Interdisciplinary Projects – Moving from Transfer to Transformation in Learning

In the PBL communities, we have always argued that the deep learning in the projects would compensate for the lack of knowledge from taught courses by the students’ ability to transfer knowledge to new areas. Within the disciplinary discourses, this has proved to be valid as the transfer of learning works within the same language and disciplinary thinking and the projects share similarities. However, we have learned that in an interdisciplinary context, where students are to transform their experiences from a disciplinary to an interdisciplinary context, the students do experience difficulties in leading and managing their projects. This keynote will be based on results from the research project funded by Poul Due Jensen Foundation on interdisciplinarity and problem- and project-based learning (PBL). Key concepts in interdisciplinary types of projects will be presented together with research findings on students learning experiences. These findings are leading to a discussion on transfer and transformation in engineering learning – both in terms of scientific knowledge and generic competencies. The main message is that in order to facilitate interdisciplinary and flexible learning, the engineering curricula needs to be built on a higher degree of transformation and variation