Bachelor’s Students’ Experiences With The Acquisition Of Interdisciplinary Understanding

A growing number of interdisciplinary Bachelor degree programmes is offered at comprehensive research universities and these aim to ensure that students gain interdisciplinary understanding. Knowledge on how Bachelor’s students’ acquire interdisciplinary competences is limited. In this qualitative interview study, we explored how students reflect on their interdisciplinary learning process.
The current study was conducted in a large Dutch research university. We held semi-structured interviews with 15 Bachelor’s students enrolled in an interdisciplinary (honours) programme. Students were enrolled 11 different interdisciplinary modules.
We found three themes in students’ reflections. Theme 1 is ‘acquaintance’ and refers to becoming acquainted with views of other disciplines. Students are introduced to lecturers and students with other disciplinary backgrounds and become familiar with other disciplines’ language, research methods and knowledge creation. The second theme is ‘contrasting’. Students describe how they learn to observe similarities and dissimilarities in knowledge constitution and methodology between academic disciplines. The third theme that we noticed is ‘strengthening’. Students report that they strengthen their own disciplinary competences with insights from other disciplines. Students do not experience these themes to the same degree. Experiences focus on ‘getting acquainted’ and ‘contrasting’.
We are convinced that students’ experiences are valuable for the development of interdisciplinary curricula. Research could focus on stages in the acquisition, teacher experiences and course designs that positively affect students’ gaining of interdisciplinary understanding.