Qualifying the debate on interdisciplinarity considering 50 years of educational experimentation at Aalborg University

Abstract

Considering 50 years of pedagogical experimentation with problem- and project-based learning at Aalborg University, this paper investigates how interdisciplinarity as an educational principle has been realized in the university's teaching and learning practices. In order to analyze the initial approaches and experiments, we introduce two theoretical positions on disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in education: the powerful knowledge approach, defending the value of disciplinary knowledge, and the German Didaktik and Bildung approach, requiring students to engage in boundary-crossing explorations of foreign knowledge. These approaches are used to interpret the initial experimentation with project work. At a policy level, the paper identifies an overall trend towards higher discipline-orientation in program offerings and curricular structures. Against this backdrop, the core parts of the paper discuss the pedagogical distinctions underpinning problem-oriented project work as it was practiced in the university's early years in order to identify and formulate more precisely the key qualities of Interdisciplinary Problem-oriented Project pedagogy (IPP) as it is ideally practiced today. By reinterpreting the work of Rousseau, Gadamer, and Negt from a Danish Bildung position (cf. Kemp and Nielsen), we shed new light on the pedagogical and curricular concepts that underpin the practice of IPP and its potential as a learning methodology for developing interdisciplinarity within human and social science degree programs. We argue that well-regulated freedom within the curriculum, termed a wide thematic framework, and student direction are the most powerful ways of inviting both interdisciplinarity and Bildung processes into problem-oriented project work. We find that in order for IPP to succeed, project work must be guided by the principle of exemplarity, supported by a Bildung culture within students, supervisors, and educational organizers, and the supervisor must be able to support the potential space, mimesis, and reversibility between symmetrical and asymmetrical roles along the process of supervision.