Redesigning a PhD Course to Promote Interdisciplinarity and Cultivate Key 21st-Century Skills: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

There is a growing yet unmet need for PhD curricula to cultivate skills needed to confront 21st-century challenges. One such skill is interdisciplinarity, which is deemed essential for dealing with various complex problems such as climate change, antibiotic resistance, and sustainability. When we reflected on the nature of our “Integrative Sciences and Engineering” course, we found that the emphasis was on content knowledge and didactic modes of instruction rather than on teaching students the definition and process of interdisciplinarity. Hence, we redesigned part of the course to promote interdisciplinary learning more explicitly. To do this, we consulted the literature on interdisciplinary graduate education, which suggests that interdisciplinarity be operationalised as collaboration in a STEM context. Thus, we adopted from the literature a model designed to promote interdisciplinary thinking. We also introduced blended learning to provide our students with a means to practice interdisciplinarity and thus collaborate more effectively. To assess the effectiveness of these interventions, we sought to answer two research questions: (1) What was the impact of the model and blended learning on promoting interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration? (2) How did the students perceive these changes? To answer these questions, we analysed students’ discussion forum posts, instructor and peer feedback, group presentations, and results of surveys and interviews. Our findings suggest that the model and blended learning approach function synergistically to help students think and act in an interdisciplinary way, and that students were generally receptive to these changes. We expect that our work will be relevant to the scholarship of interdisciplinary graduate education as well as to current efforts aimed at reforming doctoral curricula.