A student-perspective at cross-disciplinary education

This project was part of the UCPH 2016-project Cross-disciplinary education.

A substantial part of studying and an important point related to student completion is the academic integration of students at the programme they are studying. The academic integration can be considered as the socialisation of the students to become members of the culture of the programme and the disciplines.

Students attending an interdisciplinary study programme are presented with particular challenges in going through this process of socialisation. One reason is that since interdisciplinary programmes obviously are rooted in more than one academic discipline and culture the students not only have to decode and become familiar with one culture, but with several. Furthermore, some interdisciplinary programmes may be in the process of establishing themselves with a common culture whereas other programmes may still be considered as bringing together one or more separate, and sometimes highly different, disciplinary cultures. For students attending an interdisciplinary programme at Master’s level this is further emphasised because the students attending the programme frequently come from different bachelor programmes where they have experienced different processes of socialisation. In those situations, not only the content of the courses and the teachers will be affected by different disciplinary traditions and values. So will the students.

The part of the project on interdisciplinary teaching and learning that adopts the student perspective was addressing the challenges of students entering an interdisciplinary programme. The focus was on how students experience the entering and becoming a part of the programme and how they experienced and dealt with the different disciplines at the programme. When taking the students’ perspective it is possible to explore how the students experience the academic culture and what possibilities they see in the interdisciplinary field.

We focused on students entering a bachelor programme and selected three programmes at KU for case studying:

- Nanoscience

- Natural resources

- Communication and IT

The two first programmes are intra-faculty programmes at Science, whereas the third is an interfaculty programme between Humanities and Science. The programme of Nanoscience is related to the emergence of a field of research involving three different classic disciplines. The programme of Natural resources bring together different disciplines that were previously separate programmes, but now have been integrated into one bachelor programme with specialisations.

We have adopted a qualitative approach with an emphasis on qualitative and narrative interviews. The project was carried out by Lene Møller Madsen, Henriette T. Holmegaard, Rie Malm, and Lars Ulriksen

A report in Danish from the study of Nanoscience was completed in September 2014 and is available at the website of IND (DSE): https://www.ind.ku.dk/projekter/nano-studerende/M_det_med_Nanoscience_net.pdf