CitySection

Abstract

Planning education has engaged little with the question of how to educate our students regarding interdisciplinary inquiry. This article proposes pedagogy to educate planners and environmental designers to engage multidisciplinary theory and methods to perform interdisciplinary environmental research, synthesis, and interpretation. Experiential and situated learning theories guide a course design where students first perform a series of disciplinary inquiries, followed by collaborative interdisciplinary inquiries, along an urban research transect. Assessment of this pedagogy finds that (1) interdisciplinary understanding can successfully grow from disciplinary understanding and (2) “collaboration in parallel” can lead to successful interdisciplinary collaboration.