FASS3999 Chap.1 Experiential Learning and Interdisciplinarity
Experiential Learning and Interdisciplinarity
Week 1 sets up how the unit works rather than what it covers. The teaching team provides process and frameworks, and students steer content through a semester-length group project with external partners. The model behind this is experiential learning: understanding develops as you move from a concrete experience, through reflection and conceptual work, to trying something new and seeing what happens.
The chapter also distinguishes interdisciplinarity from neighbouring ideas. Multidisciplinary work places perspectives side by side, crossdisciplinary work borrows a concept from another field, and transdisciplinary work produces knowledge together with people outside the university. The unit aims at integration, meaning an outcome a single major could not reach.
The first learning outcome asks you to articulate what your own major contributes, and the chapter shows how to describe knowledge, skills and habits of attention precisely enough for teammates to use them.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why the unit separates the process of learning from its content
- 02
The experiential cycle of experience, reflection, conceptualisation and experiment
- 03
How partner panels, tutorials and assessments map onto the cycle
- 04
Wicked problems that no discipline, sector or profession owns
- 05
Multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work
- 06
Describing a major as knowledge, skills and ways of seeing
- 07
Learning outcomes on collaboration, feedback and critical reflection
Worked example · free
Turning a degree label into a team capability
- +1Name a method rather than a field: semi-structured interviewing and thematic coding of responses.
- +1State the output the group will receive: a short report on how participants describe feeling at home, grouped into themes.
- +1Identify the concept the method brings, such as social capital or the difference between interpersonal and structural exclusion.
- +1Show the integration point: the themes give a policy student evidence to test against council programs.
Key terms
- Experiential Learning Cycle
- A model in which concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation follow one another in a repeating loop.
- Wicked Problem
- A complex issue marked by disputed definitions, many interdependent causes, unstable conditions and no single correct solution.
- Multidisciplinarity
- An approach in which several disciplines contribute to a topic in sequence without any attempt to synthesise their findings.
- Crossdisciplinarity
- The borrowing of a concept, method or theory from one discipline by another, while the lending field remains a passive source.
- Transdisciplinarity
- Knowledge production carried out with stakeholders outside academia, judged by social robustness as well as scholarly reliability.
Experiential Learning and Interdisciplinarity FAQ
What does experiential learning mean in practice for this unit?
Most learning comes from doing a group project with partner organisations and then examining that experience. Tutorials and the reflective assessments ask what happened, why it happened and what you changed as a result.
How is interdisciplinary work different from having several majors in a group?
Mixed majors are a starting condition. Work becomes interdisciplinary when the group integrates methods and findings around a shared question and reaches a conclusion none of its members could have produced alone.
What should I say when asked what my major contributes?
Name a method, the output it produces and the concept it brings. A specific statement such as tracing policy history through archives tells teammates what task to give you, while a field name alone does not.
Why does the unit call its topics wicked problems?
Housing, migration, gender equality and incarceration have contested definitions, interdependent causes and no single fix. That complexity is why no single discipline or profession can claim ownership of them.
Who decides what my group studies?
Your group does, within the case study it is allocated. The teaching team supplies frameworks, tutorials and feedback, but the focus, research and final output are driven by your interests, skills and the evidence you gather.
Assessment move
Start a reflection log in the first week and keep it to three short lines per entry: the event, its meaning and the change it led to. Date every entry. By the time the Critical Reflection is due you will have a record of several turns of the learning cycle instead of a vague memory of the semester.
Next, write a capability statement for your major using a verb and an output, then ask a classmate from another discipline whether they could assign you a task from it. Revise until they can. Learn the four degrees of disciplinary combination by applying them to real drafts: look at a group document and label each section as side by side, borrowed or integrated.
When you read the optional readings on the value of humanities degrees, extract one argument you could use to explain your degree to a partner or employer. Finally, practise noticing your own habits of attention. During the first partner panel, write down which details you instinctively focus on; those instincts are evidence of what your discipline trained you to see.
