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Case 8

Atlas - Semester 4: Wicked Problems

This semester-long open-structured project course is part of the bachelor program Technology, Liberal Arts & Sciences (ATLAS), which is a Liberal Arts and Sciences program with the aim to educate engineers for the future. In this program, students receive basic trainings in mathematics, natural sciences and social sciences, based on which they tailor their own academic trajectories by taking electives from a broad range of courses offered in the university. Every student in the program, therefore, will develop into a unique disciplinary configuration. In each semester, students, next to the courses they take individually, come together in a semester project with their own expertise. Semester 4 Project specifically focuses on complex, global and grand wicked problems. Students determine topics and group all by themselves, with the facilitation from two coordinating staff. In the groups, students first map and model the chosen wicked problem, then split into expert teams to devise mitigation strategies, and at last come back in the big group to work on an integrated report.

In the first half of 2020, Semester 4 Project: Grand Challenges was included as a case study of the STRIPES project. We approached this case as a field for ethnographic study so as to explore how interdisciplinarity was constructed and enacted in this educational setting through interactions and transactions that took place among different academic identities in group work. After the naturalistic study, a co-creation session was organized as follow-up to feed back to the program and this autonomous learning community. Students and coordinators were presented with our research findings and, together with the researcher, analyzed how educational design sometimes accounted for less optimal learning experience.

What we learned

  1. Students are far from homogeneous in terms of the configuration of disciplinary identity. For the three profiles that characterize liberal arts student – disciplinary specialists, topic experts, and identity explorers, interdisciplinarity means differently and entail different journeys of development.
  2. The liberal arts program itself, both due to its unique educational design and its special status at the university, signifies a dimension of academic identity that is shared by its students.  
  3. Group work trigger different dynamics in how various academic identities act with each other and, consequently, different group-work experiences. Three patterns identified are: non-disciplinary experience, monodisciplinary experience, and authentic interdisciplinary experience.
  4. Disciplinary enablement and disciplinary transaction are two key concepts for perceiving authentic interdisciplinarity.
  5. Project-based interdisciplinary group work needs to transcend reductionism and linearity in understanding the issues to tackle.