Training for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Environmental Planning: The Shore-land Project, Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary collaboration is must-have competence for planners. To provide interdisciplinary training, educators introduce ‘authentic learning environments’ where students conduct a ‘real-world’ project within a multi-disciplinary team. This paper reports on a course in which the instructors, students and local stakeholders worked together on a real project. Qualitative interview and participatory observation were used to understand the experience and organization of interdisciplinary training in an authentic context. This study finds students experienced different levels of boundary crossing – identification, coordination, reflection and transformation. The instructors played a role of facilitating students’ teamwork and mutual understanding, which leads to reflection on interdisciplinary collaboration.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning education
• boundary-crossing
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• authentic learning
• regional learning environment

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Jeng-Horng Chen for the insightful discussion and Professor Vincent Nadin for the comments which greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).