Constructing Interdisciplinarity, in Engineering Education and Beyond
Xin Ming is a PhD student in the department ELAN Teacher Development. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr.ir. M. Boon en dr. M.A.J. MacLeod from the faculty of Behavioural Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente and prof.dr. J.T. van der Veen from the Eindhoven University of Technology.
This dissertation examines interdisciplinarity as a dynamic, multifaceted process rather than a fixed ideal. While interdisciplinarity is widely invoked in academic and professional discourse, its meanings, manifestations, and implications remain ambiguous and often contested. Through interconnected empirical studies in educational contexts, this work investigates how interdisciplinarity is envisioned, constructed, and enacted, advancing a pluralistic framework for its theoretical understanding and offering practical insights for knowledge work, including learning and education.
Following an introduction to the research topic and dissertation structure, the first two chapters examine interdisciplinary engineering education (IEE), where interdisciplinarity is often framed as a necessary response to complex socio-technical challenges. The first study employs competency as an analytical lens to explore different perspectives on interdisciplinarity. Using Q methodology to elicit and analyze views on competencies relevant to IEE, it reveals underlying expectations about what interdisciplinarity entails and how it should be cultivated. The findings demonstrate that interdisciplinarity is not a uniform learning goal but an assemblage of diverse perspectives, contingent on disciplinary backgrounds, professional orientations, and institutional frameworks, leading to different educational visions and practices.
Building on this, the second study delves deeper into how key actors in IEE—educators, policymakers, and engineering practitioners—assign meanings to interdisciplinarity. Through interviews, it identifies nine distinct yet interrelated dimensions that structure actors’ interpretations and sense-making. Accordingly, interdisciplinarity manifests not only as a set of capacities, but simultaneously also as identity and institutional practice, forming a fuzzy constellation rather than a singular construct. The plurality of interdisciplinarity—evidenced by the various dimensions and significant variations within each—underscores its complexity as a dynamic negotiation of knowledge, identities, and institutional logics. Shaped by roles, contexts, and goals of those involved, these plural meanings call for diverse vocabularies, demarcations, and evaluative criteria to capture its many facets.
The third study shifts focus to a setting of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) education, an open-ended, student-driven learning environment that includes an engineering orientation. Engaging with actual knowledge practices and concrete educational activities, this study adopts a grounded theory approach and employs ethnographic methods to explore how interdisciplinarity emerges as a learning experience through the interplay between individual academic identity formation and interpersonal interactions in group work. Drawing on observations and students’ reflective accounts, this study identifies and analyzes patterns in personal disciplinary identities, collective interdisciplinary identity, and group-work experiences. Interdisciplinarity is thus theorized as experience, constructed and enacted through two key elements: disciplinary enablement and transaction. While LAS students are often considered intrinsically interdisciplinary, their experiences reveal competing demands: the promised freedom to explore beyond disciplines is tempered by the need for coherence and legitimacy within broader academic, professional and social structures. The study further demonstrates that interdisciplinarity in LAS settings is not merely a product of curricular design but emerges through constant negotiations between students, educators, and institutional and social expectations.
Based on theoretical discussions and insights from these empirical studies, the fourth chapter develops a theoretical framework that conceptualizes interdisciplinarity as a pluralistic, constructivist, and dynamic process. Reflecting on prominent attempts to establish fixed definitions and definitive classifications, it argues that interdisciplinarity cannot be reduced to a single model or hierarchy of interactions. Instead, by situating interdisciplinarity as a notion within the conceptual nexus of knowledge, science, disciplines, interdisciplines, and disciplinarity, this essay proposes a multidimensional logic to conceptualize interdisciplinarity, in which different forms of interaction and engagement emerge through evolving interrelations among cognitive, institutional, epistemic, and social dynamics. This perspective highlights that interdisciplinarity is not a predefined structure but an ongoing process of construction, negotiation, and reconfiguration, containing both synchronic and diachronic complexities.
Together, the four studies offer complementary perspectives on interdisciplinarity as both a conceptual and practical phenomenon. The empirical investigations in educational contexts reveal the plurality of perceptions, conceptualizations and concrete practices of interdisciplinarity, while the theoretical analysis provides a framework to account for interdisciplinarity’s inherent heterogeneity. By positioning interdisciplinarity as pluralistic and framing it as a logic of becoming—a continuous, contextually embedded process shaped by interrelated dynamics—this dissertation challenges essentialist definitions and prescriptive models. Instead, it advocates for an approach that recognizes the contextual specificities and evolving nature of interdisciplinary practices.
Beyond its theoretical contributions to current discourse about knowledge, this dissertation offers practical insights for education and knowledge work more broadly. By making visible the diverse ways interdisciplinarity is understood and enacted, this research encourages educators and educationist to navigate the complexities of interdisciplinary learning without imposed rigid frames when designing curricula, activities and policies. Arguing for learning environments that accommodate and embrace interdisciplinarity's vast potential and contingencies, it contributes to the active efforts to cultivate more reflective, adaptive, and inclusive education that responds to the broader socio-technical imperatives of engineering and beyond.
