Building Foundations for Interdisciplinary Education

Abstract

This commentary, building on the work presented in Iris van der Tuin's (2025) edited volume, reflects on how the conceptual and empirical foundations for interdisciplinary education have been constructed over decades and considers the current epistemological maturity of the field. Recognising the field's current pluralistic ethos and openness to multiple perspectives, the commentary advocates for a more integrative and nuanced epistemological stance that facilitates systemic and context-sensitive decision-making in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. To support this transition, the commentary suggests exploring the potential of integrative and ecologically inspired research methods.

Lyall, Meagher, and Bandola (2015), in their review of interdisciplinary higher education, highlighted the stubborn issue in theorising interdisciplinary pedagogies. They wrote:

What is largely missing from this literature, and from the empirical data we have collected, is a debate about, or evidence for, the underlying ‘curriculum ideologies’ (Toohey 1999, 45) – the principles, ideas, beliefs and epistemologies that might underpin interdisciplinary learning and teaching. (p. 68)

Despite decades of effort by scholars across various disciplines to build conceptual foundations for interdisciplinary teaching and learning, Lyall, Meagher, and Bandola (2015) argued that ‘theory has not yet caught up with practice’ (p. 68). They attributed the issue to the flimsy scholarship in the field, but an equally significant obstacle has been the lack of high-quality integrative work that synthesises dispersed knowledge.

Although interdisciplinary studies have become an established curriculum field in higher education over the past half-century (Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger 2025), educational research in this area has received relatively little focused attention. Scholars studying interdisciplinary teaching and learning have lacked dedicated journals and platforms for sharing their research. As a result, publishing within recognised yet diverse scholarly outlets has been the main way of advancing the field's conceptual and empirical foundations. However, these ‘epistemic rent-seeking’ practices – a term coined by Steve Fuller (2016) to describe scholars’ strategic efforts to fit into existing academic silos – have resulted in an immense fragmentation of the field's knowledge base. Efforts to bring together available yet scattered theoretical knowledge, design expertise, and empirical evidence have been notably lacking.

Van der Tuin's (2025) edited book does precisely this long-overdue integrative work. By mapping key works in interdisciplinary higher education, the book offers a vade mecum for newcomers who often struggle to navigate and make sense of the huge volume of texts spread across multiple research communities, journals, and books. It also helps seasoned scholars see and reflect on how dispersed pieces of academic literature interconnect.

When considering the future of the field, two overarching questions emerge. Firstly, what do the ideas presented in this volume reveal about the field's epistemological maturity? Secondly, how can scholars now build on this foundation and sustain its development? I will begin with the first question.

Assessing the epistemological maturity of the field is no simple task, but insights from the literature on epistemic cognition – a field that studies how individuals understand the nature of knowledge and knowing (Greene et al. 2016; Hofer and Pintrich 2002) – offer some helpful guidance. Research in this field, while varying wildly, suggests several recognisable stages of epistemological development. The first stage is dualism, characterised by the belief that there can be only one right way of thinking and only one correct answer, with all other views and answers deemed necessarily wrong. The second stage is multiplicity, marked by an acceptance that multiple ways of knowing and answers could coexist, with all views being valid and largely a matter of personal preference. The third stage is contextual judgement, representing a recognition that knowing and knowledge are contextual, co-constructed, and evolving, requiring synthesis and evaluation based on relevant ways of reasoning, evidence, and situational details. This stage is a precursor to epistemic commitment, the willingness to commit to a situated action based on one's knowledge and beliefs.

Looking from this perspective, the contributions in van der Tuin's volume suggest that the field of interdisciplinary higher education has moved well beyond the dualism. A multiplicity of knowledge forms and epistemologies is not only acknowledged but also valued. This is particularly visible in Boyer's (1990) call to broaden academic scholarship beyond discovery to include application, integration, and teaching. It is also reflected in Larsson's (2020) critical interrogation of the distinction between educational research and the scholarship of teaching and learning, which challenges the empirical basis of this binary. In line with this, in their concluding synthesis, Annemarie Horn and Frank Hakemulder (2025) similarly advocate for a ‘plural scholarship of interdisciplinarity’ (p. 334), inviting us to move ‘beyond binaries to complementarity’ (p. 334). These developments signal a growing epistemological readiness to embrace more integrative and nuanced approaches.

This brings us to the second question: How can scholars now build on this foundation and sustain its development? In particular, what could help them build an interconnected knowledge base for making nuanced, context-specific judgements that inform actions about interdisciplinary teaching and learning? A brief reflection on the state-of-the-art in the field, represented in van der Tuin's (2025) volume and beyond, suggests at least two possible directions. One focuses on zooming out, leveraging diverse integration methods to connect and resituate existing knowledge. The other concentrates on zooming in – building a contextualised and reconfigurable knowledge base from the ground up.

First, the field of integrationist interdisciplinarity has accumulated an extensive repertoire of integrative research methods (some of them are summarised in Chapter 3), such as systems thinking, futures thinking, design thinking, and design fiction. Although these methods have rarely been harnessed to build the field's own conceptual infrastructure, they open up possibilities for reimagining how available knowledge could be integrated and mobilised. For example, what would the field look like if one used systems thinking to map key ideas from diverse domains that contribute to our understanding of interdisciplinary education? How would interdisciplinary courses look if one embraced futuring techniques to elicit insights for designing interdisciplinary curricula and translating those insights into pedagogical practice? Such explorations could help see interdisciplinary education from more integrative vantage points.

Second, the field of interdisciplinary education continues to rely heavily on practical case studies, which, while rich in detail, often lack transferable theoretical insights. As van der Tuin's volume highlights, studies that successfully bridge this gap are invaluable but rare. Some scholars suggest that educational research could benefit from methodological ‘know-how’ accumulated in the domain of ecology – a field adept at studying complex, idiosyncratic cases while generating broadly applicable mid-range theoretical knowledge (Ellis and Goodyear 2019; Hammer et al. 2018; Markauskaite et al. 2024). This perspective enables a nuanced understanding of interdisciplinary learning, treating each case as unique in its complexity while aiming to identify broader explanatory patterns and mechanisms that can inform effective practice across similar contexts.

In this light, van der Tuin's (2025) edited volume, by offering a collection of integrative methods and some field-shaping mid-range theoretical accounts, provides a foundation for future work. It serves as an invitation for scholars in interdisciplinary education to move beyond fragmentation and build a more coherent, theoretically informed, and contextually grounded field.