Interdisciplinary Engagement in Higher Education: Opportunities Explored

Abstract

There are increasing pressures on universities to make their graduates ready for life and work, in addition to ensuring technical and professional competence. This chapter discusses the implications of supporting such an approach for higher education in a university in Australia where the university was treated as an urban living lab, supporting student engagement for a course innovated to cover three different disciplines. Urban living labs are a form of collaborative partnership particularly in urban areas to support sustainability outcomes. The innovation presented here was in using a green building on campus, bringing students from different disciplines, to study this green building, thereby also partnering with industry. The key question driving the research was whether academic-industry partnerships may be used to understand the performance of green buildings on an urban campus. The anchor course was in construction management and the other disciplines were business and computer science. Twenty three students undertook study of predetermined spaces of a green building on campus. The results show that as a pilot study, this project was successful, with good engagement of students, teaching and non-teaching staff from the university and industry. However, it was more difficult to convert the pilot to mainstream teaching and learning.

Developing Business Communication Skills Through Interdisciplinary Approach to Study English

“…Interdisciplinary approach to designing a foreign language course in a non-linguistic University is generally considered to be a way to achieve the goal of mastering a foreign language in the field of professional activity [4][5]. Taking advantage of interdisciplinary studying a graduate is ready for networking with representatives of foreign cultures on professional subjects, getting acquainted with the latest international sources for achieving the purpose of professional development.…”

“…Interdisciplinarity covers all procedures for designing a foreign language course in the professional sphere of communication, namely, the ways of selecting didactic units and texts directly for teaching, methods and techniques for placing foreign language material and their implementation in teaching practice. Interdisciplinary links are displayed both at the contents level of integrated curriculum and at the level of technology used to improve students' foreign language skills for communication [4][5][6]. Interdisciplinary approach reveals the synthesizing relationships between objects, which is reflected in the learning process, namely in the content, technologies, forms of the educational process [5,7].…”

“…Such combination is a highly motivating one, since students have opportunity to apply what they learn in their English classes to their major area of study, whether it is computer science, engineering, or law. Thus, interdisciplinary approach is oriented at integrating knowledge from different disciplines, simultaneous development of proper communicative, professional, academic and social skills [4]. In our view, however, the implementation of cross-curricular links in teaching foreign languages is still somewhat episodic.…”