National Interdisciplinary Education Conference – Online Meetups, Seminars, and Webinars – Call for Papers for Edition 5: ‘Inter- and Transdisciplinary Project-based Teaching & Learning’
The National Interdisciplinary Education (NIE) Conference is an annual event for educators, researchers, policymakers, and students who are engaged with inter-and transdisciplinarity at Dutch – and international – universities, university colleges, and universities of applied science. We want to stay in touch and grow as a community of inter-and transdisciplinarians, and to exchange best practices and ideas. We therefore organize approx. four online events annually, alongside an annual conference.
Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration is currently being celebrated in academic and professional media as a response to the coronavirus pandemic and other complex and dynamic societal challenges. NIE online events facilitate exchange about our current, multifaceted situation, and its immediate effects on education. How may educational programmes, and scholars of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, productively respond to our situation and its many challenges? Previous editions focused on online teaching, actionability and inclusive education, integrative interdisciplinarity and Arts-Science collaborations.
The theme of the fifth edition is: Inter- and Transdisciplinary Project-based Teaching & Learning. Although it is generally assumed that inter-and transdisciplinary research is challenging for – esp. undergraduate – students, it is increasingly common that they carry out such projects even at the bachelor’s level. Since each such project brings together an unusual mix of disciplinary perspectives, sometimes even including particular stakeholder perspectives, it requires specific ways of teaching and learning. This edition of our NIE event aims to explore how such projects can facilitate interdisciplinary learning, different ways for students to carry out these projects and methods to teach and supervise such interdisciplinary research projects.
We welcome presentations on projects such as (but not limited to):
– Consultancy projects in which students examine issues for an external (real-world) client,
– Community-based learning or research
– Think-thank projects
– inter-and multidisciplinary capstone theses
– Teaching and supervision methods.

We also welcome joint presentations of teachers and students that explore both the nature of the project and experiences/project output of students. We hope to gather insights in and best practices of shaping interdisciplinary project-based education.
The fifth edition will take place on Friday June 11th, 2021, 3-5pm CET. We invite you to submit a short (50-100 words) proposal for a 10-minute presentation. Please send your proposal to r.m.vanlambalgen@uu.nl, teun.dekker@maastrichtuniversity.nl and M.Keestra@uva.nl with ‘Proposal for NIE Presentation’ in the subject line. The deadline for proposals is May 28th, 2020, 9.00am CET. We will inform you if we can fit your presentation in the schedule of the fifth online NIE meetup assign as possible. We will be using Zoom.
Feel free to contact us, should you have questions or specific ideas for future sessions.