Expertise as Developed through an Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Description

Expertise as developed through an interdisciplinary curriculum – Coco Kanters and Rianne van Lambalgen
In this presentation we will focus on interdisciplinary expertise: how it develops throughout an interdisciplinary bachelor program and how it is mobilized by students after graduation. At Liberal Arts and Sciences, Utrecht University (LAS), we educate our students to become disciplined interdisciplinarians: they gain specialized expertise from a disciplinary specialization of their choice, they gain generalist expertise by taking general education courses in different disciplines and they gain interdisciplinary expertise through the interdisciplinary core courses we offer. In addition, our students learn to reflect throughout our curriculum on different disciplinary perspectives, on interdisciplinarity and on their own learning trajectory through four reflective writing assignments, one of them at the end of their bachelor program. In this presentation, we discuss how our students articulate their interdisciplinary skills and expertise in their reflective writing assignments, but also how they mobilize their expertise after graduation. Here we see that there are different types of disciplined interdisciplinarians, depending on the choices they have made throughout and after their LAS-bachelor program. We will encourage the audience to participate in a discussion on the meaning of expertise in an interdisciplinary context, especially where expertise is not reflected in something we possess, but in something we do, or the role we take on (Carr, 2010; Hoffman et.al., 2022). Finally, we will talk about ways to support students to construct a narrative about their own expertise throughout their interdisciplinary program with respect to their future career.


Carr, E.S., 2010. Enactments of expertise. Annual review of anthropology, 39, pp.17-32.
Hoffmann, S., Deutsch, L., Klein, J. T., & O’Rourke, M. (2022). Integrate the integrators! A call for establishing academic careers for integration experts. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9(1), 1-10.

Period	21 Mar 2024
Event title	Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching
Event type	Conference
Location	Manchester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International