From rhetoric to real world: fostering higher order thinking through transdisciplinary collaboration

Abstract

Ill-structured problems abound that require sophisticated problem-solving skills, knowledge across multiple domains and the abilities to think critically and communicate effectively. Despite the abundance of rhetoric supporting the need to build these skills in our students, the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge is still the primary focus of most disciplines. Students who have not mastered these skills and possess only domain-specific knowledge will be underprepared to successfully contribute to the solutions to these problems. The IDEA Studio at Virginia Tech implemented a transdisciplinary collaborative learning environment in an effort to bring these skills out of the literature and into the real-world classroom. This paper describes our strategies, the dominant themes that drove our course structure, the challenges we faced and the lessons learned.