Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

Our programme, the Media, Art, Design and Architecture (MKDA) BA in VU’s Faculty of Humanities, offers an ideal setting for exploring the challenges and potentials of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in higher education. This is urgent, as recent political developments in the Netherlands and beyond have led to widescale interventions in academia, such as budget cuts and mergers at various levels. These dynamics require increased reflection on both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in higher education. As a case study, this paper explores the challenges in thesis supervision within MKDA’s Design track. The MKDA Design team consistently faces a high student-to-supervisor ratio, necessitating ad-hoc collaborations with colleagues from other disciplines and institutions. As a supervisory team spanning Design Cultures and Heritage Studies, often collaborating with other Art and Culture fields, we have experienced firsthand the challenges these collaborations present. These include tacit misunderstandings of BA thesis components due to different disciplinary traditions; contradictions in the process due to conflicting institutional requirements; and differing expectations regarding standards. These issues contribute to an inefficient and frustrating thesis trajectory and need to be addressed. Our project addresses these challenges and uncovers creative and unexpected benefits in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thesis supervision. The pilot aimed to enhance the quality of MKDA’s Design track thesis supervision specifically. However, as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching collaborations are becoming a long-term reality due to budget cuts and mergers, our findings are relevant for their potential to enhance innovation and creativity across Art and Culture higher education.