Show Me Yours: Developing A Faculty-Wide Interdisciplinary Initiative In Built Environment Higher Education

Abstract

In the competitive market of higher education, government funding agencies consider universities accountable for ensuring a better alignment between educational processes, graduate capabilities and real world employability. Workforce leaders have developed new expectations about the capabilities of graduating students, expecting to employ graduates who have more sophisticated understandings of the complexity involved in undertaking projects and working in the field. Graduates are expected to demonstrate well developed inter-professional literacy, be able to successfully navigate across professions in workplaces, and to effectively contribute to large projects involving a diverse range of roles and responsibilities. There is growing awareness within the sector that universities should work in partnership with students to tackle local and global challenges and that often these challenges cannot be addressed adequately by a single discipline. Stone, Bollard and Harbor (2009) note that as society has become more complex, research questions have changed, and the “structures of earlier times no longer accommodate the research needed and the teaching that emanates from this research” (p.322). Increasingly, scholars are looking across traditional disciplinary boundaries in new ways to address socio-cultural concerns. The extent of scholarship into the rise and prominence of interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education, along with the external drivers that support this paradigm in education and practice, shifts discussion within faculties from the “benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to pragmatic questions of how to develop and sustain interdisciplinary programs” (Stone et at. 2009, p.323). This paper describes a framework for the introduction of common learning experiences (CLEs) in the Built Environment Faculty (BE) at the University of New South Wales to more adequately prepare students for future professional settings. The paper discusses the initiative in the context of recent research on interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the built environment and higher education more broadly, and discusses the conditions that are likely to support and sustain the initiative into the future.