Project introduction and background information
This project is a collaboration between Wageningen Academy, the Teaching and Learning Centre and the chair group Education and Learning Sciences. Funding is provided by the Wageningen Academy innovation fund.
The paradigm of lifelong learning causes a thorough shift in higher education. When professionals (re)enter the traditional higher education classroom, it can change into a Transdisciplinary Mixed Classroom (Brinkhuijsen et al, 2021). We believe that this provides a great opportunity to add value for learning through cross-pollination between students and professionals. During Transdisciplinary Mixed Classroom courses, we found the strength of the concept lying in the integration of academic perspectives (students) with practical knowledge and experience (professionals). Through this kind of transdisciplinary education, students and professionals can learn how to deal with or even solve wicked problems.
Various initiatives for Trandisciplinary Mixed Classrooms exist, for example the Managing Public Space and Food Systems courses of Wageningen University and Research and the Urban Futures Studio (Pelzer et al, 2024) of Utrecht University. But: pedagogy is in a preliminary stage and exisiting research is limited. Also, practical evidence is still in its infancy, while we want to know: what works and why? This leads us to the question: “what design principles underlie Transdisciplinary Mixed Classrooms?”
Objective and expected outcomes
With this innovation project, we want to generate design principles for Transdisciplinary Mixed Classrooms. Based on this, we can improve our existing Transdisciplinary Mixed Classroom courses and create impactful new ones in the future to help dealing with the wicked problems of today’s and tomorrow’s world.
Results and learnings
A systematic literature review was executed, initially starting with 750 search results, leading to the inclusion of three articles. These articles were analyzed to find design principles. Following, in workshops with a variety of educationalists, design principles were generated. Last, data was combined to create a definite set of design principles. These were reviewed by educational researchers.
Literature was scarce so this did not provide a solid theoretical foundation. Although the workshops were engaging, most of the formulated design principles during the workshops were not strongly related to the concept of the Transdisciplinary Mixed Classroom.
We concluded that what we created was a good starting point but not a final set of design principles and that follow-up research is needed. This is done in the form of a PhD research, by Sarah de Vries.
References
Brinkhuijsen, M., de Vries, S., Bartelse, G., Oonk, C., & Gulikers, J. T. M. (2021). De klas van de toekomst is gemengd: Een diverse doelgroep voor het hoger onderwijs. Thema hoger onderwijs, 21(4), 65-69.
Pelzer, P., Hoffman, J., & Hajer, M. A. (2024). The mixed classroom: a pedagogical experiment with students and policymakers. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1-10.
Recommendations
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Practical outcomes
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