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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 authors examined team-learning processes in short-term student project teams operating in an intensive design competition at a public university. The purpose of this paper is to explore the critical facilitators, inhibitors and processes for fostering students' creativity within interdisciplinary design teams in higher education.

The authors used a qualitative design to explore facilitators, inhibitors and critical processes in interdisciplinary student project teams. They conducted focus group interviews with three winning interdisciplinary teams that participated in a three-day design competition and used a constant comparison to analyze the data.

The authors identified themes that contributed to creativity at the individual level, the team level and the resource level. The key findings included 12 critical team process phases to achieve one common goal.

The findings of the study yielded to a holistic model of interdisciplinary team development for creativity. Implications for educators and practitioners and suggestions for researchers to expand the interdisciplinary team process model were discussed to facilitate interdisciplinary team creativity in higher education.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of sustainability-focused, cocurricular, interdisciplinary programming for graduate students at creating future leaders in sustainability, i.e. did interdisciplinary sustainability programming further prepared graduate students in sustainability leadership beyond the scope of the individual student academic programs from the perspective of the student participants.

The objective of the study was met by evaluating the University of Michigan Dow Sustainability Fellows Program. With a decade of graduate-student participation, surveys and interviews of Fellows alumni from 2013 to 2020 were used to assess the program impact on creating sustainability leaders. Opportunities for program reflections were included through prompted open-ended questions.

A majority (88%) of the Fellows who responded to the survey agreed with the statement that their career path was positively affected by their participation in the program and that the cocurricular program provided opportunities to explore sustainability-related topics from perspectives they would not have experienced otherwise. The interdisciplinary aspect of the program and the focus on practical community sustainability projects were the most valued attributes of the cocurricular programming.

Supporting cocurricular interdisciplinary programs requires significant resources and intentionality to engage diverse disciplines and diverse partner organizations.

Programs that provide experiential opportunities to build interdisciplinary team skills successfully enable graduate students to become leaders in sustainability fields in the workplace and in outreach and service.

Cocurricular graduate student programming focused on community sustainability projects can successfully create valued learning experiences while simultaneously supporting communities with practical solutions to sustainability challenges.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first longitudinal assessment of the effectiveness of the interdisciplinary cocurricular programming on graduate student sustainability leadership outcomes. The results include feedback received from eight years of cocurricular programming.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rationale for developing interprofessional competencies among graduates from professional and graduate programs, so that they are well prepared to participate in local, national and global social change strategies.

After reviewing the literature on strategic social change initiatives the authors briefly describe two such initiatives: corporate social responsibility initiatives and social entrepreneurial ventures. After reviewing the interprofessional literature from various disciplines and professions, the authors categorized them into “competencies,” “rationale,” “conceptual framework,” “principles” and “challenges.” An examination of exemplar pedagogy from this body of literature suggests ways to prepare students to lead and actively participate in innovative, collaborative social change initiatives.

Interdisciplinary competencies include teamwork, communication, contextual understanding, negotiation, critical thinking, leadership, openness and adaptability. Interprofessional educational models are difficult to implement, however, ethical responsibility of educators to prepare students for complex realities trumps the challenges.

Interprofessional educational experiences can enable students to engage in generative and transformational learning which can later facilitate in creation of innovative solutions for society's recalcitrant physical, social and environmental issues.

Based on the system's perspective, the paper provides guidelines and strategies for implementing interprofessional pedagogical initiative.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the concept of liminality as a theoretical lens to explore and discuss how challenges, accompanied by frustrations and confusion, can enable significant learning in a teamwork setting. Student team narratives on how they handle challenges they face working to solve real-world problems are used as the basis for the discussion.

This is a case study using student narratives from an interdisciplinary master course at a Norwegian university.

We argue that the concept of liminality can support teachers and student teams to understand and handle challenges in ways that enable significant learning and innovation. Practical implications for teachers and facilitators are provided at the end of the paper.

This paper offers new lenses to understand the team- and learning processes in courses where students work with real-world problems. If the teams are able to stay open in the liminality phase it enables significant learning and innovation. This capacity is valuable in a time where teams face complexity and uncertainty is becoming more of a standard than an exception, both in higher education and in working life.

Inter- and transdisciplinarity are core concepts in almost all education for sustainable development (ESD) competence frameworks and curricula. To equip students with inter- and transdisciplinary competencies is highly demanding for educators. Educators must not only know how to teach students such competencies, but need to be experienced in inter- and transdisciplinary research and must have some technical knowledge about inter- and transdisciplinarity. This paper aims to show how university educators can be supported in their teaching.

The paper is a case study based on research and on experiences in interdisciplinary teaching and in supporting educators in their interdisciplinary teaching.

The paper presents a competence framework of interdisciplinary competencies to guide university teachers that has been developed, implemented and refined in interdisciplinary study programmes belonging to the field of ESD. It shows how the professional development of educators could be addressed referring to the experiences in these programmes. The measures presented consist for one thing of interdisciplinary processes among the educators and of measures directly supporting educators in their teaching for another thing.

The case study the paper refers to is of special value, first, because the experiences are based on long-standing research and on two decades of experiences. Second, because considerable efforts were made to deliver coherent and consistent interdisciplinary teaching in which interdisciplinarity was not only a teaching subject for the students but showed by the educators as well so that the educators involved did not only talk about competencies for inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations but also set an example in their own doings.

The purpose of this paper is to share the content and early results from an interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum that integrates theory and practice (praxis). The curriculum links new topical courses concerning renewable energy, food, water, engineering and social change with specialized labs that enhance technological and social‐institutional sustainability literacy and build team‐based project collaboration skills.

In responses to dynamic interest emerging from university students and society, scholars from Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sociology, Education and Politics Departments united to create this curriculum. New courses and labs were designed and pre‐existing courses were “radically retrofitted” and more tightly integrated through co‐instruction and content. The co‐authors discuss the background and collaborative processes that led to the emergence of this curriculum and describe the pedagogy and results associated with the student projects.

Interdisciplinary student teams developed innovative projects with both campus and community‐based partners. However, the incentives for an integrated sustainability curriculum faced persistent obstacles including the balkanization of academic knowledge, university organizational structure, and the need for additional human and financial investments. The team is currently designing the second phase of this integration and expanding a social learning network through collaborations with five universities in the Americas and Europe.

This paper shows the development process, design and content of an interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum that integrates engineering with the social and ecological sciences while enlivening campus‐community relationships through student projects. Several replicable practices include the contents and integration of topical classes, the strategies to overcome the obstacles for developing interdisciplinary student teams engaged in problem‐based learning and approaches to negotiate institutional hurdles.

The purpose of this paper is to contend that one way to advance the social marketing discipline is by introducing students to social marketing concepts during the early stages of their marketing education. Thus, it describes an interdisciplinary group Social Marketing Plan (SMP) project that was included as a class project in an introductory marketing course. An analysis of the SMP's impact on student learning is presented.

Foundations of Marketing (Foundations) students at a US university completed an SMP project as a course requirement. Project impact was assessed with post‐project measures of students' ability to apply social marketing concepts in a SMP. Project impact was also assessed with post‐project measures of attitudes toward working on interdisciplinary teams and pre‐ and post‐project comparisons of declarative marketing knowledge, environmental awareness, environmental attitudes, and environmental intentions. A post hoc comparison of the commercial marketing knowledge of a control group and Foundations students was also conducted.

End of semester surveys showed that Foundations students understood and were able to apply social marketing concepts, enjoyed the SMP project, appreciated the value of working in interdisciplinary teams, and believed that future SMP projects should include students from other disciplines. Foundations students also reported significant increases in environmental awareness, attitudes, and intentions, and commercial marketing knowledge. Contrasts with a control group revealed that adding social marketing concepts to an introductory marketing course did not impede Foundations students' learning of commercial marketing concepts.

The paper provides evidence that incorporating a social marketing project into an introductory marketing course is an effective method for introducing students to social marketing concepts, therefore advancing the social marketing discipline. Changes in student environmental attitudes and intentions to act to preserve the environment also suggest that a SMP project can be an effective method of doing social marketing.

Today’s higher education paradigm places emphasis on the broader context of globalization, economics, the environment, and society. Divergent from traditional silo-based, discipline-specific models, this broad and complex challenge necessitates the continued investigation of innovative interdisciplinary approaches for higher education. The 360 Degree Model for Educating Socially Responsible Global Citizens developed by the authors (360 Global Ed model) addresses these current needs through a structured approach for developing students as global citizens through purposeful engagement (Breitkreuz & Songer, 2015; Songer & Breitkreuz, 2014).

The 360 Global Ed model includes a theoretical framework, educational environment, academic coursework, and evidence-based outcomes. At the core of the model is an international service learning (ISL) experience. The model’s ISL experience provides a collaborative, interdisciplinary classroom environment combined with an authentic international field experience (Songer & Breitkreuz, 2014).

This chapter presents a case study of building TU/e innovation Space, a unique learning hub for developing, sustaining, and disseminating research-informed challenge-based learning (CBL) practices at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). This learning hub for education innovation fosters the collaboration between students, industry, research, and societal organizations and drives the continued development of the CBL approach at TU/e. The chapter presents insights from the development of CBL at TU/e innovation Space, drawn from postcourse evaluation surveys of two flagship courses, the innovation Space Bachelor End Project (ISBEP; third year bachelor level) and the innovation Space Project (ISP; master's course level). Analysis of the data shows that students generally rated the courses highly. As the main motivation to choose these courses, students cited the desire to do something else than their own major, aiming for interdisciplinarity and breadth of knowledge, and wanting to do something real-life or business-like. Students also liked the ability to choose their own project, but in some cases, struggled with the structure of the assessment. We also briefly describe academics' perspective on running CBL courses at the hub and present additional activities related to the full learning ecosystem of the hub. Finally, we describe some of the future directions in terms of CBL research and educational developments at the hub.