Interdisciplinary research teams are crucial for tackling complex societal issues but often struggle with goal alignment, leadership, and communication. This reflective inquiry article explores expanding the role of Research Administration (RA) and Research Development (RD) professionals as team coaches to address these challenges and improve team…

Higher education institutions recognize that today's problems are too complex to be conceptualized by a single discipline and are becoming increasingly committed to interdisciplinary work, as evidenced by the increasing number of interdisciplinary departments, internal funding opportunities, and research centers. Despite the widespread popularity…

Background: Constructing shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems is one of the most challenging aspects of interdisciplinary teamwork. How this process unfolds is under-researched, making it esoteric and difficult to scaffold. This paper aims to provide an articulated and nuanced account of what is involved in student teams'…

Purpose: This paper aims to reveal learning potential in crossing disciplinary boundaries in facilitated workshops by exploring the research goal definition process of interdisciplinary research teams. It uses multilevel boundary crossing as a theoretical framework to illustrate the multilevel nature of team learning mechanisms in…

Purpose: This article considers how the evaluation of research teams can better account for the challenges of transdisciplinarity, including their larger team size and more diverse and permeable membership, as well as the tensions between institutional pressures on individuals to publish and team goals. Design/methodology/approach: An evaluation…

Higher engineering education programmes increasingly include courses characterised by real-world problems and student collaboration in multidisciplinary teams. Research findings demonstrate that students remain limited in perceiving and meaningfully bridging disciplinary differences in these course contexts. Drawing on the literature on boundaries…

Creative virtual teamwork (CVT) has become relevant for many domains of our daily lives: during the pandemic, school classes, business collaborations, and even private personal interactions took place online. However, virtual teamwork is still a challenge for creative collaboration. Research on CVT started decades ago, yet an overview of the field…

Two trends have increased the importance of cross-boundary teaming in schools. School educators face more interdisciplinary tasks and problems. They are also further required to include diverse voices derived from students' greater demographic diversity toward creating culturally inclusive school education. In light of this, cross-boundary…

While the role of teams in leading transformations within academia is increasingly recognized, few studies have analyzed how teams form. Understanding the processes of interdisciplinary team formation within higher education will allow leaders to intentionally bring together individuals and form teams with higher likelihoods of success. In this…

The field of higher education (HE) is characterized by diversity stemming from multiple sources. Diversity results in boundaries that carry the potential to promote personal and professional development for HE students. Boundaries also offer the possibility of learning generic skills and planning and carrying out challenging tasks that require…

This review systematically synthesizes empirical evidence on learning outcomes of interdisciplinary learning. A meta-synthesis approach was used to synthesize data in two rounds, based on strict (n = 38) versus more lenient (n = 60) operationalizations of interdisciplinary learning. The results revealed a variety of interdisciplinary learning…

This article reports on a study that followed up on an initial interdisciplinary project and focused specifically on the experiences of researchers involved in practice-based interdisciplinary research. We share an approach to research evaluation that focuses on the experiences of those conducting the research rather than the outputs. The study…

Problem- and project-based learning (PBL) is often highlighted as a valuable approach for addressing the need for interdisciplinarity in engineering education. However, studies indicate that applied projects in engineering education tend to be limited to a single discipline. This article presents a new project typology which can be applied in…

Contribution: Team-based learning (TBL) with a transdisciplinary (TD) approach is applied in one introductory programming course with different cohorts. The approach reduces the failure rate in the course. In addition, the approach helped students understand the application of programming to different engineering professional areas. Background:…

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) proposes to enhance active learning and student protagonism in order to improve academic performance. In this sense, different methodologies are emerging to create scenarios for self-regulation of their learning. In this study the cooperative, collaborative and interdisciplinary learning methodologies were…