Inge Leurs

Embedding Transdisciplinary Education in Higher Educational Institutions

Kennis, Transformatie & Samenleving (KiTeS), Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social sciences, University of Twente

Supervisors: Prof. Klaasjan Visscher, Prof. Masha van der Voort, Dr. Andreas Weber

Background

I have a Bachelor’s Degree in “Cultuurwetenschappen” from Maastricht University. A pre-Master in History from the Radboud University and a Master’s Degree in “Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology” (CAST) from Maastricht University. My Master’s Thesis focused on integrating Citizen Science and Citizen Science as knowledge production. I also worked as a researcher at the Human Technology Center (HumTec) at the RWTH Aachen. Here I focused on transdisciplinarity for sustainable development and the institutionalization of transdisciplinarity in higher educational institutions.

Content

Transdisciplinarity is about transcending academic disciplines. It allows for the inclusion of non-academic stakeholders in scientific research and education. It connects science to society and focuses on real-world problems. However, despite increasing calls for transdisciplinary research and education, it is still difficult to include transdisciplinary educational courses in study programs at universities.

In my PhD project, I research barriers and facilitators for transdisciplinary education at the University of Twente by analyzing the organizational side of the Master-Insert “Shaping Responsible Futures”. This also includes an analysis of the historical and geographical context as one of the factors that play an important role in shaping transdisciplinarity at (technical) universities. After having developed a better understanding of the Master-Insert program at the University of Twente, I would like to compare this project to similar transdisciplinary educational initiatives at other universities in Europe. The goals of this comparison are twofold: on the one hand, it allows me to see whether other initiatives face similar organizational challenges. On the other hand, the comparison allows me to learn from solutions developed at other institutions.

Taken together, the outcome of my research will give lecturers, students, societal partners, and other co-learners concrete insights with respect to the organizational embedding of transdisciplinary education across institutional contexts and organizations.

It is important to see whether others face similar challenges and which solutions they have developed to tackle organizational barriers. In the end, my research project aims to evaluate potential synergies between different transdisciplinary programs at different universities.

Publications

LEURS, I., ROSTEK, K., WIECK, K., BACKHAUS, J. & OROZCO-MESSANA, J. Transdisciplinary Research for Sustainable Development: Diverse and Best-Practice at European Technical Universities. Foundations of Management, 2024, Sciendo, vol. 16 no. 1, pp. 41-58. https://doi.org/10.2478/fman-2024-0003