Transdisciplinary Professional Learning and Practice

This book presents thinking about and through transdisciplinary and professional development as an educative process. Rather than focusing on the delineation of the approaches offered, an analysis of these contributions points to commonality in those problems that benefit from a transdisciplinary perspective.    The core elements of transdisciplinarity can lead to what might be called metanoia - another way of knowing; a knowing which is ‘beyond that which is creative and transformative.  This poses challenges for the practice of all professionals and is the core issue that this book addresses.  The book brings together the constituting views of transdisciplinarity, or metanoia, and focus them on current professional practice.​ The book is structured in two parts and five sections.  The first part deals with key issues in Transdisciplinarity; its actuality and how it creates knowledge. Section 1 has three original papers which look at Transdisciplinarity from a different lens.  Especially, the Islamic voice has not been heard in this context before. Section 2 considers the knowledge aspect of Transdisciplinarity and how this might be confronted with existing disciplinary knowledge.            Part 2 of the book is directly focused on professionals and their education.  The third section considers research pedagogy and graduate education for the professional.  This is followed in section 4 which offers a discussion on team work. In the final section six chapters present the transdisciplinary practitioner in different contexts.

This book brings international perspectives to bear on thinking about and through transdisciplinarity on professional development and education. The scope of the book ranges from the idea of transdisciplinarity and its applications in professional practice to considerations of pedagogy and transdisciplinary research. A distinctive feature of the book is its consideration of key issues and concepts in the context of the lived experience of transdisciplinarity. The book effectively demonstrates how a transdisciplinary lens on the world can open one’s eyes to multiple realities and thus suggests how we might better understand the complexities and contradictions of our world. Indeed the chapters carry transdisciplinarity into new fields, on fresh grounds and even move into a post-disciplinary phase.

Although transdisciplinarity can be traced back to the early 1970s, it has often been at the margins, and is highly contested as an approach to knowledge creation within academia, and has yet to make a major impact outside the confines of the university. Instead, knowledge creation, recognition and use have been usually been approached from the structured certainty of subject disciplinary knowledge. This book studies higher education and professional identity from the premise that disciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are complementary aspects of a single, more complex whole: routine scholarly work.

Can transdisciplinary be taught and if so, how can it be applied to professional practice? The answers assembled here come from a variety of professional backgrounds. Based on insightful personal experience they offer reflective advice on integrating transdisciplinarity into teaching, research and the workplace. In reconceptualizing the practice of transdisciplinarity the book becomes a bold guide to confront the messiness of real world problems.

Helga Nowotny, Former ERC President