An ecological paradigm of interdisciplinary learning: Implications for design

ABSTRACT

In this commentary, I offer my insights from the Special Issue—Beyond disciplinary engagement: researching the ecologies of interdisciplinary learning—which, in my view, reframes interdisciplinarity. In contrast to the cognitivist paradigm—where research is largely concerned with learning processes that lead to an individual’s cognitive interdisciplinary learning outcome—in the ecological paradigm research is primarily concerned with the interdisciplinary learning processes that occur within groups. To address a concern regarding the usefulness of design principles in this framing, I use an approach for extending the applicability of design principles by augmenting them with designers’ dilemmas and solutions in various contexts. Three main dilemmas are discussed: (1) How to ensure students have access to disciplinary knowledge and epistemic resources, as they embark on the interdisciplinary work? (2) How to support the fine-grained socio-material-cultural processes involved in interdisciplinary learning between diverse learners, levels and/or disciplinary expertise? (3) How to build on, but also push the boundaries of existing infrastructures to develop new routines, social networks, physical and digital infrastructures to accommodate interdisciplinary learning from K-12 through higher education? A synthesis of the studies’ array of solutions is proposed as a preliminary roadmap for the design of ecologically-oriented interdisciplinary learning environments.

In today’s rapidly evolving world, the importance of interdisciplinary work cannot be overstated. As society grapples with increasingly complex challenges, from climate change through pandemics, declining democracies and disinformation, traditional disciplinary boundaries are proving insufficient for addressing these multifaceted issues. Interdisciplinary learning programs are introduced in more and more K-12 and higher education institutions, with the aim of empowering students with skills and practices they will need to address complex challenges. Yet, as argued by Boix Mansilla and Duraisingh in 2007, a notion that still holds true today—“interdisciplinarity is an elusive concept”(p. 218). Without a clear understanding of the specifics of what interdisciplinary learning means and entails, supporting such learning will continue to be a highly challenging endeavor, not reaching its full potential.

This Special Issue has undertaken the challenge of not only delving into the depths of interdisciplinary learning but also presenting a unique ecological perspective for its empirical examination. By doing so, the authors offer important theoretical insights that may have significant practical implications for teaching and design, as I explain below. The articles present a broad and nuanced perspective that goes beyond what has been achieved in the field of interdisciplinary learning thus far. In fact, I consider the ecological perspective presented in this collection of studies to represent a paradigmatic shift, or at the very least, a substantial expansion, from the predominantly cognitivist approach that largely characterizes current research in the field.

In this commentary, I first share some conceptual insights on interdisciplinarity that emerge from my reading of the contributions and ecological framing taken in this Special Issue. Then, my main efforts are geared toward employing an approach stemming from the design-based research (DBR) arena, to suggest how the applicability of the research studies in this Special Issue may be extended. Using this approach, I show how three overarching design principles that have already been suggested for interdisciplinary learning can be enhanced through the insights derived from the studies, and consequently offer design guidelines for supporting interdisciplinary learning with an ecological perspective. I end by suggesting directions for future advancements in the field.

Reframing interdisciplinarity: An ecological turn

The research literature on interdisciplinary learning to date has mostly focused on deciphering cognitive aspects of such learning, seeking to answer questions such as: What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in interdisciplinary thinking? (Nikitina, 2005); How can interdisciplinary understanding be assessed? (Boix Mansillla & Duraising, 2007); What are the typical stages of interdisciplinary knowledge integration? (Ivanitskaya et al., 2002); What characterizes effective (technology-enhanced) support for promoting students’ interdisciplinary understanding? (Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2024). Interdisciplinarity in these studies has primarily been conceptualized as a process occurring in the mind of the individual with a focus on a sought-after learning outcome. Interdisciplinary learning outcomes in this conceptualization are characterized and assessed by the degree to which they depict three core dimensions: (a) groundedness in disciplinary insights, (b) integration of disciplinary insights to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and (c) sense of purpose, reflectiveness and self-critique of the integration (Boix Mansillla & Duraising, 2007). This conceptualization does not imply that achieving such learning outcomes must occur in isolation. Indeed, in many of these studies, social processes such as interaction (Ivanitskaya et al., 2002), dialogue (Nikitina, 2005), and collaboration (Boix Mansillla & Duraising, 2007), sometimes as part of a communal effort (Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2024)—play crucial roles in reaching interdisciplinary learning outcomes.

The articles in this Special Issue take a different trajectory. They are primarily focused on deciphering the learning process by which people learn across and beyond disciplines. By capitalizing on methodologies stemming from the learning sciences to investigate various types of learning practices within real-world contexts, the authors embrace a socioculturally-minded, ecological perspective to explore a very different set of research questions. These include: How and when do interdisciplinary processes emerge, as can be deciphered from classroom talk? (Schwarz et al., 2024); What is the role of co-created knowledge objects in the emergence and evolvement of interdisciplinary learning? (Muukkonen et al., 2024); How can interdisciplinary learning processes mediate identity discourse and meaning-making? (Novis-Deutsch et al., 2024); What tensions and possibilities emerge when designing for student engagement with disciplinary diversity? (Papendieck & Clarke, 2024); and, what characterizes the epistemic game by which student teams construct a shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems? (Arthars et al., 2024).

That is, in contrast to the cognitivist paradigm of interdisciplinarity—where research is largely concerned with various learning processes that lead to an individual’s cognitive interdisciplinary learning outcome—the articles in this Special Issue represent a novel, ecological paradigm of interdisciplinarity, where research is primarily concerned with the interdisciplinary learning processes that occur within groups. Such processes position 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” (Markauskaite et al., 2024, p. X). This is not to imply that learning outcomes are not pursued and examined within the ecological paradigm of interdisciplinarity. Indeed, individual and collective learning outcomes in studies encompassed in this Special Issue include aspects like students’ development of knowledge practices—such as attending to interdisciplinarity or framing expertise (Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024)—or assets related to identity, confidence, skills, behaviors, and authentic research productivity (Papendieck & Clarke, 2024). However, most of these learning outcomes focus less on students’ development of understandings that encompass the three core dimensions of interdisciplinarity, and more on interdisciplinary practices or other, general learning gains. As such, the ecological paradigm the authors introduce offers a new lens, which significantly widens the cognitivist view, reframing the field’s perspective.

Enhancing design principles with practical dilemmas and solutions

The ecological paradigm offers a rich perspective on interdisciplinarity. However, it comes with a price: as illustrated in the articles, it demands a careful, fine-grained analysis of processes occurring among learners, involving not only their discourse but also their body-language and collective insights that are embedded in evolving co-created knowledge objects. To pursue these objectives while supporting students’ interdisciplinary learning, the authors made tremendous efforts to design learning environments that would facilitate these multi-modal learning processes. However, as Markauskaite et al. (2024) note, given the complexity, it was often difficult to predict how design elements in these learning environments would contribute to the development of interdisciplinary learning. This raises the question of whether it is possible at all to formulate general design principles that cut across the complex learning environments in these studies in a way that would be valuable in other situations.

To address this challenge, I draw on ideas that were advanced over three decades when design-based research (DBR) evolved and became a widely established approach in the learning sciences (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Kali & Hoadley, 2021; McKenney & Reeves, 2012/2018). Although the authors in this Special Issue did not necessarily describe their approaches using the DBR moniker, they all studied the learning processes within carefully designed environments, often through several design iterations. Therefore, approaches related to extracting design implications appear relevant.

Since its inception in the early 1990s, proponents of DBR contended that it should take place in the authentic environment it seeks to study, so that practical and theoretical insights will feed each other, with the ultimate goal of advancing learning theory in conjunction with practical insights that are applicable in wider, diverse contexts (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992). This dual goal of DBR invoked criticism regarding methodological rigor (e.g., Kelly, 2004), as well as debates regarding the usability of DBR outcomes (Bereiter, 2014, 2015; Janssen et al., 2015). The latter is echoed by Markauskaite et al. (2024), expressing a concern regarding the usefulness of principles for guiding the design of interdisciplinary learning environments, especially due to the ecological richness involved. Attending to such challenges, my research group developed an approach for extending the applicability of design principles that underlie educational innovations designed through DBR (Kidron & Kali, 2017). In this approach—which I capitalize on to address the above concern—overarching design principles are enhanced by augmenting them with the dilemmas and solutions of designers who attempt to employ them in various contexts.

We developed the approach as a second stage of a DBR study that was specifically focused on interdisciplinary learning, making it especially relevant for the current undertaking. The first stage involved designing an instructional model according to three overarching interrelated design principles that were derived from a literature review: (1) A content-oriented design principle: Breaking boundaries between disciplines; (2) A pedagogy-oriented design principle: Breaking boundaries between learners; and (3) An organization-oriented/infrastructuring design principle: Breaking boundaries between organizational structures. A set of features was designed to instantiate these principles in a higher education context, where the model, and underlying principles were tested and refined (Kidron & Kali, 2015). In the second stage, research-practice partnerships were established with three middle schools who wished to implement the model. In their attempt to implement it in their local setting, they encountered new dilemmas, as well as existing dilemmas that demanded entirely different solutions. These solutions required the design of new features for each of the design principles, based on the existing rationales, and the new constraints and affordances related to the school context. By adding the insights that emerged through these design dilemmas and solutions to a public repository of design principles, the applicability of the design principles and the entire instructional model was extended (Kidron & Kali, 2017).

In what follows, I use this approach in a slightly different manner. Instead of examining how various design adaptations can enrich a particular instructional model, I seek to elicit common design insights emerging from the five instructional models presented in the special issue, each independently designed to promote interdisciplinary learning in a specific context. What connects these models is their use as research platforms by the authors, for theoretical elaboration of ecological perspectives of interdisciplinary learning, which was called for in this Special Issue. Together, they present a completely different and novel array of ecologically-oriented solutions to dilemmas that echo those that were earlier raised regarding the three interdisciplinary learning design principles (Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2017). The insights provide a preliminary roadmap that can guide the design of interdisciplinary learning environments, as perceived through the prism of the ecological paradigm.

Design dilemmas and solutions for interdisciplinary learning from an ecological perspective

A content-oriented design principle: Breaking boundaries between disciplines

The first design principle, which was fundamental in all articles in the Special Issue, has to do with breaking boundaries between disciplines. This design principle calls for organizing the contents of learning environments in a way that would intertwine disciplinary and interdisciplinary resources, as a basic foundation for students’ interdisciplinary work (Kidron & Kali, 2015; Koichu et al., 2022). A typical design feature is to start with a “cross-cutting theme” (Kidron & Kali, 2015)—an issue that is described as “ill-defined,” or a “wicked” problem (Arthars et al., 2024)—which requires the integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives in order for learners to deeply understand it. This cross-cutting theme is designed to serve as a backbone for the whole program and is carefully chosen to engage students in the interdisciplinary work (Schwarz et al., 2024).

An inherent dilemma in designing environments aimed at fostering interdisciplinary learning, which also arises from the articles in this Special Issue, is how to ensure that students have access to the appropriate disciplinary knowledge and epistemic resources to build on, before they embark on the task of integrating ideas from the various domains to develop interdisciplinary insights regarding the cross-cutting theme.

Earlier work suggested designing the content using a“sandwich” configuration with interdisciplinary-disciplinary-interdisciplinary stages. This includes: (a) introducing the cross-cutting theme, (b) implementing activities designed for students to delve into disciplinary underlying contents, which are repeated for each domain (“deepening script”), and (c) structuring tasks that engage and support students in interdisciplinary work, often through their construction of an “integrative artifact” (Kidron & Kali, 2015). Various configurations of these stages have been devised to meet the characteristics of different learning contexts. For instance, parsing the disciplinary contents into smaller sections and repeating the whole structure in several cycles may be more appropriate for K-12 contexts. In contrast to higher education contexts, younger students may lose the connection with the cross-cutting theme when delving into the disciplinary contents in longer sessions, and as a result become less engaged in the program and the interdisciplinary work (Kidron & Kali, 2017).

Interestingly, three of the five learning environments presented in this Special Issue proposed design solutions to this dilemma, which were quite different from the “sandwich” configuration, expressing the underlying ecologically-oriented perspective (Arthars et al., 2024; Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024; Papendieck & Clarke, 2024). The organization of contents within these environments, which were all in the higher education context, did not include pre-designed resources introducing disciplinary contents at all. Instead, these designs capitalized on human resources—the students themselves, and their academic networks. That is, the responsibility for bringing relevant disciplinary content knowledge, epistemic practices, values and dispositions, and sometimes direct feedback from disciplinary experts (Papendieck & Clarke, 2024), was on the participants of the course, and was not part of the design effort per-se. This allowed for the sequencing of activities to focus on supporting the interdisciplinary work, as further described in the pedagogy-oriented design principle.

Still, these solutions were possible only when students already developed expertise and/or had access to disciplinary experts, which is more typical in higher education contexts. In the study by Schwarz et al. (2024), conducted in the K-12 context, the authors adopted the multiple-cycle sandwich configuration design strategy. Each cycle was designed as an out-of-school focus day, in which students studied a contested social issue, such as whether parents should be compelled to vaccinate their children. The students drew on scientific, mathematical, and philosophical resources as a basis for their interdisciplinary discussions and co-creation of shared artifacts around the issue. The ecological approach in this case was expressed in a rich learning environment, with design features supporting both the disciplinary and interdisciplinary work of the students (see pedagogy-oriented design principle), as well as opportunities for teachers’ supportive involvement in the process. This enabled the emergence of interdisciplinary dialogue in some cases, but also induced a considerable load on teachers, who often did not successfully meet this challenge. The ambitious role involved in interdisciplinary teaching in K-12 settings was also discussed by Novis-Deutsch et al. (2024). In their design, the organization of disciplinary and interdisciplinary resources was devised in various ways in each school to meet local constraints, affordances and visions through a network of research-practice partnerships, as further described in the organization-oriented design principle.

To sum, looking across the studies in this Special Issue in relation to the organization of contents dilemma shows that to provide students with both disciplinary content and interdisciplinary activities, designers should consider capitalizing on available human capital with disciplinary expertise. In higher education contexts, this can include the students themselves, their supervisors and academic networks, as well as guest speakers who can bring relevant disciplinary content knowledge, epistemic practices, values and dispositions. In K-12 settings, where such resources may be less available, a “sandwich” configuration is recommended, bearing in mind the ambitious role for teachers, and considerable design efforts. Networks of research-practice partnerships may support such endeavors. Across contexts, features such as a cross-cutting theme as a backbone for a whole program, around which disciplinary contents and interdisciplinary activities are organized, can serve as productive foundations for learning environments.

A pedagogy-oriented design principle: Breaking boundaries between learners

This design principle calls for the implementation of pedagogies that support students in the process of integrating disciplinary contents into interdisciplinary insights. Before presenting the types of pedagogies that have been shown to support such integration, it is important to note that the literature on interdisciplinarity identifies four core cognitive processes that are involved in interdisciplinary integration: (a) establishing purpose to the integration, (b) weighing disciplinary insights; (c) building leveraging integrations by connecting these insights; and (d) maintaining a critical stance to challenge and refine the evolving understandings (Boix Mansillla, 2017). To support these processes, learning scientists who employed this design principle adopted sociocultural theories of learning, highlighting the “between learners”-oriented pedagogies. Consequently, this principle has been described as employing pedagogies that seek to promote norms and practices that encourage participants to share their various perspectives in solving problems and developing collective insights using the wealth and diversity of ideas within the group (Kidron & Kali, 2015, 2024; Koichu et al., 2022).

The ecological perspective in the current Special Issue goes a significant step further in applying sociocultural theories “that acknowledge the heterogeneous, distributed, relational, and multilayered nature of knowledge practices and human development” (Markauskaite et al., 2024, p. X) to support students’ interdisciplinary learning. In doing so, the dilemma of how to support learning processes becomes more nuanced: How to support the fine-grained, socio-material-cultural processes involved in interdisciplinary learning between diverse learners, levels and/or disciplinary expertise?

Solutions included design considerations regarding issues such as: supporting the very basic requirement for interdisciplinary group work—the development of a shared understanding among learners with various disciplinary expertise (Arthars et al., 2024); promoting equitable syncretic negotiations within highly distributed, heterogeneous networks that are not only diverse in terms of disciplinary content but also encompass various levels of expertise (Papendieck & Clarke, 2024); enabling collective-knowledge development while supporting the integration of personal and team-level goals (Muukkonen & Kajamaa, 2024); nurturing identity-focused classroom discourse that incorporates personal narratives to foster transdisciplinary identity formation (Novis-Deutsch et al., 2024); and supporting teachers in facilitating interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation (Schwarz et al., 2024).

For instance, to support undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (Geosciences, Biology, Environmental Science, Mathematics, Sustainability, Anthropology, Computer Science, Public Health, Urban Planning and Physics) in developing their skills as researchers, Papendieck and Clarke (2024) designed a sequence of activities that encouraged students’ productive syncretic engagement throughout the course. This included supporting the processes of weighing and deploying various problem framings regarding students’ own research question; negotiating different roles and authorities in different contexts; identifying and weighing multiple stakeholders and disciplinary norms to which their work should be accountable; and integrating resources across contexts for their own research work.

One type of feature, prominent in supporting these fine-grained processes or identified as an emergent move between students, which contributed to the development of such processes was the use of simulations and role-play. For instance, in Muukkonen and Kajamaa’s study (2024), an entire graduate course on Organizational Psychology was designed as an organizational simulation. Using a technology-enhanced learning environment, and working in interdisciplinary groups spanning Educational Psychology, Engineering, Economics, Humanities, and Education—students were required to create a business concept of an imaginary industrial design company, and devise an offer of human resource services. These co-created knowledge objects were eventually presented to a guest human-resource expert, who played a role of a client. Findings indicated that as these knowledge objects evolved, and with the aid of scaffolds to guide responsibility taking, and ongoing reflection—students developed epistemic practices of: framing their own and others’ expertise in this process, attending to interdisciplinary problems, crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, and concretizing and exploring with new knowledge.

Another example of using simulations and role-play features to support the intricate processes of interdisciplinary learning is presented by Arthars et al. (2024). Here too, teams of students from various disciplinary backgrounds (Business, Design, Science, Information Technology) were required to develop solutions to complex problems. In one course, teams were required to develop a commercially viable solution to a broad problem, such as air pollution, and pitch the solution to a panel of business experts who played the role of potential investors. In another course teams were required to play the role of external consultants to develop solutions to problems posed by a corporate client. Interestingly, simulation in this study was also identified as an emergent productive type of move students took within these teams, as they attempted to develop shared understanding of these complex interdisciplinary problems. The simulation move was characterized as a process by which the teams created and explored various potential scenarios in their tentative solutions for the problem, to “elicit and explore multiple possible cause and effect relationships together with their consequences” (p. X). These moves were conveyed by participants using a compelling combination of “language, gestures, bodily cues, active listening, visual attention, and visual aids such as whiteboard inscriptions” (p. X). Arthars and colleagues illustrate how constructing of shared understanding of such problems within teams is an epistemic game that is interwoven throughout the process, in which the simulation is one of the five key moves which also involve knowledge sharing, perspective-taking, knowledge validation, and negotiation.

Simulation features were also valuable in encouraging students to cross disciplinary and epistemic boundaries in the K-12 context. In the Schwarz and colleagues’ study (2024) role-playing opportunities, such as empowering students to act as advisors to an authority or as decisionmakers were important in fostering dialogic argumentation among students around interdisciplinary social dilemmas, which often evoked students’ unarticulated references to disciplinary ideas, creating opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation.

To sum, especially careful design is required to support the fine-grained processes involved in interdisciplinary learning between diverse learners. Tasks and scaffolds need to encourage and support epistemically-diverse teams along the bumpy road of developing shared understandings and co-creating artifacts that make evolving shared insights visible and negotiable. As derived from the studies in this special issue, it seems that scaffolds should first assist students to become aware of their own epistemic strengths and weaknesses with regard to the interdisciplinary issue at hand—that is, acknowledge what makes their personal perspective valuable or limited within a team, and where other perspectives are needed. Such scaffolds can encourage students to concretize the complex and abstract ideas regarding the issue being discussed, and connect these ideas with their experiences and unique ways of doing and thinking. In K-12 settings, it is advisable to support connection-making to students’ everyday knowledge, practices and epistemologies, which may promote students’ personal identity-growth. In higher education, connection-making can be supported by linking to students’ academic disciplinary knowledge and epistemic resources, potentially promoting their disciplinary identity growth. A second set of scaffolds is then required to promote the main effort in interdisciplinary learning—assisting students to weave the various perspectives while negotiating individual and collective understandings. Across studies, simulations and role play were found as productive means to support both the individual and collective efforts involved.

An organization-oriented/infrastructuring design principle: Breaking boundaries within and between organizational structures

Educational institutions, especially in K-12, but also in higher education settings are typically geared toward disciplinary compartmentalization (Christensen et al., 2011). Therefore, designing for interdisciplinarity often requires breaking through traditional boundaries between and within organizational structures, to support the complex and fluid nature of interdisciplinary learning. This design principle makes a call to do this using the notion of infrastructuring. Stemming from the arena of design-based implementation research, infrastructuring is an approach aimed at designing equitable and sustainable educational innovations by considering existing infrastructures in educational settings (Chen, 2024; Penuel, 2015, 2019). The humanistic and networked nature of this approach are notable, as described in a keynote presented by William Penuel at the International Society for Design and Development in Education (2015):

Infrastructuring focuses on building a foundation for change, attending to who and what is already there, while seeking to build networks that can take on the difficult work of making significant and broad changes to educational practice (p. 4).

The studies in this Special Issue offer compelling and creative solutions to an inherent dilemma within the infrastructuring approach—how to build on, but also push the boundaries of existing infrastructures to develop new routines, social networks, and physical and digital infrastructures that are needed to accommodate educational innovation. This dilemma becomes even more pronounced given the complexities involved in designing learning environments to support interdisciplinary learning from K-12 through graduate educational settings.

The design solutions described to the previous two dilemmas already hinted at the infrastructuring required. A common feature in all the learning environments described in this Special Issue is the unique collaborations that these infrastructuring efforts inspired. These collaborations, which were sometimes explicitly discussed and sometimes could only be inferred from the writing, seemed to have resulted not only in innovative designs, but also in unconventional design efforts carried out in unique teams, which often included actors outside the course, program, or institution. In Arthars et al. (2024) this included the panel of business experts; in Muukkonen and Kajamaa (2024) this included the guest human-resource expert, and in Papendieck and Clarke (2024) these were the academic networks that students consulted with for their course research.

The infrastructuring in the K-12 settings, where disciplinary expertise was scarcer, were particularly innovative. Schwarz et al. (2024) describe the process by which their solution for conducting the interdisciplinary program in five out-of-school focus days as follows:

To overcome … the institutional logics that constrained our first efforts … we sought an alternative path and negotiated with a city a program in which municipality officers, parents, principals, superintendents, and teachers would take part in decision-making … . The logic of institutional constraints, such as school timetable, physical spaces for multiple groups and so forth, dictated that this “other” type of learning could not take place in school. (p. X)

Novis-Deutsch et al.’ (2024) infrastructuring solution was to devise a network of research-practice partnerships, where middle school teaching teams co-designed interdisciplinary units in Humanities, integrating domains such as History, Literature, Language Arts, and Bible. These teams enacted, reflected in, and on practice as part of a national leadership professional course. Interestingly, the authors indicate that the dynamics within their own interdisciplinary research team inspired the guidelines they developed for designing interdisciplinary learning environments, which were refined in the co-design process.

To sum, the variety of infrastructuring solutions described by the authors not only can inspire future collaborative design efforts to promote interdisciplinarity but also underscores the humanistic nature inherent in both interdisciplinary learning and the process of co-designing for interdisciplinarity with an ecologically-oriented lens. As illustrated in the studies, special collaborative efforts are required to explore constraints and affordances in existing infrastructures to accommodate the complexities involved in interdisciplinary learning and teaching, and inspire innovative infrastructuring solutions. Such exploration and positionality may lead to design researchers’ own transformative learning, stressing that transforming ourselves is often a prerequisite for transforming others (Kali, 2016; Kali & Hoadley, 2021).

Next steps for interdisciplinarity research

This commentary sought to address the concern raised by Markauskaite et al. (2024), regarding the plausibility of guiding the design of ecologically-oriented learning environments to promote interdisciplinarity, given the somewhat chaotic nature of interdisciplinary learning. The approach offered—enhancing overarching design principles—has its limitations. It is important to remember that principles for guiding the design of learning environments—even when aimed at processes more predictable than interdisciplinary learning—are not meant to be deterministic. Rather, as Bell et al. (2004) put it, design principles are:

… an intermediate step between scientific findings, which must be generalized and replicable, and local experiences or examples that come up in practice. Because of the need to interpret design principles, they are not as readily falsifiable as scientific laws. The principles are generated inductively from prior examples of success and are subject to refinement over time as others try to adapt them to their own experiences. In this sense, they are falsifiable; if they do not yield purchase in the design process, they will be debated, altered, and eventually dropped. (p. 83)

The guidelines developed in this commentary in relation to each of the three principles for designing interdisciplinary learning environments should thus be considered carefully. Further research will be needed to continue debates, alterations and perhaps even dropping some of the tentative insights regarding the suggested ecologically-oriented design guidelines. However, such negotiations are urgently needed for ongoing design efforts to empower students with skills and practices they will need to address the complex challenges of our era.

Disclosure statement

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