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Curriculum Design and Development to Enhance Transdisciplinary Skills Development

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This chapter reflects upon the development of an undergraduate design course in a major Australian University. The course accommodated up to 600 students per year, in the disciplines of architecture, fashion, industrial design, interior design, interactive design, and landscape architecture. This curriculum was developed with several features to facilitate and encourage transdisciplinary learning. These included several units shared by multiple disciplines, large units focused on team collaboration, and groups of elective units to facilitate cognate and non-cognate secondary fields of study chosen at the student's discretion. This chapter discusses the contextual motivations for the curriculum decisions behind this course development, the attempts at facilitating transdisciplinarity within an undergraduate design degree, and reflections on fourteen years of implementation. The successes and failures of these attempts at curriculum divergence are presented along with observed barriers to transdisciplinary learning.

Keywords: Curriculum ; Design ; Education ; Student-led ; Transdisciplinary ; University

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Curriculum Design and Development to Enhance Transdisciplinary Skills Development
Intellect , 19 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781789388671_2
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References

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  17. Florida Richard. ( 2002), The Rise of the Creative Class, New York:: Basic Books;.
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  18. Gray, Matthew,, Brown, Richard,, Miller, Evonne,, Buys, Laurie,, and Dawes, Les. ( 2011), ‘ Teaching sustainability: Vehicle or endpoint?. ’, in Proceedings of the STEM in Education Conference: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in Education Conference, Brisbane:, pp. 1–11.40
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  20. Hall, Douglas T.. ( 1976), Careers in Organizations, Pacific Palisades:: Goodyear Publishing;.
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  25. Max-Neef, Manfred A.. ( 2005;), ‘ Foundations of transdisciplinarity. ’, Ecological Economics, 53:1, pp. 5–16.
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  31. Nicolescu, Basarab. ( 2012;), ‘ The need for transdisciplinarity in higher education in a globalized world. ’, Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science, 3, pp. 11–18.
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