Toward an Interdisciplinary Learning Community of PBL Supervisors and Students

Abstract

This commentary addresses the needs of students and staff seeking to manage the challenges of interdisciplinary problem-based learning, such as identifying and managing competing disciplinary epistemologies, intellectual and emotional uncertainty, expectations regarding staff expertise, and the role of curriculum and instruction in a PBL context. Applying basic knowledge of learning processes to these cognitive and contextual challenges could facilitate interdisciplinary learning and collaboration. Specifically, because disciplinary ways of thinking can both impede and facilitate interdisciplinarity, I argue that PBL staff should purposefully engage the knowledge and beliefs that students bring to PBL programs to help students recognize how their assumptions and arguments affect interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. Additionally, students would benefit from a substantive orientation to diverse inquiry approaches at the beginning of their PBL experience. Building staff capacity to provide these learning experiences requires opportunities for supervisors to learn with and from their peers about one another’s disciplines and to share strategies for interacting with students whose diverse life and schooling experiences shape their expectations of courses, teachers, and learning. Students will benefit from intellectual engagement with PBL supervisors who model interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration, who are attentive to the assumptions (disciplinary and other) that shape their educational interactions, and who effectively scaffold the interdisciplinary learning experience.