Faculty experiences in interdisciplinary programs : opportunities and challenges

Changes in the business environment (such as shorter product lifecycles, globalization, and digitalization) while contributing to a sustainable development, have formed new conditions for companies and organizations. In this new situation, problems encountered cannot be answered within a single discipline. Interdisciplinary programs where students from different disciplines interact in learning and knowledge creation is a way to meet these changes in society. An interdisciplinary program also requires interaction on staff level: Meaningful collaboration brings together expertise from different disciplines so the fundamentals of a given discipline are clarified, and the connections to other disciplines are described, reaching a synergy effect by utilizing the strengths of each area. This, however, puts demands on the curriculum design and on the interaction of the teachers. This paper explores the teachers’ perspective of an interdisciplinary program at Linnaeus University. The program is a 2-year master program entitled “Innovation through business, engineering and design”, recruiting students from the engineering, business and design disciplines. The teaching staff represents different subject areas, and the teachers interact in an interdisciplinary mode in the first year, while the second year mainly contains disciplinary courses. In two focus group interviews, teachers were asked about opportunities and challenges in participating in the interdisciplinary program, as well as their view and how interdisciplinarity is considered in the program. The purpose of the paper is to identify how teachers perceive teaching in an interdisciplinary program as well as to distinguish perceived opportunities and challenges for teachers to participate in interdisciplinary programs. This paper concludes that teachers perceive interdisciplinary learning to take place in the project context, where students come from different disciplines work together to solve a complex real-life assignment. Moreover, the hindrances appear to outweigh the possibilities in participating in an interdisciplinary program. Amongst challenges the teachers perceive lack of resources, such as appropriate learning environments, required competence, and unclear decision channels