The URV promotes interdisciplinary teaching through projects that bring students into contact with other fields of knowledge to enrich and prepare them better for the world of work

A drone hovers over a large group of students who are listening to the instructions of two teachers. The aerial image captured by the drone shows how the students are distributed in groups in a large outdoor space, which is divided up into different areas. It is a practical class being held on the premises of the School of Architecture, but it is not aimed only at architecture students, but also includes students from the Double Degree in Primary and Infant Education, thus fostering the exchange of ideas and knowledge between the two disciplines. The class is actually the workshop “Learning Spaces”, which aims to design educational spaces through the interaction of students from both knowledge areas.

In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, one of the most important issues that the URV is currently addressing is how to increase interdisciplinarity at all levels, particularly in teaching, where contact and collaboration between different students from different degree courses multiplies their collective knowledge and skills. This makes them much better prepared to face a working world in which relations between professionals from different fields are the norm rather than the exception, a state of affairs that has not always been reflected in traditional education.

The URV’s efforts to meet this challenge have manifested themselves in its Teaching Strategy Plan, which recognises the University’s need to act with dynamism in the face of changes and new demands from society and to face them by generating collaborative experiences throughout the community, especially in terms of interdisciplinarity.

One of the URV’s goals, in a complex and interconnected world, is to increase interdisciplinarity at all levels

In the “Learning Spaces” project, “the students on the Double Degree in Infant and Primary Education make a proposal of what they think the centre should be like and the architecture students help them to design the premises and its content according to the educational aims and the technical possibilities”, explains Mercè Gisbert, lecturer in the Department of Pedagogy. This collaboration has actually been going on for some years now, but not enough emphasis was placed on the architecture element until recently: “Now we have found the formula, with direct contact and close collaboration between the students of both areas”, specifically, students from the second year of the Double Degree in Primary and Infant Education, and in the first and third years (depending on the specific practice) of the Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture. They make models with their own materials (clay, cardboard, etc.) and make a digital representation using artificial intelligence.

“Dialogue and integration and the joint construction of knowledge are essential in this educational process”, points out Mariona Genís, professor of Architecture, who believes that her students really benefit from practicing in a real situation featuring “an interlocutor who can give them feedback and tell them what they need to take into account in the design process”.

Students have to step out of their comfort zone and explain themselves in accessible language in an unfamiliar or unusual setting

Getting students out of their comfort zone and making them explain themselves in accessible language in an unfamiliar or unusual setting gives them a real opportunity to practice what they will encounter in the world of work. As both the lecturers and the students corroborate, this is one of the real advantages of interdisciplinary teaching. Felip Riera, an Architecture student, explained that they soon realised that the Education students did not follow them in some of their explanations, and that they had to make an effort to simplify their message and be less technical. “And that’s good,” added Riera, “because as architects it’s important to give a professional and expert image, but it’s even more important that the client understands you and that you maintain good communication”.

According to another architecture student, Cristina Karman, it is especially enriching to bring together two different mentalities: “We think about the building and the space, and they think about how the activity develops and the needs of children”. Mariona Griñó and Martina Fons, students of the double degree in Education, stress that the practical classes with the architecture students complement the theory and, in the specific case of this workshop, help them understand the importance of the spatial distribution to improve learning. “They have to learn to listen to each other, to understand each other and to work together without having had any previous contact, and this is extremely enriching from the point of view of knowledge construction”, summarised Mercè Gisbert.

Historians in the laboratory

Another example of a project that brings students into contact with a different area of knowledge is the workshop entitled “The chemistry of ink: an interdisciplinary project for making historical ink”, which is part of one of the initiatives subsidised by the Good Practices in Teaching Innovation programme of the URV’s Institute of Education Sciences. The programme supports educational proposals that encourage creativity and innovation in the classroom, one of the Institute’s mainstays. “The integration of different disciplines enriches learning and prepares students for the professional challenges of the future,” says Patricia Terrado, who teaches the workshop. She is professor of History and will be teaching her second-year students in the subject of Archaeology at the School of Chemical Engineering.

In the laboratory, with the collaboration of a technician from URV Divulga and equipped with lab coats and protective goggles, the history students used historical recipes found in various archives to produce the ink with which manuscripts were written in the past. “First they transcribed the recipes and converted the measurements to modern units and then they followed the scientific procedure to obtain the ink. This project allowed them to combine historical and scientific knowledge in a practical context, which is essential for them and their training”, explains Terrado.

One of the students who took part was Arnau Casadó. In addition to discovering facilities at the URV that he did not know about and which he thought were “very comprehensive”, Casadó was particularly enriched by coming into contact with a practical discipline that is far removed from his own: “For historians, it is as important to take into account, for example, the political perspective as it is the chemical side, since all areas of knowledge provide context and a view of the circumstances of each period.” His fellow student Abel Vico also enjoyed the practical dimension of the project, which enabled him to better understand the theoretical explanations, and he was surprised by “the points of connection between two apparently opposing fields”. For Maria Vidalina Ramos, another student, the internship stressed the importance to her of the link between history and research and showed her how comfortable she could feel in a laboratory. “We feel like real scientists”, she says.

Working for the application

Gender Challenges in Organisations is an interdisciplinary subject on the Bachelor’s Degree in Labour Relations and Human Resources that is coordinated between three different departments, namely Public Law, Economics and Business Management. Students are presented with a social need or demand that can be approached from different perspectives (economic, sociological, commercial, administrative, administrative, psychological, etc.). They then analyse the problem and propose a legally applicable response or solution. “To do this, they have to use the tools and techniques of all the areas applicable to the subject, which in this case is gender equality, just as they would do in real life,” explains Catalina Jordi, one of the teachers.

This process is known as challenge-based learning, a teaching methodology in which students are given a generic topic and have to collaborate in order to identify a social demand, analyse it and come up with a viable solution that could benefit specific groups or society in general. Catalina Jordi explains that during the workshop, the students are divided into small groups to encourage collaborative work, interaction and reflection. “In short, the aim is to promote interdisciplinarity in teaching, to combine research work with a creative process connected to real situations that are neither simple nor easy to fit into specific areas, and to foster comprehensive and global training,” concludes Jordi.

This subject is one of the initiatives endorsed by the Interdisciplinarity in Teaching Network, a working group promoted by the Institute of Education Sciences as part of the URV’s Strategic Teaching Plan. The network aims to promote interdisciplinarity at different educational levels and in different contexts such as bachelor’s and master’s degree theses; to promote the exchange of experiences and projects; to facilitate methodological training; to provide tools and resources to improve the quality of teaching and learning; and to develop teaching materials and resources that can be shared by different areas.

In this regard, the network is preparing a guide with practical recommendations for teaching staff and is encouraging different professors and students to work together on interdisciplinary bachelor’s theses. This approach allows students from different disciplines to collaborate in solving real problems, “as usually happens outside the academic world,” says María Dolores Jiménez, co-coordinator of the Network with Judith Balanyà. Thus, two or more students from different degrees have to work together on a bachelor’s thesis that is intended to meet a social challenge, thus combining knowledge from each discipline for a comprehensive result. This is the case of the bachelor’s thesis subject entitled “Promotion of sleep hygiene in infants: an educational project for families, teachers and students”, which brings together four students, two from Nursing and two from Education, and a teacher from each area, Rosa Raventós and Judith Balanyà respectively. The experience from this bachelor’s thesis subject will contribute significantly to the content of the methodological guide that is being prepared.

Maria Dolores Jiménez explains that the challenge is to “convince future professionals, who are today’s students, of the need to face society’s major challenges from different points of view”. Hence the importance of training them to combine different disciplines when developing solutions. “We want there to be more collaborative contacts between teaching staff from different fields, but it is also necessary for this collaboration to be done well and to meet minimum quality standards,” says Judith Balanyà. According to her, this way of teaching and learning “makes the experience more meaningful for students and, moreover, reflects the reality of the workplace, in which work teams are made up of people with different professional profiles”. In short, as Toni Pérez Portabella, Director of the Institute of Educational Sciences, points out, “collective work focused on solving educational challenges creates community and bears good fruit”.