachers intentionally engage in, students’ success in “interdisciplinarity” cannot be left to luck.

Step 5) Keep Dreaming

For the moment, interdisciplinarity within the state schools of England is a dream: mostly missing and largely unattainable. But that is no reason to stop dreaming. Within universities, interdisciplinarity is being praised for future-proofing both learners and education itself. Interdisciplinarity introduces students to complex problem solving, cognitive flexibility, and a whole host of smaller soft skills without abandoning the disciplinary traditions which have acted as the foundations of learning for millennia. It is the step from our current classroom norms to the dynamic learning experiences our students so desperately need. Which is why we must keep championing the pedagogy, trialling new pilot projects, and readying our classrooms to incorporate just a little bit more interdisciplinarity.

The Scout movement was an early example of organised residential outdoor education, focusing on character building, but more recently outdoor education has been seen to enable the development of life skills. Such skills include social effectiveness, teamwork, resilience and problem solving, as well as the promotion of connectedness to nature, and health and wellbeing. It has recently been very much in the news in Scotland with the passing of the Schools Residential Outdoor Education Act by the Scottish Parliament in December 2025, which is expected to come into effect from 2027. Through this Act, all Scottish school pupils will be entitled to a 5-day long residential experience at some time during their years in school.

Complexity, in a nut shell, is ‘the state of having many parts and being difficult to understand or find an answer to’ (Cambridge Dictionary). Two significant but different cases have been made for the complexity of outdoor education. Firstly, in 2001, Higgins said, ‘One of the most obvious aspects of education outdoors is that … there is a lot going on’. Importantly, the ‘lot going on’ ranges across and between the affective, cognitive and psychomotor domains of learning, a process referred to as ‘intertwining’ by Krathwohl et al. It is an adventure, and by its very nature has an uncertain outcome. Higgins concluded that education outdoors is a complex learning process, encompassing social (soft) and scientific (hard) examples of complexity. He argued that it is an educational imperative to introduce pupils to the complexity of learning outdoors to complement the prescriptive and compartmentalised nature of the educational experiences of the day.

The second case for the complexity of outdoor education comes from Williams in 2013, who was concerned with the learning process during a residential adventure education course for primary pupils. He doesn’t refer to Higgins’ 2001 paper but adopts complexity theory following discussions with educationalists to throw light on the inter-relationships between different aspects of the residential experience. In summary, he concluded that pupils demonstrate emergence at the conclusion of a residential experience due to the complex interactions acting on them. Emergence is a phenomenon associated with complex systems, referring to a step change in growth (personal growth in this case) which emerges only when properties or behaviours interact with one another.

Williams made passing reference to a 2003 paper by McKenzie. This paper, on the learning process during Outward Bound courses, was too late for Higgins to take into consideration; but to my mind it is deserving of more than a passing reference because it presents the complex nature of residential adventure education graphically (see figure, below). The publication doesn’t refer to complexity at all, but it does make the point that course elements interact. The graphic doesn’t need much explanation. It includes the inputs to the complex process – the learner, the physical and social environments, course activities, service and instructors – and towards the bottom, reflection and the emergent learner. The involvement of instructors at a late stage in the process is misleading though, since outdoor instructors are teaching, encouraging, reviewing and reflecting with the learners throughout the residential experience.

Of these three research papers only Higgins 2001 referred explicitly to interdisciplinary learning, yet all the authors were aware of residential course components interacting on the learner during the learning process. However, other papers do refer. In 2012, Allison and co-authors, writing about Scotland, said, ‘It is arguable that outdoor learning, conceived in an interdisciplinary way, might well provide the kind of educationally meaningful links for which recent curriculum initiatives like Curriculum for Excellence have sought.’; and in 2024 Higgins said, ‘Education outdoors has long been a feature of Scottish education in school grounds, locally and at residential centres, and lends itself to practical, innovative interdisciplinary pedagogies’. Allison et al. made a passing reference to complexity to bemoan the fact that at their time of writing pupils had very limited appreciation of the importance of complex problem solving. However, in 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland had already moved on this and said, ‘The introduction of Scottish Baccalaureates, particularly in Science, at Higher and Advanced Higher together with an interdisciplinary project will offer opportunities for the outdoors to be used as a context for learning.’

Learning in the outdoors is one of the four contexts for learning in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence not least because it provides opportunities for personal development, and the development of life skills that bear on pupils’ motivations and attitudes towards learning.

Dr. Roger Scrutton has a background in geology and geophysics as a member of academic staff in the School of Geosciences at Edinburgh University from 1974. He is now an Honorary Research Fellow in the Outdoor Education Group at Edinburgh.

References

Allison, P., Carr, D., & Meldrum, G. (2012). Potential for excellence: interdisciplinary learning outdoors as a moral enterprise. Curriculum Journal, 23(1), 43-58.

Higgins, P. (2001). Learning outdoors: Encounters with complexity. Other ways of learning, 99-106.

Higgins, P. (2024). Nature’s classroom: Tackling the climate and nature crisis through Scottish schools. Resource, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Spring, 2024, 16.

Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S., & Masia, B.B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook II: The affective domain. New York: David McKay.

Learning and Teaching Scotland (2010). Curriculum for excellence through outdoor learning. 28pp.

McKenzie, M., & University, S. F. (2003). Beyond “The Outward Bound process:” Rethinking Student Learning. Journal of Experiential Education, 26(1), 8-23.

Williams, R. (2013). Woven into the fabric of experience: Residential adventure education and complexity. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning, 13(2), 107-124.

The International Baccalaureate Organisation, a global leader in international education, has offered, via authorised IB World Schools, its Diploma Programme (DP) to pre-university school students across the globe for over 50 years. Emphasising breadth and depth of learning, DP students take subjects from six subject groups (language and literature; language acquisition, individuals and societies, sciences, mathematics, and the arts) in combination with a mandatory ‘core’, consisting of Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay, and Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS). Learning in the DP is inquiry driven, student centred, and based on conceptual understanding.

Cross-disciplinary approaches to learning are embedded in the DNA of the IB, for example, the transdisciplinary themes of the Primary Years Programme (PYP), the interdisciplinary unit of the Middle Years Programme (MYP), and the interdisciplinary pathway of the DP’s academic research paper, the “extended essay”. The DP also features specific courses that integrate disciplines, and it is in this space that we find a new cross-disciplinary innovation, Language and Culture.

In their article published by the Royal Anthropological Institute1, Gabriela Grinfeld and Robin Julian consider the design and piloting of the Language and Culture course in the context of the IB’s cross-disciplinary learning and teaching framework, exploring the integration of studies in language and literature with social and cultural anthropology. As anthropologists, and incorporating their experiences in curriculum design and management, they provide an overview of the development of the new Language and Culture curriculum, highlighting its purposes and challenges, and discussing the value of adopting an interdisciplinary approach as a way to broaden access to anthropology at a school level. They draw from their involvement in the creation of this new pedagogic initiative and from the analysis of testimonies gathered from alumni focus groups.

Language and Culture is a cross-disciplinary subject linking language and literature with social and cultural anthropology. It is built on the notion of conceptual learning in which students engage with central concepts of studies both in language and literature and in individuals and societies. In language and culture, students engage with a variety of different text-types in order to explore key notions related to language and culture through them and become flexible, critical readers. The model above portrays the main areas of study of the course, the central concepts in it and the way it relates to the principles at the core of the DP.

Robin Julian is a Curriculum Manager at the International Baccalaureate Organisation and is based in The Hague.

A multidisciplinary field borrows from many places, but an interdisciplinary one asks how those borrowings fit together. Criminology has historically done a great deal of the former and rather less of the latter. As Gerben Bruinsma argued in his 2015 ESC presidential address1, the field has generated hundreds of crime causation theories without necessarily achieving greater explanatory power and resembles a ‘battlefield of conflicting ideas’. Theories proliferate, but they often operate on different — sometimes mutually exclusive — assumptions, and scholars tend to form camps that rarely interact. The result is fragmentation: a field rich in perspectives but lacking the integrative frameworks to connect them.

This creates a real problem in the classroom. First-year students arrive to find a dizzying array of theories taught week by week, discipline by discipline, with little explicit guidance on how these perspectives relate to one another or why they sometimes conflict. Students default to what feels familiar — typically the sociological approaches they encountered at A-level — and struggle to move beyond description toward genuine critical engagement.

Our paper2, which I published with my PGTAs on the module, published earlier this year in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026), asks a simple question: what happens when you deliberately bring interdisciplinary thinking into a multidisciplinary field? We used a first-year Criminological Theory module at the University of Birmingham as our case study, and the findings suggest it makes a real difference.

What we did

We redesigned the module around an explicitly interdisciplinary structure. From the very first lecture, we introduced students to epistemology and the philosophy of science — not as abstract prerequisites, but as practical tools for evaluating the theories they would encounter throughout the semester. We asked: what counts as evidence? What assumptions does each theory rest on? How do different disciplines approach the same question — the question of why crime happens — with different methods and different starting points?

We gave students integration frameworks to work with: end-to-end integration (proposing a causal order between theories), side-by-side integration (recognising that different theories may fit different types of crime), and up-and-down integration (understanding that different explanations operate at different levels of analysis). These frameworks gave students a shared vocabulary for talking about how theories relate to one another — moving them from a multidisciplinary encounter with many perspectives toward an interdisciplinary practice of connecting them.

The module combined lectures, seminars built around structured debates, circle-of-voices discussions, comparison tables, and concept maps, a self-guided online “jigsaw module” developed with Florida International University’s Science and Fiction Lab, and a summative essay that rewarded cross-disciplinary comparison and epistemological reflection.

What students told us

We conducted semi-structured focus groups with five students and analysed the data thematically. Four themes emerged, and they speak directly to the multi-to-inter shift.

Students described moving from what happened to why it happened — from cataloguing theories to interrogating the assumptions beneath them. As one student, Emma, put it: “I now think about why a crime happened … not just that it happened.” Seminar discussions evolved from what another student, Mary, called “versus debates” into “together debates,” reflecting a growing capacity to hold multiple perspectives in productive tension rather than picking sides.

The jigsaw module — combining criminology, neuroscience, and supernatural fiction — was described as “eye-opening” but also abstract. Students valued the interdisciplinary connections it surfaced but wanted clearer scaffolding. This is a useful reminder: moving students from multidisciplinary exposure to genuine interdisciplinary thinking requires deliberate structure, especially when the task is unfamiliar.

Students consistently praised practical tools — Coleman’s boat for bridging micro and macro analysis, comparison tables, concept maps, and real-world case studies — as the moments where integration became tangible. And they reported a “comfort zone bias” toward sociological theories, asking for more sustained engagement with psychology and biology. The multidisciplinary habits of the field, it turns out, are reproduced in students’ own instincts — which is precisely why an interdisciplinary intervention matters.

Why this matters beyond criminology

Many fields are multidisciplinary in practice — they draw on multiple traditions — without being interdisciplinary in pedagogy. Students in these fields encounter diverse perspectives but are rarely taught how to integrate them, compare their epistemological foundations, or evaluate where they genuinely complement or contradict one another.

Our findings suggest that when you make interdisciplinarity a deliberate, scaffolded part of the curriculum — when you give students the tools and vocabulary to do the integrating themselves — it supports critical thinking across three dimensions: analytical depth, cross-disciplinary synthesis, and reflective engagement. These are transferable outcomes. The specific theories belong to criminology; the pedagogical approach does not.

For anyone teaching in a fragmented or multidisciplinary field, the invitation is straightforward: make the interdisciplinary character of your discipline visible and deliberate. Name the epistemological differences. Give students frameworks for navigating them. Design assessments that reward integration rather than reproduction. And then ask your students what happened — because, as we found, they will tell you.

The full open-access paper is available here: Svingen, Tsirova, and Khalilova (2026), Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

About the authors

Evelyn Svingen is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Birmingham, where she teaches criminological theory and serves as Programme Director of the BASc in Social Sciences. She has also served as Program Director for the MRes in Interdisciplinary study and as Academic Lead in Social Sciences at the Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences (LANS) program. Her research spans evolutionary and biosocial criminology, cooperation, and punishment. She is the author of Evolutionary Criminology and Cooperation: Retribution, Reciprocity, and Crime (Palgrave, 2023), winner of the 2024 European Society of Criminology Book Award, and lead editor of Building and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Higher Education: Lessons from LANS (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Egle Tsirova and Ulviyya Khalilova are postgraduate teaching assistants in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology at the University of Birmingham, where they co-designed and co-facilitated the module’s seminars and focus group research.

These moments mattered to me because they reminded me that interdisciplinarity is not only a concept discussed in formal academic settings. It is also a way of communicating and practising across different fields, spaces, and contexts. Conference participants came from different institutions, disciplinary backgrounds, educational levels, and professional roles. In this sense, the conference itself became a small interdisciplinary space: a place where different ways of thinking could meet, connect, challenge, and enrich one another.

This year’s conference theme, “Interdisciplinary Pathways”, connected closely with my research. When “pathways” are mentioned, many people may think of routes through curricula, modules, degree structures, or institutional arrangements. I understand pathways more broadly as lived experiences: the ways in which learners and teachers move through unfamiliar ideas, methods, tools, spaces, collaborations, and expectations. Pathways are not only designed through formal structures; they are also experienced, negotiated, and reshaped by people.

I gave a five-minute flash talk at the conference based on my emerging PhD project, which explores how undergraduate students experience boundary crossing during interdisciplinary learning and teaching in postdigital learning spaces. As this was my first in-person academic conference presentation, I felt a little nervous but more excited. In the project, I am interested in two undergraduate pathways into interdisciplinary learning: students enrolled in interdisciplinary degree programmes, and students from single-discipline degree programmes who take interdisciplinary electives. Rather than evaluating which group performs better, I hope to understand how different pathways shape students’ interdisciplinary learning experiences, including what feels exciting, difficult, unfamiliar, supportive, or transformative.

This interest in different pathways matters because students do not all begin from the same starting point when they enter interdisciplinary learning spaces. Some students may understand interdisciplinarity as part of their programme identity from the beginning. Others may experience it as a temporary movement away from a more familiar disciplinary background. Some students may need more support in recognising the value of their own disciplinary background in an interdisciplinary space, while others may need more opportunities to understand what interdisciplinarity means beyond creativity, collaboration, or innovation.

One line from the conference particularly stayed with me: “We teach students to grow food, manage forests, and protect ecosystems. The least we can do is to teach them the language to tell the world why it matters.” I found this sentence powerful because it frames language not only as a means of communication, but also as a way of making knowledge visible, meaningful, and connected to the wider world. If we read “language” as a metaphor for interdisciplinary education, then every time we answer the question “What is ‘interdisciplinary’?”, every time we respond to “How do we understand it?”, and every effort we make to design and practise interdisciplinary courses or projects, we are also trying to tell the world why it matters.

Knowledge and skills become more meaningful when students can connect them to wider contexts, communicate their significance, and understand why they matter beyond a single classroom, discipline, or professional field. In this sense, interdisciplinarity is not simply a supporting skill. Rather, it works as a bridge, connecting expertise with society, knowledge with responsibility, and learning with the wider world.

This also made me reflect on a common misunderstanding of interdisciplinary education. Sometimes, interdisciplinarity is misunderstood as training students to know “a little bit of everything”. From that perspective, it may seem less valuable than becoming highly specialised in one clearly defined field. For a long time, we have lived in a world that celebrates exceptional expertise within particular domains: the mathematician, the engineer, the AI specialist, the translator, the economist, the designer. Of course, disciplinary depth has enormous value, and interdisciplinary education does not aim to deny this. At the same time, interdisciplinarity does not stand in opposition to expertise, nor is it an attempt to replace traditional disciplines. Disciplines remain essential foundations of universities and knowledge-making. Rather, interdisciplinarity asks creative and necessary questions: how can deep knowledge speak to other forms of knowledge? How can different forms of expertise be connected, translated, challenged, and reimagined in response to problems that cannot be contained within a single field?

This matters because students are entering a world that is not organised according to disciplinary boundaries. Climate change, health inequalities, urban futures, sustainability, and education itself are all complex, entangled, and uncertain. They cannot be fully understood or addressed through one lens alone. These “wicked” problems certainly require specialists, but they also require people who can move across differences, communicate across fields, and hold multiple perspectives in view.

I think the meaning of interdisciplinary education goes far beyond simply “integrating disciplines”. It is not only about putting different disciplinary methodologies or theories together. Rather, it is about cultivating a way of thinking that can move, connect, and translate. It helps students open their minds and begin to engage with larger questions about humanity, society, and the future, rather than remaining within narrow, discipline-bound ways of responding to questions. It invites them to encounter what they do not yet know, to become more comfortable with uncertainty, and to see unfamiliarity not only as a weakness, but also as a possible beginning.

The deeper value of interdisciplinary education lies in this possibility. It is not about producing students who simply “do everything”. Rather, it supports learners who can connect, translate, communicate, collaborate, and imagine across boundaries. These learners may not always fit easily into traditional categories of expertise, but this is precisely why they matter: in a world where many urgent problems are complex, interconnected, and resistant to single-discipline solutions, the ability to move across boundaries is no longer optional, but necessary.

This is why interdisciplinary education should not be understood as a rejection of depth. Rather, it is a way of helping depth “travel”, cross boundaries, and translate into wider contexts. It allows knowledge to move among people, practices, tools, communities, and futures. It enables students not only to learn what matters, but also to find ways to tell the world why it matters.

Last but not least, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to David Overend, Jenny Scoles, and everyone involved in organising the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference 2026. The conference was deeply thought-provoking and meaningful for me. It reminded me that interdisciplinary education is not only about courses and projects, but also about how we understand the entanglements between learners, knowledge, spaces, society, and the future.

Kunqi Huang is a PhD student at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, based at the Centre for Research in Digital Education within the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research mainly focuses on interdisciplinary education in the postdigital context. Kunqi Huang’s research interests include interdisciplinary education, comparative education, postdigital education, and intercultural education.

To create that pipeline effect, LIS’s employability offer is carefully designed to be curriculum-integrated. It is not limited to end-of-degree careers advice; it is built through the degree experience itself, reinforced by academic coaching, practical internship experience, and targeted careers support.

Graduate outcomes: the headline and what sits behind it

LIS’s first undergraduate (BASc) cohort outcomes show 89% of graduates in skilled work and/or further study 15 months after graduation. Just as importantly, graduates are moving into a spread of sectors rather than clustering into a single destination: the largest share go into business and consulting, followed by research and data, sustainability and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), and tech and software, with others progressing to finance and investment, government and policy, and media and marketing, or entrepreneurship and sport and youth engagement.

This mix matters because it gives context to the headline figure: it suggests outcomes are being driven by transferable capability (and the ability to evidence it) rather than narrow occupational training. In other words, a strong “how” sits behind the percentage: repeated practice applying learning to real problems, credible outputs that can be shown to employers, and structured support that helps students translate what they can do into what employers can recognise.

A labour market shaped by skills signals

LIS builds employability against a national shift toward skills-based recruitment. According to the Institute of Student Employers (ISE), 58% of UK employers already hire for skills - a reminder that recruitment is increasingly driven by demonstrable capability rather than by credentials alone.

This has a direct implication for an interdisciplinary degree, and for graduates from all institutions, entering the labour market at a time of AI disruption (FT.com, paywalled) and the possible shrinking of the graduate labour market. An interdisciplinary education with its corresponding breadth can be an advantage, but only if students make that breadth legible: what they can do, how they do it, and what evidence proves it. In practice, employability support needs to help students produce that evidence and tell that story clearly.

Employability through programme design

The LIS BASc degree is structured around tackling complex, real-world problems using interdisciplinary perspectives and methods. The point is not only to learn concepts, but to use them, turning knowledge into outputs that are meaningful beyond the classroom.

A core mechanism is regular, timetabled coaching in small groups. This is where students are pushed to synthesise learning across domains, reflect on how their thinking is changing, and develop the habits that matter in work settings: problem definition, collaboration, judgement under uncertainty, and clear communication. In employability terms, coaching helps students do something many graduates struggle with: explain not just what they learned, but how they can work as a result.

Practical experience and targeted careers support

The LIS employability offering complements teaching and curriculum design with structured support that makes skills visible in employer-recognised ways:

• Internships and applied work: students work on real organisational problems in the curriculum and on internships that evidence their capability in real settings.

• One-to-one careers coaching: support is available to help all students define goals, prepare applications, and develop a coherent professional narrative.

• Networked employer engagement: brokered and facilitated interaction with employers and organisations helps students understand sectors and career pathways as well as role requirements and hiring processes.

We also recognise that employability is a moving target, and map programme learning outcomes to forward-looking skills themes, including those set out in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs reports. The intention is not to train students for a single first role, but to build durable capabilities - analytical and creative thinking, technological fluency, and adaptive problem-solving - that travel across sectors as roles evolve.

Widening participation and transition risk

A final dimension is transition support for students at higher risk of becoming NEET (not in education, employment, or training). At LIS, employability is strengthened when support is personalised and cross-functional, combining academic delivery, coaching, and careers interventions as a joined-up system rather than separate services.

What to take away

LIS’s employability offering works because it is an integrated system: the degree builds capability through interdisciplinary problem-solving; coaching develops synthesis and articulation; and practical experience plus careers support ensures students leave with evidence that employers can recognise. The outcomes data is remarkable, but the differentiator is the mechanism: employability is designed into the student journey, so graduates can demonstrate their skills, not merely claim them.

Anna Matei is Head of Futures at the London Interdisciplinary School.

The event was opened, after the introductory welcome from David Overend and the director of the EFI, Marion Thain, with a superb keynote from Helena Good, OBE, MD of Daydream Believers, a visionary group of people who are making real impact on young lives through their qualifications for young people on creative thinking and innovation. Helena shared some of her journey with us and a video of Stanley, ambassador and alumnus. It’s worth a look, especially if you are a teacher in school:

I spent the rest of my day hearing from some great speakers and presenters, from PhD students to educators of long experience working in interdisciplinary ways, not least of which was Dr. Roger Scrutton, champion of outdoor learning who anticipates the impact of the recently passed Scottish Residential Outdoor Education Bill. This Act gives all pupils in state and grant-aided schools in Scotland the chance to experience residential outdoor education. If there is capacity in our outdoor provision, this will be, in my opinion, a great thing.

There were far more talks and presentations available than one person could attend but instead of carving myself a highly personalised selection from the programme (that would have demanded walking between venues), I took the lazy option of staying in one room and taking my chances. It was a good strategy because the quality of talks was very high. The challenge for presenters of the “lightning talks” was time, being limited to five minutes, carefully policed by a time-keeper. I was skeptical about this at first, hardly being able myself to deliver a joke in that time, but all of those I saw managed to step up and make a coherent and confident impression. It was a joy to watch.

It could be said that higher education dominated the programme but the organisers had tried hard to extend the opportunity to the school sectors, and the RSE bursary helped achieve a better balance. Alison Murray and Nuzhat Uthmani from Stirling University explained their spiral curriculum approach to teaching across the responsibilities for all (health and wellbeing, numeracy and literacy) for primary student teachers. Joanna Stell from Impington Village College talked in detail about the development and success of interdisciplinary projects for secondary pupils on the international baccalaureate programme. For me, the strength of her talk was the stance of critical evaluation taken by the educators involved in the trial and development. She asked what factors might be in play and refused to accept that for the successful examples, such as “the Cambridge witches in iambic pentameter”, a project spanning English and History within a local context, it was a matter of luck. Here, for me, lies the critically inquiring stance of professional education.

I am conscious that I can not do justice in this short post to my day at the IDL conference, so I am going to do the injustice of stopping here with an apology to those I ought to have mentioned. What I will say is that it was really refreshing to experience such warm reflection and creativity in a collaborative and collegiate atmosphere at the EFI. I am encouraged that we are finally beginning to “get it” perhaps, and I am excited to find out more of the curricular reform currently under way in Scotland that promises to finally address the missing leg of Curriculum for Excellence, that of interdisciplinary learning. Throughout the day there were so many good opportunities to network with friends old and new, including a number of teachers who had been supported by a bursary from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Our own Professor Colin Graham closed out the conference to the clink-clink of beverages arriving for the post-conference soirée.

Look out for more coming soon, here, and on the Higher Education IDL site, and in the Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.

One Summer my parents decided they were going to build a cabin in the Decatur islands off the coast of Washington as a summer getaway. It was close to my mom’s relatives, and our family needed a place for my brothers and I to get away to during our teenage years.

My parents hardly knew a thing about homebuilding.

My mom had taken a ‘floorplanning’ class at the local community college; and my dad helped build our bunk beds and put a deep end in our pool, but they both didn’t know how to wire electricity in a home, or dig a sewage line.

They insisted that they would ‘learn.’

On July 15th, 1996, they loaded our Green Mini Van and made the long trek up the Pacific Coast with my four quadruplet brothers. We arrived on Decatur Island to a pile of lumber and a vacant lot. There was no instruction manual. No expert electrician or plumber to assist. Just lumber; and an extremely naive family of 6 with a lot of gumption, and very little know how.

In one month we undertook the project of our lives.

The School Instruction Manual

Building a cabin on Decatur island without an instructional manual is hardly the way we structure learning in school. Schools provide an instruction manual for every class. Which assignments to complete in the exact order they need to be completed. How to get a passing grade. How to spend every minute of your time.

And we wonder what happened to kids’ innate curiosity.

But what if learning experiences in schools looked different? What if like homebuilding in Decatur, classes, courses and schedules were built around big open- ended questions, and hands-on projects to guide learning? What if subjects merged together naturally to fulfil the goals of the project or to answer the big question?

That’s the exact approach we are taking at the inaugural Montessori Middle School at The International Montessori School of Hong Kong: A unique mixed age, bilingual program for 7th and 8th grade adolescent learners that uses interdisciplinary experiences to create empowered citizens.

And we just wrapped up our first big interdisciplinary unit on Identity; and addressed our first big question:

What makes me, ‘me?’ An Interdisciplinary Approach to Uncovering Our Unique Identities

In Science, students constructed DNA models to represent the influence of genetics on their personal preferences.

To build their models, students had to learn:

• The structure of DNA: The double helix, sugar-phosphate backbones, and nitrogenous base pairs (Adenine-Thymine, Cytosine-Guanine).

• Genotype vs. Phenotype: How to distinguish between the genetic code (genotype) and the physical traits or behaviors it produces (phenotype).

• Inherited vs. Acquired Traits: Recognizing that while eye color is genetic, a preference for a specific sports team is likely environmental/learned.

• Probability: Simple Punnett Squares to understand why they might share traits with siblings but still be unique.

In Language, they wrote poetry and narratives around what made them unique.

To construct the poetry and narratives, they had to learn:

• Figurative Language: Using metaphors, similes, and personification to describe internal feelings or unique personality quirks.

• Narrative Voice: Understanding first-person point of view and how to establish a consistent “tone” that reflects their personality.

• The Writing Process: Planning, drafting, and—most importantly—revision to ensure their unique “voice” comes through clearly.

• Structure: Understanding how different poem forms (like I Am poems, Free Verse, or Sonnets) can change the impact of their message.

In Humanities, they created interactive maps to represent the cultures in the places they call ‘home.’ To build the maps, they had to learn:

• Cartographic Conventions: Using legends/keys, scale, compass roses, and coordinates.

• Human-Environment Interaction: How the physical geography of their “home” (climate, terrain) influences the culture (food, clothing, traditions).

• Cultural Diffusion: Understanding how cultures move and change when people migrate from one place to another.

• Digital Literacy: If the maps are digital, they need to know how to embed “hotspots,” links, or media to make them interactive.

In Design Tech, students created 3-D designs and accompanying stories of their names. To create these designs, they had to learn:

• 3-D Modeling Software: Basic proficiency in tools like Tinkercad or SketchUp (e.g., grouping shapes, “hole” functions, and scaling).

• Design Thinking: Empathizing with their own history to define a “problem” (how do I represent the name ‘Alex’?) and prototyping solutions.

• Symbolism in Design: Choosing colors, textures, and geometric vs. organic shapes to convey meaning (e.g., sharp edges for strength, soft curves for kindness).

• Measurement and Precision: Using the metric system to ensure 3-D prints or physical builds are accurate and stable.

And after 6 weeks, in the same way my family and I stood proudly by the frame of our new cabin, students stood proudly by the unique blueprint of their identity (see picture). Learning was innate and natural.

The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Learning

Interdisciplinary experiences aren’t just fun for students.

They also create the kind of empowered citizens our world needs.

According to a number of studies1, they:

• Enhance critical thinking and synthesis

• Build real-world problem solving skills

• Increase creativity and innovation

• Improve cognitive flexibility

A Call To Action: Shifting Our Classrooms to Allow for These Experiences

Designing and Delivering Interdisciplinary Learning Experiences is not easy. It requires bold leadership, courageous teachers, willing students and a shift in the way we have done school for a long time. But our students deserve it.

So what shifts do we need to make for this kind of interdisciplinary learning to grow roots?

First, we need to shift our role in the classroom. There’s no need for content experts to stand in the front of the classroom and disseminate knowledge. AI, Youtube Videos, and the world’s largest content library can do that for us. Instead, we need to become learning designers who can help guide the learning experience, and deliver short mini-lessons when the time calls. This requires getting to know our students’ unique interests, personalities, and strengths and reorganizing learning pathways to tailor to them.

Second, we need to shift our environments to allow for flexibility, and resources that allow for exploration. There’s no longer a need for rows of chairs facing a giant whiteboard. Instead we need modular setups that cater to diverse learning styles, and allow for multiple kinds of learning to happen simultaneously. Think small couches, coffee tables, breakout rooms, and yes, even a kitchen. Open cabinets with hands-on experiments, learning materials, maps, timelines, books, technology.

Finally, we need to plan teaching and learning in teams rather than in silos. This can be with the teacher next door, or a group of teachers across the school. Language and Social Studies can merge around bigger topics or themes like Storytelling or Identity. Science and Math around sustainability.

Making these shifts isn’t just ‘preparing kids for the future.’ It’s training them to think with the dispositions needed right now. If Maria Montessori, John Dewey and Piaget reshaped schooling in this way 100 years ago, we can certainly achieve it today.

I speak from 22 years of experience educating this way. It absolutely works. It requires imagination, and even more practice.

What’s one shift you can make in your classroom right away?

We can’t afford to waste any more time - our students’ futures depend on it.

Kyle Wagner Bio

Kyle Wagner doesn’t just build interdisciplinary learning experiences; he builds future citizens. As the Founder of Transform Educational Consulting Limited and the Inaugural Middle School Director at The International Montessori of Hong Kong, Kyle specializes in turning passive classrooms into active hubs of innovation. Kyle first fell in love with project-based learning as a Middle School Humanities teacher at High Tech High (the most prominent project-based learning school in the world) where he supported students in publishing best- selling books, curating their own living museums, creating social enterprises, and even influencing policy change in the community through real- world projects.

He has taken this passion global, building interdisciplinary micro-schools like ‘Futures Academy’ at The International School of Beijing, and supporting thousands of educators from schools around the world through training and workshops to transform their classrooms from passive spaces into active hubs of innovation as well.

A published author, Kyle’s books ‘Where Is The Teacher:’ The 12 Shifts for Student-Centered Environments, “ and “The Power of SIMPLE,” and his podcast, ‘The Student-Centered Shift,’ share simple ideas and strategies to make these shifts through real case studies from the classroom.

Kyle holds a M.Ed. in Teacher Leadership with a thesis that focuses on developing democratic classrooms and distributed leadership models. When not writing or teaching, he is performing with his original band, participating in karaoke contests and traveling the world with his partner. He currently resides in Hong Kong where he spends time developing student-centered schools of the future while helping other school leaders build theirs.

This year’s Conference will focus on how interdisciplinarity can be supported, structured and created in different educational contexts, including those before and beyond higher education.

A learner’s interdisciplinary journey may start at various points and this Conference will focus on the place for interdisciplinary opportunities - including points within the curriculum as well as physical and intellectual spaces.

The focus will also consider collaborations for transdisciplinarity across disciplines and across organisational boundaries – within universities, with primary and secondary schools, with the local community or external partners.

The Conference welcomes examples of how interdisciplinary activities can impact learners through projects which transcend university or academic boundaries. Outcomes from these opportunities which might measure transferable and lifelong skills and experience are particularly welcome. Student perspectives and contributions are greatly valued within all submissions.

Conference themes

All submissions should address one or more of the following conference themes. You will be asked to identify the relevant theme(s) when submitting your application:

Pathways for Interdisciplinary Activities

This theme relates to ways in which interdisciplinarity can be introduced and extended in a learning journey, perhaps in secondary schools, in the early years of university, in short courses, or in lifelong learning. Submissions should outline or explore ways in which interdisciplinary activities and experiences can be sustained over time, including ways to identify interdisciplinary opportunities within existing curriculum as well as focused interdisciplinary events or projects. Examples of long-term interdisciplinary ventures or ways in which the interdisciplinary conversation are opened in different spaces are particularly welcome.

Spaces for Creativity in Interdisciplinarity

Making a place or carving out space for interdisciplinary opportunities can be difficult as pressures on students to achieve goals related to attainment and potential future employment become stronger. But re-defining interdisciplinary activities in terms of creativity or independent thought might provide new routes into interdisciplinary activities. If interdisciplinarity is framed in terms of ‘making something new’, this may provide a justification for students and faculty that resonates beyond the established curriculum; the ‘unique selling point’ perhaps. Contributions to this theme should include examples of how creativity and creative thought are embedded in interdisciplinary activities and ways to enhance existing interdisciplinary activities through creativity.

Collaboration to Support Interdisciplinary Opportunities

Increasingly, interdisciplinary opportunities attempt to transcend traditional boundaries, such as those between disciplines, across disciplines or between the institution and the local community. These challenge-based and experiential projects offer a focus for multi-subject considerations of complex systems, and provide a valuable connection between the university and the local community. Collaboration can also take place within campus environments, such as between faculty, academic support services and archival evidence. Contributions to this theme should highlight examples of where collaboration has worked well and provide guidance for how this might be implemented in other contexts.

Wildcard

An important development within the interdisciplinary learning and teaching arena which may not fit neatly into one of the themes above. Please make the rationale for the wildcard clear in the abstract submission.

Submission formats

The organisers invite submissions for short papers and lightning talks. We will do our best to accommodate your preferred format, but this will depend on space available within the schedule, and we may contact you to discuss an alternative format.

Short paper Presentation which follow traditional conference presentation format, though we also welcome submissions offering opportunities for interaction. These should be limited to 15 minutes to be followed by five minutes for questions.

Lightning talks should be limited to 5 minutes, and no more than 5 slides (or equivalent). Lightning talks offer a fantastic opportunity to share new ideas, capture insights gained, generate hallway conversation, and receive helpful feedback. They might:

- focus on a particular element of successful practice

- recount lessons learned

- capture an account of impact

- describe a challenge that would benefit from community feedback

- propose a collaborative project

We would particularly welcome lightning talk submissions from students, educators who are new to interdisciplinary teaching, and non-academic staff working to support interdisciplinary education (e.g., learning technologists, librarians and professional services).

Conference format

In addition to hosting conference papers and lighting talks, additional sessions which support more informal ways to share experience may be offered. These sessions will be designed by the conference organisers, but we will invite delegates to submit their ‘interdisciplinary challenges’ to shape their focus. We will ask for these when you register to attend the conference.

Our goal of encouraging active participation and dynamic exchanges means that the conference will only run as an in-person event.

Closing date for Submissions: 16 January 2026

The submission form can be found at this link. It asks for the following details, which you may wish to have ready:

• Name and contact details of the presenter(s)

• The Type of Submission (Short Paper/Lightning Talk) and the sub-theme of the submission (Pathways for Interdisciplinary Activities/Spaces for Creativity in Interdisciplinarity/ Collaboration to Support Interdisciplinary Opportunities/Wildcard)

• Short Paper: A Title of the Submission and an Abstract of no more than 250 words

• Lightning Talk: A Title of the Submission and an Abstract of no more than 150 words

• A short biography of the presenter(s) of no more than 150 words (each)

This is the ninth Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference and information regarding previous conferences can be found at this website.

For further information please contact the conference organisers:

David Overend, Jenny Scoles and Emilie McSwiggan, Co-Chairs, Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference 2026, david.overend@ed.ac.uk, jenny.scoles@ed.ac.uk and emilie.mcswiggan@ed.ac.uk.

Ida Kemp, Chair, Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conferences (UK), interdisciplinary.ac.uk@gmail.com

A further perspective about Yrityskylä was published in the Financial Times (January 6, 2025) as part of the paper’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign. The article – “Finland fuels children’s future with financial literacy and food” complements the two Finnish perspectives.

What forms might an educational perspective and programme take on financial literacy and working life in the Scottish curriculum? What knowledge, skills, mindsets and competences are required? Are there practical examples that might be shared on the IDL Network?

I had the chance recently to reflect on some of these matters in a conversation with Louise Darcy, a practitioner who had been looking at her own development. Louise is an experienced Primary Teacher who, returning to school after a summer break, felt that there were aspects of Scottish Education that she wanted to better understand, interdisciplinary learning being one. Finding the Teaching Matters blog, she contacted the chief editor Dr. Jenny Scoles, who kindly put Louise and I in touch. We arranged to talk over an online call after school.

We both imagined a half hour chat but found that a professional conversation can become a rich exploration of policy, ideas, practice, shared concerns and experience. Louise wrote a post about it on her own SubStack:

louise’s Substack

Teacher inspiration : A Wonderful Week

Adjusting to Being Back in the Classroom…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · Scottishteacher and Nick Hood

In that post, Louise shares her motivation and professional curiosity in exploring interdisciplinary learning, some of the resources she found helpful, and the next steps she is planning for herself and the children she teaches. Her follow up post should be read also, for the sound advice Louise has for other classroom practitioners about knowing when to stop; self-care is possibly (in my view, at any rate) the most significant duty of the professional. It is important to develop capacity in professions like teaching and to remain committed to being the best version of yourself that you can be. Developing confidence and competence in situating your practice within the interdisciplinary context for learning is an essential, if sometimes neglected or poorly understood foundation of our education system. All practitioners should continue to strive, as Louise is doing, to bring that foundation to the lives of the children in their care, but do not forget to “put your own mask on first.”

Look out for more from Louise on her SubStack soon. She is already reporting that “it's been great to see how the children have responded and how, slowly but surely, real progress is being made.“

When I was deciding what to study at university, I went through several career options each week – struggling to find a single discipline that I clicked with. Having studied Maths, Biology, English literature and Spanish at A-level, I didn’t want to choose a degree that would isolate any of my academic strengths and only allow me to consider problems from one angle.

What I have loved about the course at Edinburgh University is that I’ve felt in control of what I’m doing and able to really delve into my own interests. In one module alone, the work I’ve submitted has ranged from an academic essay on teaching biodiversity in schools, to a creative writing piece from the perspective of an indigenous girl in the Ngorongoro National Park in Tanzania, to a presentation on how to implement a biodiversity festival in Scottish cities.

However, doing a degree like this means you sign yourself up for a pretty much daily question at university of ‘What degree do you do?’ - very quickly followed up by ‘So what actually is that?’

At Edinburgh, the core degree is formed of three modules: Global Challenges, Students As Change Agents, and Reflections. Global Challenges is centred around a key question – each year focusing on a different topic. Sustainability, conflict, global health and inequality are all covered in the four- year programme. Students As Change Agents is also heavily rooted in real-world problems, with students working in teams to produce a report and presentation to a charity on an issue they have identified.

After my exams at secondary school and sixth form, what I really wanted was a degree that not only taught you what to study, but why to study it. Interdisciplinary Futures is certainly on the way to showing students the importance and relevance of what they’re doing, not that they’re just working towards a degree so they can say they have one.

So how do you know if an interdisciplinary course is right for you?

There’s not necessarily a set type of person who I would say is ‘right’ for the course. I’ve got friends on my course with STEM backgrounds, humanities backgrounds and arts backgrounds. But what everyone seems to have in common is a drive to mix academic theory and practice with real-world problem solving, wanting to see the world and its perspectives rather than stay in a single lane, and believing we can make a positive impact on communities and the wider world.

Yet this is not to say an interdisciplinary degree comes without problems. At times, I have really struggled with the move away from a less traditionally academic course, and I did at one point consider switching to a language degree. I’ve definitely not been alone in this, with many of my friends on the course sharing similar thoughts on how different the course is to the type of education we’re used to. I think this is in part due to the way the current education system in the UK is formed – with a priority on grades and subjects over genuine skills learnt. Currently, there don’t seem to be any real options until higher education to choose an interdisciplinary approach to learning in academia.

While I have enjoyed challenging myself with such a new and unique course, the elective options for me have been integral for my first year in helping me feeling like I’m still progressing in a discipline. This has further allowed to build interdisciplinary knowledge, as it’s shown me how to combine such different subjects to look at an issue.

In my first year I’ve studied Spanish and Politics alongside Interdisciplinary Futures which has allowed me to broaden my perspective for some of the core modules. Our question this year has been regarding biodiversity. Having studied Hispanic culture in my Spanish course, this allowed me a wider global perspective on cultural implications of biodiversity, and studying politics informed my view about land ownership and conflicts within certain protected spaces.

The real question isn’t why I chose to study an interdisciplinary degree over a year ago. It’s why I’m continuing to choose this path. What I wanted from university was not just a traditional degree, but a sense of working towards something tangible. Interdisciplinary Futures definitely offers undergraduates the chance to do that. I hope that with future cohorts the degree will become more recognised and interdisciplinarity will have a strong position in higher education – and in fact education as a sector - and not just for those studying it as their main degree.

Caitlin Hall is an undergraduate student of Interdisciplinary Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh.

Biodiversity

1.13MB ∙ PDF file

Download

a pdf presentation outlining the unit design

Download

This presentation, like others in the Natural Partners collection here on the IDL network, is part of a formative assessment activity in which peers, tutors and invited IDL experts are asked to provide advice and next steps guidance to students who will go on to trial aspects of their detailed IDL planning in a subsequent placement. You can see that in the penultimate slide in this particular deck. As the product of creative design and planning, these offer great ideas for other teachers seeking encouragement for their own implementation of the fourth context for learning in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, currently under review. Following the Hayward report, it is expected that interdisciplinary learning will feature at least as strongly in Scotland’s schools into the future, engaging with sustainability and the demand for stronger critical skills in our citizens.

Teachers are welcome to adapt the designs in these outline units of work for their own planning of interdisciplinarity and learning for sustainability.

Vertical Farming

5.2MB ∙ PDF file

Download

pdf file containing IDL unit design

Download

Sophie’s unit design idea sets out details for problem-based interdisciplinary learning that addresses outdoor learning, STEM and sustainability, linked to specific UN development goals, all connected within the four capacities of the curriculum.

Our challenge-based approach aims to empower students to contribute towards better futures and directly responds to employers, who have told us that they want our graduates to be adaptable, skilled in collaboration, and capable of responding to complexity. In this blog post, I introduce some of the core courses on the programme and share a new resource – a toolkit for interdisciplinary learning and teaching – that will hopefully provide ways for others to connect to the work that we are doing at EFI and to chart new pathways to study, collaborate and work with us. The proposed Scottish Diploma of Education, informed by the Hayward Review of Qualifications and Assessment (March 2023), offers new opportunities to build some of these pathways.

Creating an undergraduate programme for EFI has involved a long, careful process of collaboration across the University’s three colleges (Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Medicine & Veterinary Medicine, and Science & Engineering). The result is a collection of courses led by academics from across the University in collaboration with external lecturers and partner organisations, many of whom have close connections with EFI’s research and innovation centres. These courses are taken by a diverse cohort of students who are brave enough to enrol on a brand-new programme that is still in its early stages of development, but which promises a confident, ambitious and innovative model of education, as we imagine and work towards better futures.

An important strand of the Interdisciplinary Futures programme is a two-year series of research training workshops called Researching Global Challenges. On this pre-honours (first and second year) course, students are introduced to a series of challenge questions and ‘real-world’ problems, covering topics such as inequality, sustainability, conflict or global health. This year we asked ‘how can we enhance biodiversity?’. Last year, the question addressed the gap between rich and poor. Responding to these questions, students complete a cycle of methods workshops, moving week by week to a new workstation and working with a tutor on methods in data collection and analysis, cultural analysis and creative practice. Addressing the same questions from radically different perspectives, all in the same large teaching space, students build a sense of the vast range of possible approaches. In their assessments, which include essays, presentations, creative submissions and group projects, their learning across the different workstations is consolidated into mixed methods responses, which are always informed by data and creative research practice.

Alongside our methods course, we invite external partners to work with our students on courses that develop their capacity to work as ‘change agents’. Students develop core skills like problem-solving and data analysis, applying them to projects proposed by external partners. These partners, which have included a rewilding charity, a construction company, and a children's data collaborative, present the societal, economic, or environmental problems that they are working on. Students respond to these project briefs in teams to research, analyse data, and develop innovative solutions, culminating in a business-style impact report and presentation. Students value the ‘real world’ application of their learning that is offered by these courses.

Throughout the programme, students receive coaching, feedback, and opportunities for reflection, fostering personal development and a deeper understanding of their skills and values. Our Reflections on Interdisciplinary Practice courses are designed to create a space for students to step outside the ‘hands-on’ learning of the methods and change agents courses, to zoom out and consider how they are developing as learners, and what they need to progress through the years of the programme in a way that helps them achieve their personal and career goals. We aim to build a strong sense of community through these courses and foster an environment of careful, supportive and collaborative learning.

Alongside the core courses, we also offer a range of optional elective courses that are open to students in other schools. We have courses on ethics and politics of data, creative responses to the city of Edinburgh, and sustainable development, among others. As we approach the third year of the programme in 2025-26, we are introducing a suite of honours (third and fourth year) courses and will have over 200 students across our core and elective courses. It has been a period of rapid growth and development, and we are increasingly confident and clear about what interdisciplinary learning and teaching means to us. And we are ready to share these insights and experiences with others!

Emerging from the Interdisciplinary Futures programme but connecting to other researchers, educators and contexts, the Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching (TILT) provides a set of strategies, methodologies, and materials designed to empower individuals from diverse educational backgrounds to engage in interdisciplinary work. Whether you're a student, educator, researcher, or curriculum developer, TILT offers practical support for fostering cross-disciplinary connections and expanding your interdisciplinary practice. We hope that TILT will connect us with others working with interdisciplinary methods and approaches in other parts of further and higher education, and also in other contexts, including community groups, arts organisations, life-long learning and secondary schools.

TILT is a digital space of possibility, a living document that we hope will grow and evolve through contributions and collaborations, reflecting the dynamic and ever-expanding nature of interdisciplinary education. It's an invitation to join us in shaping the future of education, fostering a collective and collaborative way of working that transcends traditional boundaries, and empowering individuals to tackle the complex challenges of our time with creativity, empathy, and a shared commitment to building better futures.

Overend, D., Choi, S., Cross, A., Cullen, C., Dures, S., Jay, D., Scoles, J., Winter, M. and Zhang, S. (2024). TILT: Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching, blogs.ed.ac.uk/tilt/. University of Edinburgh.

David Overend is a researcher in interdisciplinary education, art and performance. He is programme director of Interdisciplinary Futures for Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. davidoverend.net.

Human knowledge has grown ever more rapidly through the 20th and early 21st century and is now accelerating through the application of AI. What now counts as important knowledge for learners, teachers and employers? Global challenges – health and wellbeing, climate change, food production, clean energy, security, conflict, migration, AI, employment and challenges to democracy and truth itself - all these transcend traditional subject boundaries around which our education system has been constructed and sustained through subject-led qualifications. The pace of change will only accelerate. For better or worse, the 20th and early 21st century ‘liberal’ world order as we know it – social, economic, cultural and political – is disappearing. Many in our society have not enjoyed its benefits, creating social and political divisions. Are learner pathways, and the knowledge, skills, competences and mindsets acquired through primary, secondary and tertiary education and training, still coherent and relevant to the rapidly changing nature and demands of employment and life in the uncertain world of the 21st century? In 2025 the reform of our education system to align with this changing world of challenge, opportunity and employment grows ever more important. A key decision around whether to adopt the recommendations of the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment (2023) on the reform of the qualifications will impact future learner pathways through secondary into tertiary education and/or employment.

Our education system needs re-imagining. While subjects - the ‘pillars’ of the curriculum - remain important, a rebalancing towards greater breadth of learning and skills development and more diverse learner pathways has become important for 21st century life. However, breadth should not entail studying more subjects but should focus on exploring the connections between subjects through interdisciplinary and cross-curricular learning (IDL) - one of the ‘four contexts for learning’ of Curriculum for Excellence and a key element of the Scottish Diploma of Achievement proposed in the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment (2023). Knowing how to learn, and motivating learners to want to learn, are becoming as important as what they learn.

By way of background, in the early 1960s only around 4% of UK school leavers continued their education into university. Higher Education expanded rapidly from late 1960s onwards with the aim of driving innovation, economic growth and greater prosperity. In 2023 Scottish higher education entries were around 37% of school leavers, with around 27% entering further education and 24% into employment. In Scotland, as in the wider UK, a majority of school leavers don’t go on to university. Nonetheless higher education remains the aspiration and destination of choice for many.

In practice, education serves multiple purposes – supporting and growing the economy, developing skills, preparing individuals for employment and (not least) enhancing and enriching their understanding of the world and their role within it. However, many of the jobs for which our education system currently prepares young learners may not exist by the time they enter the workforce. Jobs for life are becoming rarer. Higher education institutions focus more on educating students, creating new insights, knowledge and understanding through research, sharing knowledge and developing subject-specific skills. This creates a tension. While many jobs continue to value more specialist knowledge, understanding and training, a large majority (>86%) of large employers (Institute of Student Employers) now say they no longer require higher education graduates with subject specialisms, while an astonishing 96% of graduates said they had changed career pathways by age 241. Subject specialism is no longer the primary determinant of suitability in the majority of graduate recruitment. Employers increasingly value transferable skills and attributes, breadth of knowledge and experience, adaptability, cross-disciplinary thinking and working, problem-solving, collaboration and interpersonal skills – all skills that can be transferred from one role and place to another, and across employment sectors. These should be an integral part of all young people’s education, ensuring the democratisation of knowledge and skills. This is not to suggest that subject specialism through secondary education and qualifications is no longer important; sustaining subject specialism, research, skills and expertise should remain central to education and to prosperous modern economies.

Meanwhile the stability and financial viability of higher education institutions in the UK (and more widely) are currently under serious threat, particularly because of the large and widespread loss of income resulting from the recent rapid decline in the numbers of overseas students studying in the UK. The college sector, which plays a vital role in skilling and upskilling learners to address skills demands, gaps and shortages (not least in key energy, construction and environmental sectors) is also under threat from critical underfunding2. All of these challenges are systemic. The status quo appears unsustainable. Reform of secondary education and the qualifications should address the better alignment of secondary and tertiary education to meet the rapidly evolving and diverse challenges of the 21st century. This will require cross-sector collaboration to develop more flexible learner pathways through the education system.

The UK’s newest university, the London Interdisciplinary School, has led the way in developing a problem-led curriculum, ‘teaching undergraduates, graduates, and professionals how to tackle complex, real-world problems by applying knowledge and skills from a range of disciplines, and embracing science, humanities, and the arts’. The recently established Edinburgh Futures Institute shares these aspirations. Other universities are now developing broadly interdisciplinary curricula or requiring a proportion of their undergraduate teaching to take the form of interdisciplinary modules to broaden the mindsets of students entering higher education.

“Collaboration” was the leading ‘word cloud’ word selected by delegates (including many classroom teachers) at the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s 2019 IDL Conference; it is to be expected in most jobs. Yet most of our secondary education and tertiary education and qualifications (our learner pathways) prioritise individual achievements. Collaboration requires a major culture shift, not least in testing and qualifications and in learner mindsets.

Are young learners over-assessed and losing a sense of imagination and curiosity about the world? In the most-viewed Ted Talk of all time (“Changing Education Paradigms”) Sir Ken Robinson thought so. The systemic development of more interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to learning would make a major contribution to the development of curious and ‘job-ready’ students and graduates.

Colin Graham (FRSE) is a Senior Honorary Professorial Fellow, The University of Edinburgh

This post has been adapted from an article in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s quarterly magazine ReSourcE for Spring 20243, which contains a series of articles written by members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Education Committee.

The image was AI-generated by WriteCream’s free implementation using the prompt “A modern teenaged schoolchild wearing a 2025 school uniform sitting at the wheel of a 1920s racing car on an Edinburgh street with a race setting. The scene should blend contemporary and historical elements.”

Amongst the scientists, a mathematician takes charge of the equations for working out the exact angle at which the dish should be turned in order to receive the signal from the moon. Notwithstanding the sheer level of skill and perseverance, with the blackboard filled to the edges with formulas and chalk, every attempt leads to interference. Due to the high-winds and the lack of power, the signal was neither precise nor stable. The team almost gave up, when they decide to take matters in their own hands; as the clouds parted, the moon appears in the sky; they point the dish straight towards it, and Armstrong’ light-footed and slightly unstable step appears on screen.

In what way is this film saying anything about knowledge, education and ultimately, about curriculum, as we grapple with the big questions of what curriculum should do in today’s schools? This discussion is not only of academic interest, but it is remarkably timely for global policy1, and especially in Scotland, currently undertaking a review of Curriculum for Excellence.

The moment when the team of scientists turned the dish - by manoeuvring its levers - was the historical moment when the wider public witnessed a human being taking their first step into an environment that never before had been part of human experience. While this might appear as a rather simple act, what lay behind it was a gesture, by which term I mean more than just the performance of an action. A gesture is part of a system of visual, linguistic signs which contains a subject, a verb signalling an intention, and an object, which is put to the attention of the viewers. In this case, the image of Armstrong stepping on the moon’s surface, crystallised the idea of a powerful humanity armed with sophisticated technological devices; but it also brought into view the more tentative image of a human encumbered by his/her own ignorance of what was stepping into.

There are many readings for such an image, but the point is not the deciphering; the power of a gesture lies in the witnessing of what happens when the viewer engages with the reality that is being presented to them.

And so, I ask the readers and myself, what happens when a science teacher decides to point to the moon as a topic in the curriculum? Is this gesture informed chalk in hand by the accurate calculation of when in the programme of studies this topic should feature in order to achieve an accurate transmission? Or is it more like that historical gesture, when a teacher decides to move the levers and turn the dish for everyone to see? I suggest that in between these two modalities of teaching lie very different conceptions of curriculum and of education.

When we engage in discussion around curriculum review, a reference is commonly made to the vertical nature of scientific knowledge, which means that a teacher must know what to teach first before a student can learn what comes next. This belief in verticality is grounded in the positivist idea that science develops as a linear accumulation of factual knowledge organised into disciplines. From this idea of knowledge derives a model of curriculum as ‘mastery’: it features a strong focus on content; it is teacher-focused and pays little attention to the needs or experiences of individual pupils.

When this model is at work, and a teacher decides to teach students about the moon, a number of interferences occur; for example, with geography (“does the moon show the same face whether we are in North America or in Australia?”); or popular music culture (“What is the dark side of the moon?”) combined with the difficulty of comprehending the reciprocal relationships between Earth, Sun and Moon in space. At that point, on what basis do we decide where to draw the line, as to what may be legitimately included in the lesson in order to fit the requirements for that particular age and stage? This dilemma presents itself every time we call Interdisciplinary Learning or IDL into question. Identified with an acronym that stands by itself, IDL comes across as a ‘fat component’ of the curriculum, cumbersome to deliver and with no real rationale or justification behind it.

Conversely, moving the levers implies a different set of considerations. Firstly, it is a gesture of responsibility, which puts the teacher in the position to make a judgement on why it might be relevant and important to engage with a particular topic; but secondly, it is also a gesture of humility, which requires a certain openness with regards to what might ensue. Differing from mastery, this approach finds its roots into a model of praxis, where the transmission of factual knowledge and procedures is not the central focal points. Rather, the curriculum will not look like something scripted but it will be more along the lines of what, one of its strongest advocates, the Scottish educationalist Lawrence Stenhouse defined as:

“an attempt to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that it is open to critical scrutiny, and capable of effective translation into practice”. (Stenhouse, 1975, p.124).

Interestingly in this quote there is no reference to specified content - what is to be taught – but it refers to essential principles and features, which point to ways of doing, approaches and methodologies. This different emphasis on the ‘how’ however is not simply replacing the what with a prescription of the ways in which a particular content may be imparted. This is the case with what we refer to as the latest fashions and passions in education: cooperative learning; project-based learning; interdisciplinary learning; nor it is a simple way to replace the emphasis on content with the acquisition of generic skills by the students: i.e., communication; cooperation; and even design or creativity.

Instead, with the call to principles and features lies the call to the agency of the teacher to decide what matters, and the best way to go about sharing that with the students. ‘Turning the levers’ means asking oneself what gestures may be possible to invite the students forward and to look? And how is the experience designed to allow for that critical scrutiny of what happened and what may happen next? As Stenhouse also maintained, the ambition of the teacher is not mastery but artistry: “the teacher should aspire to give learners access to insights into the status of what they learn” (Stenhouse, 1988, p.44)

So, a praxis curriculum is concerned with showing as opposed to telling, and in this lies in the possibility to imagine, verbalise and narrate events, through approaches that both define and expand on the possibilities to see for oneself. If this is the ambition for schools, then it is a big responsibility for us working in teacher education. How do we prepare teachers not simply to do a bit of IDL as part of their practice but to actually move the levers of the curriculum? Figure 1 below was taken from a session conducted in collaboration with two Chemistry Education colleagues at Moray House School of Education and Sport, Claire Ritchie and Audrey Cameron, who also communicates through British Sign Language. Together we worked with our cohort of student teachers, enrolled in the General Science course on the Postgraduate Diploma in Secondary Education (PGDE Secondary).

The session took inspiration from Primo Levi’s book “The Periodic Table” and specifically, the chapter on Carbon. It is a piece of fiction which was written by a scientist of Jewish-Italian origin who was detained as a practicing chemist in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. At the start of the session, it was read to the students in English as a translation from the original Italian text and signed by Audrey in BSL.

The chapter in itself is a piece of interdisciplinary thinking: the atom of Carbon moves from rocks to leaves and down the lungs of a falcon, each time trespassing and transgressing the boundaries of biology, chemistry and physics. During the session students followed such movements by playing with different modalities of thinking about Carbon. In the picture shown in Figure 1, a large window acts as a boundary between the inside and the outside of the room. On the inside, we see a model that students constructed with cardboard and card to show Carbon bonding with other atoms to form new molecules; but on the outside of the window, we see cars parked in the street; chimneys from the buildings, different types of plants and trees, which are all involved in the business of Carbon exchanges. The space in the room and its windows were taken in as active dimensions of the lesson, thus playing a role in the design and in giving rise to the first gesture: turning away from the computer or the board and pointing towards the space outside. At the same time, the card-model invited students into the process of making, foregrounding the components of a chemical compound and keeping the more traditional and representational view of science in play. The glass however operates as an interesting boundary by situating the model of Carbon in the communal space of the room but also in communication with the campus outside. And finally, a possibility was always there and left open: by looking beyond the model and beyond the framing of the picture itself, we may be able to see the Edinburgh’s volcanic crags, the city, and the sea on the horizon.

The impetus for this session however did not come demonstrating to our student teachers that our Programme ‘includes’ or ‘does’ IDL, or even to model best practice for how to do it. Rather, it came from the deliberate gesture to put Carbon on the table and invite them to look; to make it part of a shared experience between students from across the sciences and their lecturers; it was a moment in which Carbon was dislodged from its fixed and abstract position in the Periodic Table, and by paraphrasing Levi, it was thrown into the world of our lives, the world of things that change. With such educational premise at the outset, interdisciplinarity was an effect of the lesson, not a pre-specified modality of teaching that we had to follow.

Colleagues in the field of curriculum studies talk about curricular reform as turning the attention away from strong output regulation to quality input regulation (see for example Priestley for an extended account in Scotland), and to strengthen the power of the middle, that is, the agency of the teachers to be curriculum-makers. While I cannot disagree with this, I suggest that beside making, designing also plays a part. The act of ‘turning the levers’ encompasses being responsive and be able to adapt curriculum to context, but also being intentional about what a lesson may serve to mobilise and make visible in the experiences of the students. Reflecting back to our case, throwing Carbon into the teaching space involved trans-languaging, that afforded the methodological possibility to connect making and design by introducing different communicative modalities, each time surfacing new layers, new meanings and new questions.

According to Garcia and Wei (2014) and Flores and Rosa (2015), translanguaging encourages students to fluidly use their entire linguistic repertoire to make sense of the world around them. While translanguaging pedagogy is used more commonly in the context of pluri-lingual students, in our case, we used it to engender a conversation across the students’ diverse understandings of Carbon (which are mediated by prior studies and disciplinary backgrounds), as well as to bridge the gap between students’ everyday experiences and scientific knowledge. This was important to us working in the context of teacher education, as we were not simply interested in helping our student teachers to acquire knowledge that lies outside their discipline, but:

• to give them the tools and dispositions to see for themselves why it might be relevant to teach a particular topic;

• how it might be consequential in their lives, as well as in the lives of the student they will be teaching;

• and thus envisage the moment in which they themselves will be in a position to turn the levers of the curriculum.

At the centre of the image in Figure 1 we find one of the comments produced by one of the students at the end of the session:

“Poetry can be an easy+effective way to view science through a different lens or perspective”

We are not making claims as to what extent this event influenced the students’ view of curriculum or of education more broadly. But there is a signal…

Returning now to the core mission of this network which is concerned with the question of the relationships amongst disciplines vis-a-vis school curricula, the message I would like to give is to seriously consider what should come next. In Scotland in particular, interdisciplinarity often comes into the equation in relation to issues of sustainability and the environment. However, inserted within a curriculum that swivels between the shadows of academic rationalism, with its emphasis on subjects and content, particularly in relation to the Higher syllabus; and social efficiency, with its emphasis on workforce skills and measurable outcomes (see Priestley), it is to the moon that we seem to be heading, but I question whether we give sufficient scope to understanding the nature of our stepping . The Earth on which we live, looks increasingly more like a mere factor in the production, a resource external to us, hardened and flattened underneath the tarmac beneath our feet.

‘Turning the levers’ means to take a different perspective, which brings us face to face with the reality of our shared existence on the Earth. At that point, the question of IDL ceases to be about the combining of subjects in different measures, but it will be concerned with addressing the burning questions and challenges we are facing. Mostly, it will also be concerned with a new language, with greater emphasis on surfacing relations and forging an ecological thinking. Quoting Latour, if the composition of the air we breathe depends on living beings, the atmosphere or the soil is no longer a container in which living and non-living things are placed and in which they may evolve; but it will be in part a result of their actions: “in other words, there are not organisms on one side and an environment on the other, but a coproduction by both. Agencies are redistributed” (p. 76). Taking such relationality into account opens up the curriculum as praxis and trans-languaging, where different agencies are given the power and the distinct capacity to respond, to partake in the making and to react. Figures 2 and 3 (below) give further examples of this kind of experimental practice in teacher education and in school, which transgresses usual spaces and materials; and troubles sedimented habits of what curriculum might look like, feel and do in education.

And so if we are ready to turn the levers in these final weeks of the year, I will end this piece with an invitation to practice coming together face to face:

Take a look at the Earth
              Crusted with ice
              Softened with water 
              Yellowed by the sun;  
And then take another look at it;
               Shooting new seedlings
              Darkening in the shadows of a tall building
              Sticking to your feet 
Turn towards it and take a look
              Pick up the first thread  
And follow it.    

Professor Laura Colucci-Gray holds a teaching, research and leadership appointment in STEM and sustainability education at Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh. A former biology teacher, Laura holds a degree in natural sciences from the University of Turin and a PhD in science education, awarded by the Open University. Laura is passionate about real-life learning, radical democracy and participatory methodologies across the arts and sciences.

Cited works

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171.

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Latour, B. (2020). Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime. London: Polity.

Levi, Primo. (1984). The Periodic Table. London: Penguin.

Stenhouse, L. (1979). Research as a basis for teaching. Inaugural Lecture, University of East Anglia, Norwich, reproduced in J. Elliott & N. Norris (Eds.), Curriculum, pedagogy and educational research: The work of Lawrence Stenhouse, Vol 2012, pp. 122-136. London: Routledge.

Stenhouse, L. (1988). Artistry and Teaching: the teacher as a focus of research and development. J. Curric. Superv. 4, pp. 43-51