OK another post about boundaries as I’m a bit obsessed by how boundary crossing happens in higher education. I think boundary crossing is essential to working with wicked problems. We and our students need to be able to collaborate and learn effectively across the boundaries between academic disciplines and between academia and the wider world. Despite this, much of the literature on interdisciplinary higher education is oddly silent about what this boundary crossing actually involves and how we can facilitate it.

So I was delighted to find this interesting article by Hanna Vuojärvi and her colleagues in Finland, which really gets into the nitty gritty of boundary crossing. Like me, these authors see boundary crossing as working at the fuzzy and shifting meeting points between communities or groups. These groups have different norms, values, practices and ways of using language and other tools. The communities all have their own social, cultural and historical roots, although there will often be some overlap. Boundary crossing can be supported by boundary objects like maps, diagrams or shared challenges, which can exist across communities.

Vuojärvi and her colleagues took the different forms of boundary crossing set out by Akkerman and Bakker and mapped their students learning at boundaries against these. I found that very useful, so here’s my own attempt to use the same approach to give examples of how boundary crossing might occur in learning for wicked problems:

1. Identification involves making sense of particular ways of knowing and doing by defining them in comparison to the ways of knowing and doing you encounter in another community. So, for example, a psychology student researching sustainable actions in the home builds a deeper understanding of how evidence is used in psychological arguments by comparing that with how a history student uses evidence to consider how sustainability in the home has changed over longer periods of time.
2. Coordination involves working out how the ways of doing things in different communities can be brought together effectively and simultaneously. One example of that would be where members of a community group and students of biology developed shared routines for evaluating river biodiversity that worked for both groups. The students interviewed by Vuojarvi and her colleagues emphasised the work that they needed to do to coordinate the timings of their contributions and the digital tools they used.
3. Reflection means building awareness of your own assumptions and habitual approaches and how those are shaped by the communities you are part of. This is followed by using this awareness to try to see perspectives from other communities. Here a medical student might think about how their knowledge of treatments for a disease is shaped by the research that’s available, by how and whether particular research is funded, and by the past habitual practices of other doctors. They might then collaborate with a community of suffferers of that disease realising that community has different knowledge based on lived experience that would bring valuable new possibilities. One of Vuojarvi and her colleagues student interviewees put it like this: “And I got to think about sustainable development from the micro perspective. I’ve dealt with these issues before on a bigger scale, such as from large state-owned companies’ perspectives or through large-scale business affairs…But what it means for an individual or an individual forest owner in their everyday lives, that was new.”
4. Transformation can occur when collaboration across boundaries is not working well and the participants involved need to develop new hybrid approaches, tools or concepts. This might happen, for example, when educators coming from more psychological or sociological perspectives realise they need to develop a shared conceptual model to allow them to collaborate on responding to an educational wicked problem.

Drawing out some of what this might mean for our educational practices, I think that identification should remind us that interdisciplinary work can deepen students’ understanding of their own disciplines by way of contrast. So, we don’t always need to see interdisciplinary opportunities as taking away disciplinary depth. The challenges of coordination remind me that if I want learners to work across boundaries I need to help them find the right coordinating tools and structures to help this to work. This might include processes to establish ground rules or to make space for all perspectives to be heard. Reflection can be drawn out rather than left to chance, that’s why reflection practices like prompted journalling often appear in experiential learning. I think transformation is likely to be the most difficult for student groups so maybe that’s where we have to do our own boundary crossing work with teachers from other subject areas and collaborators from outside academia to develop shared models and approaches we can offer to our students?

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash edited by Vel McCune