UNDERSTANDING STUDENT PERSPECTIVES REGARDING INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING AND SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH TRANSDISCIPLINARY CURRICULUM MODULES

Increasing students’ ability to address wicked problems related to sustainability is critical for future workforce needs. The NSF-funded Business and Science: Integrated Curriculum for Sustainability (BASICS) project seeks to achieve such learning through the development of transdisciplinary curricular modules that can be used in geoscience, other STEM fields, and business courses. Two “common exercises” were developed and implemented at three institutions (Bentley University, Northern Illinois University, and Wittenberg University). One exercise focuses on water quality in the Mississippi River watershed and the other exercise addresses an equitable-zero waste circular economy.

To study implementation, we conducted interviews with 27 students enrolled in courses across the three institutions. Interviews included 11 students who engaged with the Mississippi exercise, 16 students with the Circular Economy, and 1 student who had both exercises. Students represented a range of majors (16 business, 5 science, 2 data science, 4 humanities). Transcripts were analyzed in line with the Gioia et al., (2013) three-stage methodology. First, three authors analyzed transcripts and identified first-order concepts. Next, two authors collectively analyzed the coded transcripts, interpreting the verbatim responses into second-order themes. From the rich descriptions of the second-order themes, we arrived at three thematic dimensions related to 1) how students valued an interdisciplinary approach to addressing wicked problems, 2) what new understandings were reported, related to how multidisciplinary knowledge addressed such problems, and 3) how students characterized sustainability in relation to their aspirations.

Findings suggest that the curriculum strengthened students’ understanding of the necessity of multiple fields in addressing sustainability problems, the challenges of negotiating across perspectives, and the value of the outcomes of this approach. Pre/post surveys administered across 77 course enactments demonstrated statistically significant increases in students’ perceived importance of drawing expertise from more disciplines to address these problems. The interviews elucidated the survey findings, characterizing students’ understanding of wicked problems and how students related it to future coursework and professional life.