Abstract
This paper explores how Engineering students and Work and Welfare students reflect upon their own engagement in a one-week cross-disciplinary project. To develop a better understanding of what unfolds during these activities we collected data through anonymous surveys two consecutive years. Data from these 141 respondents were analysed using a learning history approach and are presented as narratives. Results show major disruptions and conflicts driving the student projects, exposing inviting confrontations, social identity threats, managing diversity, and friction of ideas. Whereas this in many cases led to new and better project solutions, these real-world experiences raise awareness of the need for tools and methods for training students. The aim of the paper is to learn from students’ experiences through narrative distance, and fill a gap in the literature between problem-based learning (PBL) and the learning history method. Discussing different experiences of cross-disciplinary teamwork through the explanations of these theories, we also lay out potential questions for future research on the topic.
Highlights
Each year students at Østfold University College in Norway participate in a social innovation project
The friction created in the meeting of ideas from different scholarly positions, first-year team-leaders who is early in their discipline specific education and leaders of third-year students, all contributes to change, and to confrontations
Starting with the term “conflict”, this can be explained both by what they have learned in previous courses, as they do when they categorize each other stereotypically [20,21], and individual differences will affect the outcome of a situation as being a positive, productive conflict or a negative, destructive conflict
Summary
Each year students at Østfold University College in Norway participate in a social innovation project. The students come from the programmes Innovation and Project Management at Faculty of Engineering (“IPL” students), and Work and Welfare at Faculty of Health and Welfare (“AVF” students) This learning project is open, where interdisciplinary teams decide target groups, aims, ideation and prioritization of ideas, develop a solution, and present their concept in a competition with minimal tutoring from staff. The aim is problem-based learning (PBL) in cross-disciplinary teams, unfolding narratives according to different parties’ perspectives. This cooperative perspective on PBL, based on Vygotsky’s social development theory [1], individuals depend on their group to achieve common goals, and learning is achieved through collaboration, interaction, and shared understanding [2]. The narrative distance, emotional or cognitive, allows the readers to decide how they will make sense of the content of the narrative [7]
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