Interdisciplinary learning in undergraduate and graduate education : Conceptualizations and empirical accounts

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together several research programs that aim to advance the conceptual and methodological foundations for studying interdisciplinary learning and to provide empirical evidence for further development of this, currently undertheorized and understudied, field. The first paper embraces a sociological concept of academic hospitality to look at how different modes of interdisciplinarity are adopted in university courses. The second paper adopts an activity-centered framework to investigate the development of students’ competence during interdisciplinary learning. The third paper takes a linguistic perspective and examines connectedness as a measure of interdisciplinarity in students’ produced artifacts. The last paper adopts a multimodal blending lens to look at how students integrate their ideas and construct shared knowledge artifacts during interdisciplinary innovation meetings. Collectively, the contributions provide a broad conceptual and methodological ‘toolkit’ for studying interdisciplinary learning from different analytical perspectives and at different levels of granularity.