Getting started with interdisciplinarity in your teaching? Start with a pressure cooker!
Interdisciplinary learning involves challenges that demand specific skills from students, such as being able to reflect on one's own discipline, empathise with another (disciplinary) perspective and make connections between knowledge and insights from different disciplines. This demands a different way of learning from students, but also a different way of teaching from teachers. A pressure cooker is a kind of simulation that helps to quickly become familiar with the interdisciplinary method.
Why use a pressure cooker?
It is good for teams of educational developers, teachers and students to understand the prerequisites for interdisciplinarity before embarking on an educational development project, a course unit or a research project. A guided pressure cooker is a working form that introduces such teams to the integrative research method chosen for the interdisciplinary education or project.
What topics can you choose from?
The Interdisciplinary Education programme has currently developed two pressure cookers: on the Interdisciplinary Research Process (based on Repko & Szostak (2021)) and on Travelling Concepts. Four other pressure cookers are under development - these will deal with integrative methods futuring, object orientation, design thinking and systems thinking.
How to get started?
We recommend that teams of educational developers and teachers gain experience with the method at the beginning of a collaboration. The pressure cookers are designed so that even with little knowledge or experience of interdisciplinarity, you can still give the pressure cookers to your team yourself.
The pressure cooker can also be used by students starting an interdisciplinary project. By using the simulation at the beginning of the course, you offer students a perspective on how to work towards integration in the rest of the course.
The pressure cookers can be downloaded as a complete teaching package from Edusources (freely accessible). The package includes at least a ready-made powerpoint presentation to use in class and sometimes even worksheets, cheat sheets and case studies.
Questions
Do you have questions about these pressure cookers or about interdisciplinary education? Check the page on interdisciplinary education or contact the programme at t.w.bland@uu.nl.