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This perspective piece addresses specifically future lines of inquiry and practice that advance the goals of the agenda through an interdisciplinary approach to leadership studies. Here, the authors explain in-depth the contexts of an interdisciplinary approach to the agenda and address specific challenges therein. In order to provide clarity to this approach, considerations are made with respect to the language, contextual reference points, and tensions regarding measurement of learning. The authors provide impetus for inclusion of particular, salient priorities from the agenda, and address opportunities for practice and future research. Suggestions reveal unique opportunities within an interdisciplinary perspective such as the integration of diverse content and perspectives as well as collaboration across disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated model of didactic, practice and interdisciplinary service learning in healthcare education, and determine the students’ perceptions on the benefits of this integration.

A pre and post survey design was utilized to examine health professions students’ perspectives with respect to learning outcomes relevant to professional benefits of a service learning capstone. The surveys consisted of 36 items for measuring the interdisciplinary course characteristics and perceived benefits of the integrated approach. The required interdisciplinary (used interchangeably with interprofessional) course was constructed as an integrated didactic, practice interdisciplinary service learning model. The sample consisted of undergraduate students (n=53) who completed the interdisciplinary senior seminar capstone course taught by one faculty member in one of three course sections. Structural equation modeling based on partial least squares was used to analyze the significance of constructs. Students’ reflections on interdisciplinary service learning were also collected and summarized.

The study demonstrated the significance of interdisciplinary course and team preparation on perceived professional benefits and positive community service learning experience.

Further studies are needed and being pursued to address practitioners’ perceptions of interdisciplinary education. To fully complete the assessment of interdisciplinary education, longitudinal studies must be pursued with graduates and their employers. A larger sample size could be used to repeat this study.

The model employed in this study may be utilized as a component of practice education and clinical practice to address accreditation requirements, quality patient-centred care, and engaging students in valuing interprofessionalism and service.

This study presents an integrated model of didactic, practice and interdisciplinary service learning in health professions education, and demonstrates the benefits of the model with health profession students’ perceptions of interprofessional education (IPE). This study contributes to professional learning research as the impact of IPE has been questionable due to lack of rigorous evidence.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the interdisciplinary relations in some high‐priority fields of science and technology based on ISI data.

This is an applied study using scientometric, citation analysis and network analysis methods. The study population consists of scientific articles of Iranian researchers in five fields that have been indexed in “WOS” database. These fields are included nanotechnology, biophysics, nuclear physics, sociology and communication. After identifying and extracting data from “WOS” (included 1,777 records), in order to determine the interdisciplinary relations and the evolution of these relationships, the citations of these records (41,080 citations) have been extracted and analysed.

The results indicate all the studied scientific fields have self‐citation and other‐citation. Depending on the type of field, the rate of intra‐disciplinary and extra‐disciplinary citations is various. There is a positive correlation between co‐authorship and interdisciplinary approach in all the studied fields. There is no significant relation between the number of citations and interdisciplinary approach. Overall, the results showed the use of only a bibliographic method cannot specify all aspects of interdisciplinarity of the scientific field. Simultaneous use of different analysis methods such as citation analysis, co‐authorship analysis and bibliographic coupling is necessary in order to data exchange between fields.

The analysis and mapping of interdisciplinary relations in a scientific field can provide useful information regarding connectivity and interdependence among areas. Through such studies, the status of cooperation between disciplines and the evolutionary trend of it is well defined. The results of these studies would also be useful in developing the interdisciplinary collaboration among professionals and understanding their information needs and plan to meet these needs.

Leadership scholar-practitioners seldom need to be sold on the benefits of working together. Rather leadership educators want to know how to teach adult leadership scholar-practitioners how to work together across differences. The aim of this paper is to guide leadership development practitioners on how to nurture leadership that can address the complex problems the changing global arena demand of us today and into the future. We argue when preparing adult leadership scholar-practitioners, using adult learning theories and paying attention to the interdisciplinary roots of the field of leadership might lead to better learning and engagement with real world challenges. In this paper we present a leadership development model we call interdisciplinary leadership. First, we discuss the interdisciplinary roots of leadership. Second, we describe interdisciplinary leadership as a tapestry – an intricate combination of identities, practices, and outcomes used to prepare people to address complex problems. Finally, we describe the mission, structure, curriculum, and instructional strategies that can be used by leadership educators when applying interdisciplinary leadership. This model acknowledges the identity, practices, and outcomes needed to develop scholar-practitioners of leadership and provides practical techniques to help leadership educators prepare leaders to work together across differences to address complex problems.

This paper aims to develop an improved and harmonized approach to interdisciplinarity in education for sustainable development (ESD)within higher education institutions (HEIs), focusing on maximizing the mobilization of students from all academic disciplines. An attempt is made to reconcile varying strategies for the implementation of interdisciplinary ESD content in HEIs, studying the relative merit and benefit of those strategies and crafting a new approach to combining them, where possible.

This work relies on a robust review and analysis of existing literature proposals on the implementation of ESD in HEIs to elaborate an integrated approach to interdisciplinarity. Specifically, a scoping literature review is applied, analyzing the existing approaches to ESD in HEIs as well as the challenges observed in their implementation. Using this theoretical framework, this paper evaluates the compatibility and efficiency of the approaches currently implemented. Based on this analysis, an integrative approach is outlined, building upon and combining existing proposals.

Building on existing literature, this study identifies two main trends for interdisciplinarity in ESD in HEIs: integration into existing disciplinary curricula and new, stand-alone ESD curricula. This paper suggests adopting the two approaches simultaneously, to reach students from all academic disciplines, especially those with minimal exposure to ESD through their own discipline. Furthermore, this paper stresses that these dual curricula strategies should be combined with further interdisciplinary research initiatives as well as extensive leveraging of technology and e-learning.

This study bridges the gap between diverging visions for ESD in HEIs, harmonizing strategies from the literature to outline a new, multilateral strategy. Furthermore, it extensively studies the need for increased engagement into ESD of students from underrepresented disciplines, including the humanities. This engagement has been little addressed in the literature, rendering the proposed approach original insofar as it outlines the ways to improve current approaches to ESD in HEIs.

This paper aims to contribute to contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity and social marketing by presenting the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working across disciplines in an Australian community energy efficiency intervention – Energy + Illawarra. The paper also aims to identify challenges, practicalities and learning that emerge from collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. It also aims to provide some suggestions and guidelines for researchers in the interdisciplinary space.

The paper uses a case study approach and presents the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working together on the Energy + Illawarra project – a community energy efficiency social marketing intervention.

Challenges in interdisciplinary projects that are presented by differences in ontology, methodology, language and discourse are identified. The importance of being critically reflexive and openness to alternative perspectives are examined. Concerns over publishing interdisciplinary research are considered. The value of experimenting and developing partnerships through pilot projects is discussed. The potential of leveraging existing synergies and the opportunity to learn from clashes in ontology are also highlighted.

This paper contributes to the discussion about being interdisciplinary in social marketing by identifying subjectivities, practicalities and opportunities from collaborating on cross-disciplinary projects. Guidance for researchers on working on interdisciplinary projects offers value for social marketers working in this area.

The study investigates the effectiveness of an adaptive reflective framework that shifts the learning process toward a student-centered approach within an interdisciplinary learning environment. It aims to promote the learning process within an interdisciplinary learning environment that could promote the students’ design competencies.

The experiment was conducted at Basic Design studio, investigating three concepts of basic design principles: harmony, repetition and rhythm. A total of 80 first-year architectural students were enrolled in this study and placed into two equal groups: the “control group” received the traditional learning method and in contrast, the “experimental group” received an interdisciplinary reflective learning method using music as a relevant discipline.

The results showed that utilizing “Music Animation Machine” in the learning process significantly promoted students’ cognitive skills, engagement and design competencies. In addition, there was obvious evidence of excellent progress in learning basic design principles using the proposed reflective approach within a student-centered learning environment.

Many researchers focus on the importance of using music as a design tool. However, there is a crucial demand for investigating it as a learning tool. This research raised music effectiveness in the learning process of design principles. Thus, it incites to test more disciplines interconnected with architectural design. Other researchers could utilize this approach to ensure its effect on enhancing design competencies in the basic design and other architectural design courses.

This study aims to explore an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach for advancing knowledge and understanding of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) at higher education institutions (HEIs).

This qualitative study conducted an explorative experiment to elaborate on forms to advance a pedagogical approach that embeds sustainability. The design of the pedagogical project was explorative and interdisciplinary, using a predefined framework on key competencies for sustainability.

The findings showed that an interdisciplinary approach can create a learning setting that stimulates students’ problem-solving competencies for sustainability-related issues. Students were trained in the five key sustainable competencies addressed by Wiek et al. (2011). Moreover, although it is not always possible to arrange an interdisciplinary pedagogical setting, this might be a key condition for the development of students’ key competencies regarding their understanding of the SDGs. Addressing the SDGs from an interdisciplinary perspective paved the way for the development of students’ strategic competencies, including systems thinking and anticipatory competencies.

The pedagogical project, as an interdisciplinary explorative experiment, was shown to be a potentially suitable method to counteract “cherry-picking” approaches to teaching the SDGs at HEI.

The pedagogical approach advanced in this paper, extends active learning and interdisciplinarity in higher education. The authors argue that this approach encourages students to take ownership of and responsibility for their learning process and indicates a changed mindset and behavior.

The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of interdisciplinary thinking and the conditions and processes that foster it among first-year undergraduate students.

This study with 510 Australian students drawn from 2 cohorts explored an initiative to promote interdisciplinary teaching in an undergraduate ethics-based subject. The study focused on a case-study-based reflective essay intervention to compare the teaching and learning outcomes in the two student cohorts.

The results show how a case-study-based reflective essay intervention impacted on interdisciplinary learning. Introducing the case-study-based reflective essay improved interdisciplinary thinking. Findings show that integral to engaging students in interdisciplinary learning is a need for more experiential and active approaches built into education itself.

The study findings extend Spelt et al.’s (2009) model in the business education context to link student learning outcomes to the learning processes, learning environment and interdisciplinary thinking. A key limitation of this study is that the intervention is limited to only two student cohorts.

The study recommends the use of reflective practice in interdisciplinary subjects to support a variety of learning outcomes across disciplines including classroom-based and assignment-based reflective practices which influence interdisciplinary thinking and active learning.

There is limited understanding on how business schools should or could attempt to promote interdisciplinary teaching and the actual methods for doing so. This study highlights the significance of integrating reflective practice in undergraduate business education to promote students’ interdisciplinary thinking.

A modern business graduate is expected to have strong disciplinary skills as well as the soft skills of communication and team work. However today's business graduate needs to be more than the traditional “I‐shaped” graduate of the past and more of the “T‐shaped” graduate employers are looking for. Many undergraduate business degrees profess to offer integration of the curriculum but on investigation this occurs mainly through a capstone subject at the end of the degree. Today's business graduates need a more integrated approach to their learning. This paper aims to outline the transformation of a traditional business curriculum to one that is inter‐disciplinary, outlining the necessary steps and conditions including the most challenging – faculty buy in.

The review of the Bachelor of Business degree at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) provided an opportunity to explore the option to embrace an integrated curriculum. The authors outline how the review was shaped, the need for change and the approaches to interdisciplinary business education, and an approach to designing an interdisciplinary curriculum. They also provide two case studies.

Approaches to developing an integrative curriculum can take many forms, but the most effective is one that is embedded throughout an entire degree program. This must start with a cornerstone subject to set the road map for the student's study. This subject needs to demonstrate how each discipline interrelates and how at the end of the degree through a capstone subject, this knowledge is again brought together to deal with more complex issues using the more sophisticated tools studied throughout the degree. There also needs to be a strategy that integrates the various first‐year disciplinary subjects traditionally included in an undergraduate business degree.

This paper aims to outline the transformation of a traditional business curriculum to one that is inter‐disciplinary and integrated. The outcome of such an approach produces graduates with the inter‐disciplinary skills that employers are looking for.