Beyond disciplinary engagement: Researching the ecologies of interdisciplinary learning

ABSTRACT

The importance of engaging students with complex societal challenges has led to the adoption of various interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices in both K-12 and higher education. However, interdisciplinary learning is one of the most complex domains of contemporary educational practice, and, despite its significance, remains significantly undertheorized and under-researched. This Special Issue highlights empirical research efforts toward understanding interdisciplinary learning in its complexity. It simultaneously aims to 1) advance ecological perspectives that encompass concepts and methodologies for studying complex heterogeneous learning practices and 2) apply these perspectives to the research of interdisciplinary learning—of how people learn across and beyond disciplines. This introduction provides a historical context for interdisciplinary learning, introduces an ecological stance toward researching learning across and beyond disciplines, and reviews critical theoretical and methodological challenges within interdisciplinary learning, arguing that the field of the learning sciences is well-positioned to address these challenges. It discusses how the contributions presented in this special issue shed light on theoretical, methodological, empirical, and design aspects of interdisciplinary learning and offer a basis for further design work and research.

Introduction

The recent decade has brought a pressing need to engage students in schools and in higher education with contemporary societal challenges—climate change and justice, social equity, chronic and epidemic diseases, the disruptive proliferation of AI, etc. This need is driven by the recognition that education must prepare young people for addressing complex challenges that will dominate their lives. In response to this, schools and universities have been embracing diverse interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices, such as STEM, STEAM, sustainability and other cross-curriculum projects. As Karl Popper (1962) famously argued:

Disciplines are distinguished partly for historical reasons and reasons of administrative convenience (such as the organization of teaching and of appointments), and partly because the theories which we construct to solve our problems have a tendency to grow into unified systems. But all this classification and distinction is a comparatively unimportant and superficial affair. We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or discipline. (p. 67)

However, interdisciplinary teaching and learning has been one of the most challenging and simultaneously one of the most under-researched and under-theorized aspects of K-12 and tertiary education. As the UK Higher Education Academy’s report on interdisciplinary education argued:

theory has not yet caught up with practice in this field and there is a clear lack of theorising about pedagogy in this emerging area of learning and teaching practice. (Lyall et al., 2016, p. x)

What characterizes students’ productive interdisciplinary engagement? What kinds of resourcefulness enable them to contribute constructively to interdisciplinary teamwork? How can we design for productive learning across and beyond disciplines? These and many other critical questions about interdisciplinary teaching, learning and design remain under-investigated.

The learning sciences community has made significant progress in understanding and improving disciplinary teaching and learning, including how people learn through and for solving real-world problems. However, the focus has been on disciplinary learning. Programmatic research on interdisciplinary learning has been lacking, and its contribution to this domain has been far less prominent.

This Special Issue, therefore, is our call to scholars in the learning sciences to engage in studying, conceptualizing, designing for, and advancing learning across and beyond disciplines. It is rooted in our conviction that researching interdisciplinary learning is an exceptional intellectual opportunity, as interdisciplinary education is a site for studying the most complex forms of learning and, therefore, interdisciplinary learning offers unique opportunities for advancing the theoretical and methodological frontiers of the field. Concurrently, it is also a moral obligation, as failures to address challenges faced in interdisciplinary teaching and learning risk irreversible human and environmental costs. Over the last 30 years, the learning sciences field has built robust foundations and is now ready to answer this call.

Existing literature suggests that today’s complex challenges require not only deep disciplinary grounding and work across disciplines but also work across diverse epistemic boundaries, such as industry, and community (Barry & Born, 2013; Cooke & Hilton, 2015; Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993; Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017). These challenges call for collaboration of multiple agents that represent different cultures, political agendas, and stakeholder perspectives. In short, complex societal challenges demand that we intertwine disciplinary knowledge with interdisciplinary practices, cognition with dialogue, and rigorous scientific understanding with civic responsibility and dispositions to engage in joint action (Boix-Mansilla, 2017; Nikitina, 2005; Slakmon & Schwarz, 2019). This requires turning to the ecological conceptualizations of learning that acknowledge the heterogeneous, distributed, relational, and multilayered nature of knowledge practices and human development (Markauskaite & Nerland, 2019).

This Special Issue highlights empirical research efforts toward understanding interdisciplinary learning in its complexity. It simultaneously aims to 1) advance ecological perspectives that encompass concepts and methodologies for studying complex heterogeneous learning practices and 2) apply these perspectives to the research of interdisciplinary learning—of how people learn across and beyond disciplines. While ecological conceptualizations are articulated in various educational studies (e.g., Barnett, 2018; Barnett & Jackson, 2020; Barron, 2006; Damşa & Jornet, 2017; Damşa et al., 2020; Ellis & Goodyear, 2019; Hammer et al., 2018; Hecht & Crowley, 2020; Jornet & Damşa, 2021; Lee, 2010; Markauskaite, Carvalho, et al., 2023; Nasir et al., 2020), they now need elaboration and repositioning in the context of interdisciplinary learning.

We use the terms “discipline” and “interdisciplinarity” across this issue in a broad sense (Barry & Born, 2013; Huutoniemi et al., 2010; Markauskaite, Goodyear, et al., 2023). “Discipline” or “disciplinarity” refers to a specific branch of knowledge or learning with unique characteristics (concepts, theories, methods, objects, etc.), identity and practices. Classical examples of disciplines include history, biology, and physics. They also include professional and newly emerging areas of epistemic practice with a recognized disciplinary identity, such as design, nursing, and nanoscience. Disciplines are organized into broader disciplinary fields such as humanities, science, medicine and engineering.

“Interdisciplinarity” broadly refers to all forms of engagement and collaboration between disciplines and other non-academic knowledge fields and activity spheres such as community, industry, politics and private life. This term encompasses other terms used in the literature to denote different degrees of interaction across disciplines. They range from “crossdisciplinarity”, which involves exploration of the same topics from different disciplinary perspectives without making connections between them, to “multidisciplinarity”, which involves work solving complex problems using knowledge from multiple disciplines without integrating them, to “transdisciplinarity”, which involves the integration and transcendence of existing disciplinary knowledge fields, leading to the emergence of new worldviews (Huutoniemi et al., 2010; Klein, 2017; Nowotny et al., 2001).

Accordingly, we define the scope of interdisciplinary learning broadly. Interdisciplinary work often requires resourcefulness to interact productively and co-create knowledge together with people who have different expertise and who do not share the same disciplinary vocabularies, epistemic practices, and cultures. How people develop this resourcefulness and how this process may be facilitated within and across different contexts are two broad questions that delineate the scope of interdisciplinary learning that we consider in this Special Issue.

We use ecological perspectives to emphasize the importance of understanding interdisciplinary learning at multiple levels—from individual resourcefulness to institutional ecosystems—and consider the dynamic processes and interactions among diverse agents and their environments (Jornet & Damşa, 2021; Markauskaite, Carvalho, et al., 2023). This perspective also shares a deep commitment to producing actionable knowledge that can inform inclusive and sustainable educational practices (Ellis & Goodyear, 2019).

In this editorial, we first provide a brief historical review of interdisciplinary learning and elaborate on ecological perspectives. We then situate research on learning across and beyond disciplines within the learning sciences and describe our collective work that led to this Special Issue. Afterward, we introduce the papers presented in this Special Issue and discuss key overarching themes.

Interdisciplinary learning

Some scholars argue that interdisciplinary learning is hardly a new phenomenon, pointing out that its origins can be traced back to ancient times (Klein, 1990, 2006). Greek philosophers spoke about the division of knowledge practices into domains, such as poetics, politics, and metaphysics, and advocated ideas of knowledge synthesis, unified science, and integration of knowledge (Klein, 1990). Scholars also point out that interdisciplinary learning is deeply rooted in the history of universities (Fuller, 2010; Klein, 1990). The notion of a university originates from the Latin word “universitas”, meaning “a whole,” and its establishment is closely associated with the dual ideal of “universitas magistrorum et scholarium,” roughly connotating a community of teachers and scholars/students and “universitas scientiarum,” roughly connotating a community of disciplines (Klein, 1990).

However, explicit attention to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary learning emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when university research and education became increasingly specialized and compartmentalized. The movement toward interdisciplinarity was an attempt to reduce disciplinary divisions that were seen as a significant deviation from the earlier “whole person” vision of university education and an obstacle to pursuing a unified vision of knowledge (Fuller, 2010; Repko, 2012).

Some other scholars, however, argue that the history of interdisciplinarity was primarily shaped by external factors outside the university:

Social, cultural, political, and economic factors and developments presumed to be external to the normal workings of a discipline or field, such as wartime needs; consequences of global cross-cultural contacts and colonialism; discovery of new social problems; economic downturns; and health or ecological fears, combine, often contradictorily, with shifting currents within and across disciplines. (Graff, 2016, p. 798)

This trend became most explicit in the middle of the 20th century when new interdisciplinary programs, such as cybernetics, cognitive science, and cultural studies, emerged in response to the changing historical context and became a part of university curricula. From this perspective, it is impossible to talk about interdisciplinarity without talking about disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is not one distinct mode of knowledge work, but rather multiple historical movements: “defined and constructed by questions and problems of theory or practice, knowledge or conditions of living, and the means developed to answer them in new and different ways” (Graff, 2016, p. 793). There is an inherent continuity between disciplinary and interdisciplinary education: “The guiding principle is not the need to demolish the disciplines, but to teach them in the context of their dynamic relationships with other disciplines and with the problems of society” (Apostel et al., 1972, p. 10).

The recent attention to interdisciplinary education in universities has been driven by multiple, interrelated factors. First, concerns grew that university education had become too disconnected from society’s needs. Simultaneously, neoliberal economic and political forces prompted educational institutions to look for new ways to contribute to broader economic agendas that are rooted in interdisciplinary real-world practices. Such agendas included reducing the shortage of workers with STEM skills, preparing graduates with relevant (inter)disciplinary knowledge and skills for emerging workplace roles and professions (biomedical engineers, data analysts, etc.), and developing students’ capabilities to solve complex (aka “wicked”) professional problems (Lindvig & Ulriksen, 2019; McCune et al., 2023; Van den Beemt et al., 2020).

Second, broader societal challenges such as socio-political conflicts, unprecedented weather events, infectious diseases, climate change, and other natural and human-induced crises have prompted educational institutions to become more engaged in preparing students for these complex challenges (Latour, 2023). Growing sociopolitical activism and movements, such as civil rights, gender equality, decolonization, and environmental protection, have also contributed to students’ demands for programs and courses addressing these issues (Graff, 2016).

Universities have responded to this by introducing diverse interdisciplinary curriculum options (DeZure, 2017; Lyall et al., 2016). This includes the introduction of interdisciplinary degrees (e.g., data science, sustainability, and nanoscience), project-based courses in which students co-create innovative solutions for real-world challenges (Arthars et al., 2024), and interdisciplinary curriculum elements into existing courses (Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024; Papendieck & Clarke, 2024).

In school education, conceptions of interdisciplinary learning have followed an intersecting but nevertheless distinct historical path. In the early days, schools focused on general education without dividing learning into disciplines but, later, school education also became more subdivided into subjects or disciplines (Apostel et al., 1972; Klein, 2006).

The initial shift toward interdisciplinarity can be seen in the emergence of integrative pedagogical approaches in the late 19th century (Klein, 2006; Warkentien et al., 2022). They also have been echoed and elaborated in progressivist ideas of democratic education and constructivist pedagogies (e.g., Dewey, 1916). The notion of integration emphasized connections across the subjects but extended beyond them. As Klein (2006) observes, it was linked to diverse aspects: “the psychological process of holistic learning, personal integration, social integration, moral education, merging learning and work, a more relevant student-centered curriculum, teacher-student planning, preparation for participation in a democracy, a child-centered activity curriculum, an experience-based curriculum, and a broad-fields approach” (p. 12). This trend in various forms has continued throughout the 20th century.

Over recent years, K-12 curriculums have seen a renewed focus on interdisciplinary learning (Warkentien et al., 2022). For example, schools in multiple countries have introduced diverse project-based learning options, such as integrated STEM curricula (Takeuchi et al., 2020), phenomenon-based studies (Lonka, 2018), STEAM projects (Katz-Buonincontro, 2018), and various cross-curriculum themes, such as sustainability (Dolan, 2021) and indigenous perspectives (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013). These curriculum changes have been partly related to similar economic, political, social and cultural factors as in universities, such as concern about the disconnection of school education from society’s needs, students’ disengagement from schools, shortage of students who choose STEM pathways, the need to develop students’ transversal 21st-century skills for future work and social life (Markauskaite, Goodyear, et al., 2023; Warkentien et al., 2022), as well as the need to prepare youth for active citizenship and engagement with contemporary societal challenges (Novis-Deutsch et al., 2024; Schwarz et al., 2024).

Despite a long history of interdisciplinary education in universities and schools, there has been mounting concern that the majority of implemented interdisciplinary learning programs lack robust theoretical underpinning; and it is not clear if they result in expected student learning outcomes (Katz-Buonincontro, 2018; Lyall et al., 2016; Warkentien et al., 2022). In most of the publications on interdisciplinary programs, authors only speculate about the capabilities that students need to develop, and pedagogical designs that could be effective, but the supporting conceptual foundation and empirical evidence are often limited. For example, the UK Higher Education Academy’s report on the provision of interdisciplinary education, drawing on earlier similar accounts, has described the state of the art of research and pedagogical theory in interdisciplinary education as follows:

one could easily still argue that interdisciplinary study remains ‘the most seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy.’ (Lyall et al., 2016, p. 68, quoting Ellis, 2009 and Liu, 1989)

While there are some pioneering empirical studies (e.g., Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2024; Nikitina, 2005; Shen et al., 2015; Tytler et al., 2021), research of interdisciplinary learning lags significantly behind institutional decisions that change practice. Well-conceptualized and methodologically robust research is needed about what kinds of knowledge, skills, dispositions and other personal resources enable people to work successfully across disciplines, what characterizes productive interdisciplinary learning, what types of pedagogical designs are effective, and how to make these designs scalable, equitable, and sustainable. Research into the interdisciplinary learning processes is particularly limited.

Taking an ecological perspective

Successes or failures of interdisciplinary learning cannot be understood just by looking at individual aspects of personal or group learning or by exploring them in isolation from broader curriculum activity systems, infrastructures, and cultures. There is a need to study and understand the dynamic of interdisciplinary learning across different facets and levels of learning ecosystems (Ellis & Goodyear, 2019). For this, we need to embrace and advance the ecological conceptualizations of learning that acknowledge the heterogeneous, distributed, relational and multilayered nature of interdisciplinary learning.

Ecology, originating in biology, explores how organisms interact with each other and their surroundings. It encompasses various levels—from individuals and populations to communities and ecosystems—and it aims to understand the patterns, processes, and dynamic relationships that shape these ecosystems. Ecology holds a pivotal role in the field of biology, but the influence and applications of ecological ways of thinking and inquiry extend into other fields, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and philosophy, resulting in a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives (Markauskaite, Carvalho, et al., 2023).

Within education, ecological ways of thinking and inquiry enable us to consider the diverse interactions of learners within distributed environments and explore the phenomena within and across different levels of educational ecosystems. They offer a toolkit for exploring the most complex forms of teaching and learning (Barron, 2006; Damşa et al., 2020; Ellis & Goodyear, 2019; Hecht & Crowley, 2020; Jornet & Damşa, 2021; Lee, 2010; Nasir et al., 2020). In this Special Issue, we use ecological perspectives to highlight three core aspects that characterize ecological thinking and research practices: theoretical, methodological, and ethical.

From a theoretical standpoint, learning is an ecological phenomenon, marked by reciprocal interrelations and interactions among multiple aspects (people, problems, objects, institutions, etc.), processes (language, thinking, movement, affect, etc.) and layers of the learning ecosystems (individual, group, community, etc.) (Markauskaite, Carvalho, et al., 2023). Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of learning necessitates studying how these reciprocal dynamic relationships and interactions unfold within and across different levels and multiple time scales. Such levels range from micro-level biological and cognitive processes to meso-level interactions among people, artifacts and their environments to macro-level institutional processes, community practices, and cultures.

From a methodological standpoint, educational ecology is an applied science that focuses on understanding educational activities and outcomes with an aim of producing actionable knowledge—knowledge that is useful in designing and managing educational ecosystems (Ellis & Goodyear, 2019). This perspective acknowledges that educational phenomena are complex, dynamic and emerging. They cannot be explained using a stable set of specific factors or one grand theory. Therefore, a thorough study of such phenomena must embrace a study of variation and complexity, attend to local conditions and dynamics across the scales, and balance global and local knowledge (Hammer et al., 2018). As Hammer et al. (2018) point out, understanding ecological phenomena can be advanced by developing “knowledge of possible mechanisms (as opposed to necessary ones)” (p. 638), which are “not universal law but still of general value” (p. 638).

From an ethical standpoint, ecology and ecological perspectives on learning come with a strong orientation to designing for learning and creating institutional environments that do not shy away from the most complex contemporary issues, such as equity, diversity, and inclusion, and that prepare learners for addressing such issues (Barnett, 2018; Barnett & Jackson, 2020; Trisos et al., 2021). Ecological thinking and practices urge us to take responsibility and engage learners in “ecologically considerate actions” necessary to “build a resilient and sustainable society that cares about the whole world and not just itself” (Barnett & Jackson, 2020, pp. 5–6). This perspective puts learning into the public sphere. It invites designing for learning that builds upon achievements of disciplines but engages students with the most complex real-world challenges.

Together, the ecological perspectives on learning offer a useful theoretical, methodological, and dispositional toolkit for exploring learning ecosystems that extend across and beyond disciplines and enacting change.

Preparing the ground in the learning sciences

The learning sciences community has been advancing a number of theoretical and empirical lines that could provide springboards for developing theoretical and methodological foundations for designing and empirically studying interdisciplinary learning. These include theories of knowledge building and knowledge creation (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2015), learning in activity and across contexts (Greeno & Engestrom, 2015), epistemic learning (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018; Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017), dialogic pedagogies for transformative education (Slakmon & Schwarz, 2019) and design for equitable engagement (Bell et al., 2017; Penuel, 2019). These theoretical accounts focus on the integration of multiple viewpoints and interaction between multiple agents and objects in complex heterogeneous environments; therefore, they are highly pertinent to the challenges that researchers and practitioners face conceptualizing, designing, and studying interdisciplinary learning.

Despite their relevance, these ideas have been mainly empirically explored in disciplinary learning contexts. Research that tries to extend these lines of work to learning beyond disciplines has occasionally appeared in different contexts, such as studies of heterogeneity in collaborative problem-solving (Rosebery et al., 2010; Smirnov et al., 2018), disciplinary engagement in project-based learning (Van Horne & Bell, 2017), learning across contexts (Herrenkohl et al., 2018; Ludvigsen et al., 2011) and multivocality (Suthers et al., 2013). However, this body of work has rarely focused on learning across disciplines.

Nevertheless, the field of the learning sciences is well-positioned to address some key theoretical and methodological challenges of interdisciplinary learning (Markauskaite, Muukkonen, et al., 2020). These challenges cover at least five overarching aspects: 1) capabilities to work across and beyond disciplines, 2) sociomaterial dimensions of interdisciplinary learning, 3) designing for interdisciplinary learning, 4) the role of multiple contexts, and 5) transactional relationships within interdisciplinary ecosystems.

First, it is broadly agreed that successful engagement in interdisciplinary knowledge work often requires not only specialized competencies in a particular discipline but also additional capabilities that enable people to work across disciplinary boundaries (Bammer, 2017). While there have been a number of proposals on what these capabilities may include (e.g., Boix-Mansilla, 2017; Spelt et al., 2017), empirical evidence has been lacking. Further, these capabilities often have been seen either as primarily cognitive (e.g., interdisciplinary understanding) or as linguistic (e.g., interdisciplinary communication). However, there has been little attention to the full range of personal resources (e.g., epistemic values, dispositions, and emotions) that, as Science and Technology Studies (STS) show, play a critical role in interdisciplinary knowledge work (Markauskaite & Nerland, 2019). Ideas that have origins in the learning sciences, such as epistemic frames (Shaffer, 2006), epistemic fluency (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017; Morrison & Collins, 1996), and apt epistemic performance (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018), have a significant potential to contribute to a much broader understanding of personal resourcefulness that students need to develop for successful interdisciplinary engagement. However, these ideas need to be extended to the field of interdisciplinary learning.

Second, existing research on interdisciplinary learning has primarily been using students’ reflections and self-assessments or final project products to assess students’ learning (Miles & Rainbird, 2015; Repko, 2008). Learning processes, including students’ teamwork in creating shared knowledge products, have been mostly unexplored. Fine-grained process-oriented integrative methodologies are needed to study relational and dynamically unfolding aspects of interdisciplinary learning. Researchers in the learning sciences have developed a number of theoretical frameworks and techniques for investigating collaborative knowledge work and learning, such as shared epistemic agency (Damşa et al., 2010), epistemic network analysis (Shaffer, 2017), and others (Stahl, 2006; Suthers et al., 2013). Some other researchers have explored the generativity of existing frameworks and methods to study the interaction between inanimate objects and human actors in interdisciplinary learning, such as Actor-Network Theory (Schwarz et al., in press) and epistemic niche construction (Markauskaite, Arthars, et al., 2020). These approaches provide a robust starting point for developing relational theories and methods for investigating the productivity of students’ learning processes in interdisciplinary teams.

Third, interdisciplinary curriculums, as a rule, broadly build on constructivist pedagogies emphasizing students’ learning through engagement in authentic project-based interdisciplinary practices (Lyall et al., 2016; Muukkonen et al., 2010). However, the conceptual underpinnings of what specifically constitutes authentic interdisciplinary practices and how to design for productive students’ interdisciplinary engagement have been just emerging (Kidron & Kali, 2015; Koichu et al., 2022; Pennington et al., 2016). These approaches, as well as other constructivist models that focus on knowledge co-creation and expansive learning (e.g., Greeno & Engestrom, 2015; Muukkonen & Lakkala, 2009; Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005; Paavola et al., 2011; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2015), provide a productive starting point for developing interdisciplinary pedagogical models and design principles. Nevertheless, they still require development and testing in interdisciplinary learning contexts.

Fourth, interdisciplinary learning cannot be understood in isolation from broader socio-political contexts, the nature, institutional agendas, and material arrangements. They include histories of disciplines, stakeholder expectations, institutional policies, and existing infrastructures that enable (or not) particular kinds of interdisciplinary practices (Cooke & Hilton, 2015; GUNI, 2019). This view of interdisciplinarity positions the learner as an agent who interacts not only with peers but also with multiple artifacts within their communities and institutions, and the natural environment. This stresses the importance of the Other, of inanimate objects, and of multiple contexts in interdisciplinary learning. The questions of how socio-political, institutional, and ecocentric dimensions could be unpacked and, consequently, how they could be shaped to enable productive interdisciplinary learning, require significant conceptualization and empirical work. The emerging critical research and posthumanist lines of work in the learning sciences offer useful conceptual tools (e.g., Bell et al., 2017; Davies & Renshaw, 2019; Philip & Sengupta, 2020; Schwarz et al., in press; Takeuchi et al., 2020).

Fifth, successes or failures of interdisciplinary learning cannot be understood just by looking at each of the above aspects in isolation. There is a need for conceptual frameworks and methods that allow studying the ecology of interdisciplinary learning across different facets and levels. The ecological perspectives that are increasingly taken up in the learning sciences highlight a transactional relationship between various elements (e.g., disciplines, epistemologies, people, resources and purposes) and levels of educational ecosystems (e.g., individuals, groups, communities and cultures) (Damşa & Jornet, 2017; Damşa et al., 2020; Hecht & Crowley, 2020; Jornet & Damşa, 2021; Lee, 2010; Markauskaite, Carvalho, et al., 2023; Nasir et al., 2020). They offer a fruitful ground for this integrative work.

These convergences between the issues of interdisciplinary learning and diverse lines of work that contribute to ecological conceptualizations in the learning sciences have provided a solid ground for this Special Issue and we hope will continue to inspire future work.

The origin of this special issue

This Special Issue builds on the work started in 2019 by the guest editors with a workshop at the CSCL2019 conference in Lyon, entitled “Theories and methods for researching interdisciplinary learning” (Markauskaite et al., 2019). This workshop was borne out of our observations that various forms of interdisciplinary learning have become widespread within and across workplaces, research and development settings, higher education and schools; but that the research that examines it is largely invisible in the learning sciences. It is by no means to imply that nothing was done—we were well aware of individual studies and a significant body of related work (e.g., Castek et al., 2019; Herrenkohl et al., 2018; Pea et al., 2020)—but this work was dispersed across multiple theoretical and methodological traditions and rarely explored the distinct nature of interdisciplinary learning processes. In this workshop, we aimed to bring researchers from diverse research traditions with interests and expertise in studying various aspects of interdisciplinary learning (e.g., collaboration, shared agency, knowledge co-creation, epistemic fluency) to share their theoretical and methodological tools and practices, and discuss how research in this area can become more programmatic in the face of its growing significance. The workshop’s outcome was a joint realization that interdisciplinary learning is a complex, dynamic phenomenon that involves multiple actors, and unfolds within and across different levels of the educational ecosystem and, therefore, requires ecological perspectives for studying it.

A year later, the ICLS2020 conference’s theme was “The interdisciplinarity of the learning sciences” (Gresalfi & Horn, 2020), evidencing the growing attention to the questions of interdisciplinarity in the learning sciences community, including the interdisciplinary nature of the learning sciences itself. For it, we co-organized a follow-up workshop entitled “Researching the ecologies of interdisciplinary learning” (Markauskaite, Muukkonen, et al., 2020). Through this workshop, we aimed to create an ecological foundation for synthesizing existing and developing new research lines on interdisciplinary learning. Our joint work resulted in a framework articulating the main levels of interdisciplinary learning ecosystems and a set of guiding questions for exploring learning phenomena within and across these levels. This framework and questions were a starting point for inviting others to contribute to this Special Issue.

At the ISLS2021 conference, we co-convened the third workshop, “Creating research-based design principles for interdisciplinary learning” (Markauskaite et al., 2021), in which we aimed to engage researchers, designers and educators in sharing design ideas and work. This work as well as other co-organized symposia (e.g., Markauskaite, Muukkonen, et al., 2020) conducted over the years have revealed a clear gap in the learning sciences literature and the importance of bringing the topic of interdisciplinary learning to the forefront of the field.

We initiated this Special Issue aiming to consolidate and extend the above work, with the overarching goal to create a foundation for ecological conceptualizations and empirical research of interdisciplinary learning within the field of the learning sciences.

In our open call, we asked for contributions that cover conceptual, methodological, design, and empirical aspects of interdisciplinary learning within and across four broad levels of learning ecosystems:

• Personal interdisciplinary resourcefulness: What kinds of capabilities (knowledge, skills, dispositions, etc.) and other personal resources enable people to participate successfully in interdisciplinary knowledge work? How do these capabilities vary across individuals, problems, and contexts? How could we assess these capabilities in just and equitable ways? What is the relationship between disciplinary and interdisciplinary capabilities?

• Interdisciplinary learning in groups: What is distinct to learning in interdisciplinary teams? What are the conditions that facilitate productive interdisciplinary engagement? How does the nature of interdisciplinary problems shape team learning? What kinds of methodologies and analytical tools do we use for studying interdisciplinary learning processes and outcomes? How can we study the dynamic between the resourcefulness of individual team members and group processes? What role do tools and artifacts play in interdisciplinary learning?

• Curriculum activity systems: What is distinct to interdisciplinary teaching and learning? What are the main design principles for designing interdisciplinary learning environments and courses? How can we ensure that these designs make epistemic fairness and hospitality possible? How can we study the impact and effectiveness of different designs?

• Institutional arrangements and cultures: What sorts of sociopolitical agendas, infrastructures, and other arrangements underpin the current move toward interdisciplinary learning? How do the values, expectations, and roles of different stakeholders shape it? What enables and what hinders successful practices? What sorts of theories and methodologies could be used to study these practices?

We invited papers that investigate the questions of interdisciplinary learning across any of the above levels and draw on theories and methods from the learning sciences and other fields: anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), cognitive science, sociology, organizational science, linguistics, design, computer and data science, etc.

Authors were initially invited to submit their proposals outlining their intended contribution. We received 38 submissions involving a total of 144 authors from 13 countries from Europe, Australasia, and North America. Many proposals outlined interesting and innovative work, but due to space limitations, we had to be selective.

We shortlisted 8 best proposals from 6 countries that had clear potential to result in high-quality original papers. They focused on different levels of learning ecosystems and covered diverse learning contexts in school and tertiary education. The authors were invited to write and submit full manuscripts. These manuscripts went through a full peer-review similar to any other submission to the journal; after two rounds of external peer-review by 3–4 academic experts and further internal review by the co-editors of the Special Issue, 5 papers were accepted.

These papers have been written by research teams from Australia, Finland, Israel and the US. Two papers investigate interdisciplinary learning in school, one in undergraduate and two in graduate education contexts. Three papers are led by early career researchers. The papers, alongside two commentaries written by scholars who have been involved in the above workshops and discussions since 2019, are published in this issue.

The papers and contributions

All papers in this Special Issue explore learning processes that cut across levels of learning ecosystems. It starts with two papers from design research and professional development projects that aim to introduce interdisciplinarity across schools. Therefore, they focus on students’ interdisciplinary learning by simultaneously considering larger curriculum activity systems, as well as institutional arrangements and cultures.

Baruch Schwarz, Einat Heyd-Metsuyanim, Boris Koichu, Michal Tabach, and Anat Yarden’s paper “Opportunities and hindrances for promoting interdisciplinary learning in schools” builds on a design-based study situated in an Israelian junior high school education context with a historically discipline-based curriculum structure. The authors conceptualize the purpose of interdisciplinary learning by drawing on Dewey’s (1916) progressive pedagogy and Bateson’s (1980) ecological perspective and argue that Bateson’s epistemological position emphasizing the value of multiple perspectives is at the heart of interdisciplinary learning and education for democracy. The paper makes three distinct contributions to the field. First, it provides a historical review of the rise of disciplines that led to their compartmentalization in schools and universities, by such putting reason as a way for humans (aka “Man”) to progress and control the world through specialized methods. Post-modernity questions the centrality of humans, and aims at de-compartmentalizing disciplines for the sake of solving authentic issues. The authors argue that this de-compartmentalization must stem from traditions and envisioned reforms in teaching disciplines. Second, Schwarz et al. analyze three disciplines (i.e., mathematics, philosophy and science) by focusing on the core characteristics of disciplines—epistemologies, inquiry methods and reasoning strategies, texts, and discourse structures—to show that disciplines deeply differ, and to explain why interdisciplinary processes are difficult to stage. Since reforms in all disciplines put at the center dialogic argumentation, they conjecture that its enactment may trigger interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation. Building on this conjecture, the authors describe design principles for developing an interdisciplinary program. They consider a broad educational ecosystem and highlight the importance of design principles that include content-based, pedagogy-based, and organization-based aspects. Third, in spite of these design efforts, Schwarz et al. show that the emergence of interdisciplinary processes in classes is difficult. They show the demanding and critical teachers’ role in this endeavor: 1) teachers’ “missed opportunities” to prompt students to draw upon and integrate disciplinary knowledge and 2) teachers’ promotion of interdisciplinary processes, when being attentive to arguments raised by students and subtly hinting at previously constructed disciplinary ideas. Overall, the paper makes a unique contribution to understanding demands on teacher skillfulness and the need to consider a much broader institutional ecosystem when creating new interdisciplinary programs.

In the paper “Interdisciplinary learning in the humanities: knowledge building and identity work,” Nurit Novis-Deutsch, Etan Cohen, Hanan Alexander, Liat Rahamian, Uri Gavish, Ofir Glick, Oren Yehi Shalom, Gad Marcus, and Ayelet Mann present an ambitious study on interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the humanities and arts. Over three years, they partnered with teachers from ten Israeli middle schools to embrace interdisciplinarity and enhance students’ engagement with ethics, identity, and other liberal values. The study uses an ecological lens to conceptualize interdisciplinary learning in humanities, proposing that two processes—cross-disciplinary knowledge-building and transdisciplinary identity work—play out in tandem. Interdisciplinarity is at the center of this study, and the research team comprising researchers from the learning sciences, philosophy, social psychology, and history is a critical part of it. The authors acknowledge that their interdisciplinary team’s composition created opportunities to engage with different theoretical positions. However, it also posed challenges. At the center of these challenges is the need to weave different theoretical and methodological perspectives. In research-practice partnership projects, this inevitably extends to practitioner perspectives. The authors make a remarkable contribution by integrating diverse ideas about interdisciplinary learning into one coherent framework of interdisciplinary competencies and activities. However, several uneasy tensions emerge in their empirical work. At the center is the tension between liberal dialogue-oriented pedagogical values and the need to assess individual students’ interdisciplinary learning outcomes in ways that external stakeholders value. Nevertheless, two very valuable outcomes emerge from this tension. First, to ascertain learning gains, the authors draw upon a number of established measurement techniques informed by positivistic ways of thinking. Their constructed framework and measurement tool for assessing students’ interdisciplinary competences are undoubtedly valuable contributions upon which other tools for assessing interdisciplinary learning can be built. Second, the authors explore learning processes by focusing on the nuances of students’ and teachers’ engagement in classroom dialogue. They offer insights into the nature of knowledge-building and identity-focused classroom discourses and, similarly to Schwarz et al.’s study, show the indispensable role of teachers in creating a space for students to draw on their experiences and shape it. Their adopted ecological perspective enables them to conclude that interdisciplinary humanities could help bridge not only disciplines but also one more unacknowledged yet critical gap: between knowledge and learner.

The next two papers in this Special Issue explore interdisciplinary learning in specific university courses. Therefore, they pay close simultaneous attention to the design of curriculum activity systems and students’ learning processes.

Adam Papendieck and Julia Clarke, in the paper “Curiosity to Question: Tracing productive engagement in an interdisciplinary course-based research experience,” chose the interesting context of course-based research to explore interdisciplinary learning in undergraduate education. This context brings to the fore the overall idea of ecology when interdisciplinarity in education is at stake. The course contextualizes learning as a way to become a researcher—mixing disciplines and putting them into interaction is a double leap in student development. The authors explore the processes in the interdisciplinary course-based research experience that contribute to learning. The challenges to exploring such an enterprise are enormous. To overcome them, the authors combined two approaches that are generally considered incompatible: Activity Theory, and Actor-Network Theory. Activity Theory provides a perspective of productivity, which involves cyclical and developmental interactions within and among interconnected human-centered activity systems that fundamentally transform the network and its actors. Actor-Network Theory, in contrast, focuses on how human and non-human actors assemble in networks in ways that produce power, and provides an instrumental perspective that describes political-rhetorical alliances and translational assembly of stable networks. In this sense, it provides an ecological rather than the ego-centered analysis provided by Activity Theory. Combining the two approaches enables the exploration of various developmental and instrumental relationships and interactions that promote productive student engagements in different ways at different moments. The authors show that these relations enable students to embed themselves in authentic and persistent research networks. They also show how the nitty gritty work of managing noncoherence and contradiction in such highly distributed, heterogeneous and mediated scientific research networks often plays out in a distinctly syncretic mode. Such syncretic negotiations—whether carried out through rules and norms of developmental activity systems or as translations in the assembly of a competent and persistent actor network—are the moves that allow us to construct interdisciplinary scientific networks with the requisite complexity to address complex problems and with the pluralism to address them in an equitable and just fashion.

Hanni Muukkonen and Anu Kajamaa’s paper “Knowledge objects and knowledge practices in interdisciplinary learning: Example of an organization simulation in higher education” focuses on the promotion of students’ interdisciplinary learning during a master’s course, particularly through the use of organization simulations. The study coins interdisciplinary learning as an essential component in the development of students as both learners and future professionals, closely associated with various higher cognitive skills and educational opportunities related to work-life scenarios. This study contributes significantly to the body of knowledge about the utilization of simulation learning in support of interdisciplinary learning. Most uniquely, this research utilizes a sociocultural lens, thereby creating a distinct perspective on knowledge creation and interdisciplinary learning. It suggests that these take place through open-ended practices of collective knowledge development. The study also acknowledges the pivotal role played by shared knowledge objects, such as plans, designs, and offers for external clients produced by teams. The study depicts student teams’ activities to meet the expectations of the simulation: knowledge objects were developed by ideating and converging different knowledge, and negotiating tensions. These activities were studied as emerging knowledge practices, highlighting common attention to interdisciplinary goals, responsibility taking and commitment, framing of expertise, crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, exploring knowledge, and reflecting on practices. Through the four iterations of a master’s level organizational psychology course, the study shows how simulations can mediate and facilitate students’ knowledge practices at individual and collaborative levels, encouraging interdisciplinary learning. It reveals how the complex simulation integrates personal and team-level goals and activities. It suggests that the complexities related to different disciplinary backgrounds necessitate a careful design of simulations. The findings from this study not only contribute to a better understanding of interdisciplinary learning and knowledge practices but they also expand our pedagogical understanding of the use of simulations, catalyzing awareness of curriculum activities involving interdisciplinary learning and addressing the demand for innovative learning environments and methods.

The last paper, “Constructing a shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems: Epistemic games in interdisciplinary teamwork,” coauthored by Natasha Arthars, Lina Markauskaite and Peter Goodyear, explores naturally occurring interdisciplinary learning processes in student groups from several project-based courses. The paper provides a novel perspective on students’ construction of shared understanding by closely examining how students’ interactions and resources shape these processes. They present a fine-grained analysis of cases in which graduate student teams construct shared understanding of complex problems. The paper opens an untrodden path to examine this process through the perspective of epistemic games. The construction of shared understanding within a discipline is well-documented, as well as the role of epistemic games in this endeavor. However, interdisciplinarity and students’ groupwork on complex (aka “wicked”) problems shift the focus from the solution of the problem to the agreement of what the problem is that they are to solve. This turns the construction of shared understanding into a different process. A salient difference is the need to attend to details of students’ interaction and the broader ecological context in which it takes place. Arthars et al. combine the epistemic games theoretical framework with an ecological analytical perspective that provides insight into the distributed nature of students’ construction of shared understanding. The moves they identify convey an alternation of groping-in-the-dark moves with transactional ones. In isolation, each move is not unique to interdisciplinarity, but their combination draws a distinct picture of interdisciplinary construction of shared understanding. The authors do not pretend to predict any deterministic process or outcome according to possible antecedents. On the contrary, their descriptions suggest the partly whimsical character of shared meaning making and demonstrate that the construction of shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems is a multifaceted and dynamic epistemic game. Findings from this naturalistic study have interesting implications for interdisciplinary teaching and learning: teachers may focus on supporting interdisciplinary teams in constructing shared understanding of the problems by giving teams tasks that encourage specific epistemic moves, rather than leaving to chance that productive moves emerge naturally.

Peter Reimann’s (2024) commentary “Methodological challenges of research on interdisciplinary learning” focuses on the methodological aspects of the studies presented in the Special Issue. Reimann points out that researching learning across and beyond disciplines is a complex task as interdisciplinary learning is a group activity that usually extends over long periods. Therefore, it is difficult to capture all the learning or conduct experimental comparisons. However, Reimann suggests that new methods for capturing and sharing data could make research on interdisciplinary learning more interrelated, efficient, transparent, and reproducible. Based on his expertise in eResearch methods and scientific explanations, Reimann proposes methodological ideas and elaborates on them by focusing on the narrative format used to present complex data in the papers. Reimann’s suggestions for increasing the systematicity of narratives and making them a more rigorous explanatory strategy are an exciting methodological frontier.

Yael Kali (2024), in her commentary “An ecological paradigm of interdisciplinary learning: Implications for design,” looks at the papers from the design perspective. Drawing on her longstanding experience developing design principles and pioneering design-based research studies of interdisciplinary learning in university and school education contexts, she elicits design insights from the studies presented in the Special Issue. Kali discusses them in the context of content-oriented, pedagogy-oriented, and organization-oriented design principles for interdisciplinary learning constructed in her previous studies: 1) breaking boundaries between disciplines; 2) breaking boundaries between learners; and 3) breaking boundaries between organizational structures (Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2017). She insightfully unpacks each principle as a set of design dilemmas and then uses the ideas and findings from the papers to suggest design solutions. Kali’s commentary eloquently brings design insights from the papers into one roadmap, rooted in ecological ways of thinking, for guiding the design of interdisciplinary learning ecosystems.

Concluding comments

The papers presented in this Special Issue illuminate theoretical, methodological and design aspects of interdisciplinary learning. To discuss the key lessons learned, we return to the five challenges raised above related to 1) the capabilities to work across and beyond disciplines, 2) the sociomaterial dimensions of interdisciplinary learning, 3) designing for interdisciplinary learning, 4) the role of multiple contexts, and 5) the transactional relationships within interdisciplinary ecosystems.

Studies of interdisciplinary education often focus on individual learning gains, such as “interdisciplinary cognitions” (Nikitina, 2005), “interdisciplinary understanding” (Boix-Mansilla, 2017; Kidron & Kali, 2024), and “interdisciplinary thinking” (Spelt et al., 2017). In contrast, most authors in this Special Issue explore interdisciplinary learning at a group level. They emphasize the importance of jointly constructed meanings and objects, and examine a wide range of verbal and nonverbal interactions between learners and other human and non-human actors within a distributed environment. None of the studies deny the importance of individual gains and personal resourcefulness. However, they convey that the knowledge and capability emerging at a group level are critical when people solve—and learn to solve—”real” problems that have no one “right” answer, whether they be democratic civic acts (Schwarz et al., 2024) or complex workplace tasks (Arthars et al., 2024; Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024). This knowledge and capability are more than a sum of individual understandings and competencies. All studies in this issue try to tap into personal resources that students (and teachers) bring to the joint discussions of interdisciplinary problems—Novis-Deutsch et al. (2024) even make steps constructing an instrument for measuring interdisciplinary competencies—however, how collective learning relates to individual learning remains the most complex research area.

The studies in this Special Issue offer nuanced insights into the roles of non-human actors, with two papers (Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024; Papendieck & Clarke, 2024) choosing objects as their core analytical focus. These studies show the importance of acknowledging the multiple roles of epistemic objects as these objects are simultaneously knowledge objects that carry out the meaning and motivate activity and boundary objects that mediate interaction and translation of ideas in interdisciplinary learning. Most importantly, when students learn by working on complex interdisciplinary problems, these objects sometimes become “runaway objects” (Engeström, 2007) that feel overwhelming and out of control. Due to their urgency and complexity, they can be highly agentic in shaping learning activity and, sometimes, they do this in unproductive ways. The papers offer only a glimpse into how students engage with objects during interdisciplinary learning. However, they show that material objects, due to their tangible nature, could be instrumental in instantiating the desirable intellectual challenges and shaping productive interdisciplinary learning processes and outcomes. Exploring their potential in design for interdisciplinary learning is worth pursuing.

All studies that include a design component reveal the enormous effort invested in designing tasks, environments, or whole programs to afford the enactment of interdisciplinary processes. Other researchers have already stressed that design for interdisciplinary learning requires that effort and have suggested design principles to support it (e.g., Boix-Mansilla, 2017; Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2017). The papers in this Special Issue contribute a further set of design ideas. They, however, also show major variations and discrepancies between design intentions and the actual learning processes. While these discrepancies are a natural characteristic of design for learning (Goodyear et al., 2021), particularly in collaborative settings (Koschmann, 2016), they suggest that the fidelity of design enactment in the case of interdisciplinarity is a particularly challenging task. We do not claim that design principles are not useful—the papers show that careful design and productive teachers’ enactment increase the chances for successful interdisciplinary learning to emerge—but we recognize the capriciousness of interdisciplinary processes. Students and teachers bring numerous personal resources to interdisciplinary problems, and “principal knowledge” as well as “discipline,” in their etymological sense, become loose when disciplinary boundaries are crossed. Can other forms of representing design knowledge and instantiating it in concrete courses be more productive? Some studies in this Special Issue suggest such possibilities worth exploring. For example, Arthars et al. (2024) embrace the concept of epistemic games to describe interdisciplinary processes, and Muukkonen and Kajamaa (2024) focus on simulation as an environment for interactions.

In their accounts, the authors describe different aspects of the educational ecosystems, revealing that interdisciplinary learning often involves the active engagement of multiple human actors with different roles and levels of expertise—students, teachers, designers, instructors, mentors, and, in the case of school education, principals, superintendents, and parents (Novis-Deutsch et al., 2024; Schwarz et al., 2024). They also articulate the diverse roles of non-human actors—instructions, technologies, whiteboards, inscriptions, etc.—in interdisciplinary learning (cf. Arthars et al., 2024; Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024; Papendieck & Clarke, 2024). Nevertheless, however materialistic the accounts are, human motivations and resourcefulness—including those of teachers and students—are vital in the distributed and heterogeneous interdisciplinary enterprise to build and extend transactional relationships.

The most complex question is the relationship between students’ participation and productive interdisciplinary engagement. The studies in this Special Issue show that participation tends to flourish in interdisciplinary learning settings. Real-world questions invite students to voice their knowledge and perspectives and, due to the various disciplinary understandings, experiences, and perspectives, draw students into dialogue and negotiation. However, these studies also indicate an undeniable gap between students’ participation and productive interdisciplinary engagement, where students genuinely engage in interdisciplinary knowledge work. Productive interdisciplinary engagement, similarly to disciplinary engagement (Engle & Conant, 2002), is linked to “students’ responsibility for ensuring that their intellectual work is responsive to content and practices established by intellectual stakeholders” (p. 405). Such content and practices in the case of interdisciplinary problems are multiple and do not necessarily have shared norms, purposes and values. We contend that productive interdisciplinary engagement is linked to epistemic fluency and ecological ethics: the capability to understand and work across different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing and incorporate accountability to all voices (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017; Morrison & Collins, 1996; Trisos et al., 2021). Further, productive interdisciplinary engagement involves not only students, but must expand to all stakeholders across the ecosystem. The design principles outlined in Kali’s (2024) commentary could be a starting point for creating learning environments for productive interdisciplinary engagement across the educational ecosystem.

All studies presented in this Special Issue draw on theoretical and methodological approaches already embraced in the learning sciences, such as dialogic learning, knowledge creation, epistemic games, Activity Theory, Actor-Network Theory, and knowledge integration. However, all papers also involve substantial conceptual work in developing, integrating, and extending these approaches to make them useful in conceptualizing and studying interdisciplinary learning, such as combining Activity Theory with Actor-Network Theory (Papendieck & Clarke, 2024) or extending the disciplinary literacy framework to new disciplines and dialogic argumentation practices (Schwarz et al., 2024). Complex integrative conceptual and methodological work makes attaining “gold standard” ontological and epistemological coherence hardly achievable. However, the developed conceptual and methodological frameworks contribute to understanding interdisciplinary learning in real classrooms and offer actionable insights. The contributions that papers make are not grand theories of interdisciplinary learning but rather mid-range theoretical conjectures and explanations that describe “possible mechanisms (as opposed to necessary ones)” (Hammer et al., 2018, p. 638), which are nevertheless helpful in taking practical actions. Such actions include helping teachers know how they can scaffold productive interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation so that learners draw upon and integrate disciplinary knowledge when discussing societal challenges (Schwarz et al., 2024) or supporting teams in constructing shared understanding by giving tasks that encourage productive epistemic games and moves (Arthars et al., 2024). Indeed, all studies in this Special Issue—even if they do not make their epistemological stance explicit—instantiate an ecological methodological stance. Ecology, above all, is an applied science.

Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers for their invaluable comments and guidance to the authors of the papers. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the editors-in-chief, Susan Jurow and Jianwei Zhang, and the editorial assistant, Thomas Underwood, who assisted us in every step of the editorial process.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Lina Markauskaite acknowledges funding from the Australian Research Council grant DP200100376 and NSW Department of Education grant G212673. Baruch Schwarz acknowledges funding from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant No. 2699/17]. Crina Damşa’s work was funded by the Department of Education at the University of Oslo, Norway. Hanni Muukkonen’s work was funded by the Learning and Learning Processes Research Unit, University of Oulu. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the funding agencies.