Interdisciplinary courses are increasingly seen as essential for preparing university students for the world, yet little is known about how educators actually design and teach them. What do course leaders focus on? What pedagogies do they choose? How do they see the roles of students and teachers? And how do they design physical and digital environments for interdisciplinary teaching and learning?
A recently published paper, “Variation in approaches to interdisciplinary teaching and learning: A phenomenographic investigation,” based on Dwayne Ripley’s PhD study, provides insight into these questions. Drawing on interviews with 23 interdisciplinary course leaders, it identifies four distinct approaches to interdisciplinary teaching and learning, ranging from focusing on students’ teamwork experiences to cultivating their epistemic awareness and agency.
A. Experience‑centred: Learning by working together
The first approach centres on giving students experiences of working in interdisciplinary teams. Educators emphasise group formation, classroom interactions, and reflective activities that help students notice different perspectives. Course leaders curate activities and environments but leave students to make sense of their interdisciplinary experiences.
B. Autonomy‑centred: Freedom to shape projects
The second approach focuses on student autonomy. Here, students choose their teams, define project directions, and manage their collaboration. Teachers support teams as facilitators, stepping in to assist them produce the best outcome, mainly once students have attempted to organise themselves.
C. Inquiry‑centred: Learning how to investigate
The third approach shifts attention from products to processes of inquiry. Educators explicitly teach students how to identify problems, design research processes, choose methods, and critically evaluate evidence. Students learn through conducting research rather than simply producing a final project.
D. Epistemically‑centred: Navigating different ways of knowing
The last approach focuses on developing students’ epistemic awareness and agency, their ability to recognise, compare, and work with different disciplinary ways of creating and validating knowledge. Educators explicitly teach concepts such as disciplinary epistemologies, interdisciplinarity vs. multidisciplinarity, and the challenges of integrating diverse knowledge practices. Students learn not just to collaborate, but to understand how knowledge work is done. Distinctly, this approach directly recognises that effective interdisciplinary work requires explicit teaching and carefully designed scaffolds, not only teamwork experience or autonomy to be creative.
Summary: Outcome space of course leaders’ approaches to interdisciplinary teaching and learning in course designs
Takeaways
These findings show that interdisciplinary course leaders’ teaching approaches vary widely, not only in pedagogical strategies but also in the kinds of learning they prioritise. While some course leaders emphasise students’ experiences of interdisciplinary teamwork and their autonomy, others focus on creating explicit, structured opportunities for students to investigate complex issues and learn to collaborate with people who hold different knowledge traditions. The outcome space presented above offers a practical tool for reflecting on the diverse ways interdisciplinary teaching and learning can be understood and approached informing the design of future interdisciplinary courses.
Acknowledgements
This paper’s open access publication was supported in part by the University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Open Access Publishing Grant 2025. Microsoft Copilot was used in the preparation of this blog.