Towards Understanding Learning Pathways: A Transdisciplinary Research and Development Approach

Abstract

Research-practice partnerships in education are pioneering new ways in which researchers and teacher-practitioners work together on the basis of a mutually beneficial collaboration, a view of research as a core activity involving participants as co-researchers in their joint work, and where questions focus on practice for the betterment of learners. Transdisciplinary research and development extends such inquiry-driven, participatory approaches through integrating both non-academic participants (including industry, public and private sector partners, community members, policy makers, to name a few) and academic researchers from unrelated disciplines (including social sciences, natural sciences, arts, design and humanities, amongst others) to achieve a common goal -involving the creation of new knowledge, practices and theory -and transform insights into initiatives for the good of society. This paper arises from a university-school sector collaboration that set out to tackle the challenge of preparing young people cognitively and socially to choose the living of meaningful and productive lives, alongside the broader agendas of educating them to develop dynamic careers that can adapt to and create tomorrow's workforce and supporting their career-life aspirations. Growing out of previous collaborations and early conversations, this preliminary paper reports on a two-year project that we co-designed to implement novel transdisciplinary techniques and practices, test a proof of concept and discern its feasibility for career education, prototype and pilot initiatives centred on industry-and student-led challenge projects and co-designing virtual workspaces. These transdisciplinary developments would enable the university-school team to investigate questions such as how to grow and renew school-based capability for working with teachers, community, industry and families as they partner with students, working together for sound life choices, and to what extent such co-designed environments improve students' engagement with career pathways and development of future-oriented capabilities. As the project itself is dedicated to developing new valid, reliable and nuanced ways of measuring success in career advice provision, we lay out how participants might distil (research) quality and identify criteria that count toward developing a strong evidence base to inform practice and policy. We discuss the need for the next transdisciplinary phase of collective research and development if the project is to achieve its first milestone.