By Sabine Hoffmann and Bianca Vienni-Baptista.
2. Bianca Vienni-Baptista (biography)
Given that integration is a key characteristic of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, how can we explicitly teach students how to integrate?
Our focus is on master’s students and teaching them how to constructively combine perspectives from different disciplines as well as from science, policy and practice.
Here we share key guiding principles underpinning integrative teaching and learning, as well as main teaching and learning activities.
Four principles to guide integrative teaching and learning
We propose four guiding principles.
- Recognise integration as a key competence
Recognising integration across different disciplines, and also science, policy and practice, as a key competence in academia and beyond requires operationalising competence-oriented learning objectives. Such learning objectives define the subject- and method-specific, as well as social and personal, competencies required to proactively lead and actively engage in integration.
- Connect theory with practice
This involves using empirical case studies, ie., interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research projects, to illustrate core elements of integration (eg., theories, concepts, conditions, strategies, dimensions, principles, roles, competencies) and to exemplify strategies, methods and tools of integration used in these projects.
- Create opportunities for experiential learning
Designing hands-on exercises as a means for experiential learning enables students to apply and experience different integration strategies, methods and tools. It also allows them to draw on their direct experiences in proactively leading and actively engaging in integration and critically reflecting, thinking and acting on the various challenges and opportunities they experience in their collaborative and integrative efforts.
- Build in critical reflection
Allowing time and space for critical reflection on integration, including by teachers, as well as leaders and team members of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research projects, involves sharing struggles and serving as role models for critical reflection.
Four main teaching and learning activities
The figure below encapsulates the main teaching and learning activities and how they relate to the cornerstones of studying, leading, teaching and learning integration. The basic assumption is straightforward: students learn integration best when theory and practice continuously inform one another.
We propose four main teaching and learning activities, as well as describing how they are combined.
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- Introducing core elements of integration
Core elements of integration include integration theories, concepts, dimensions, principles, conditions, strategies, methods, tools, researchers’ roles and competencies in integration. To link conceptual insights on integration with empirical insights, it helps if the teachers draw on experiential knowledge in leading and engaging in integration in different interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects.
- Using empirical case studies
Empirical cases ideally highlight (i) a particular environmental and societal problem, (ii) the integration process and related outputs, and (iii) the integration methods and tools used. Students analyse and cross-compare these empirical cases using what they have learned about the core elements of integration.
- Providing hands-on exercises and team building exercises
Hands-on exercises are usefully focused on a case study, allowing students to apply and experiment with particular integration methods or other tools (for example, theory of change) and to assess their strengths and weaknesses, as well as potentials and limitations. Team-building exercises (for example, team charters) are used to create an experimental and safe space in the classroom.
- Supporting reflective learning journals
Reflective learning journals allow students to consider (after each course module or group work): what happened, why, so what and now what. Students bring their individual reflections to the classroom to share key insights within their groups.
- Combining the activities
Returning to the figure above, the core elements of integration, the empirical case studies, the hands-on exercises and the reflective learning journals enable the teachers to bridge conceptual and empirical insights from studying and leading integration (left side of the figure) with a view to teaching students integration in theory (eg. understanding, analysing, distinguishing, combining, discussing, reflecting and assessing integration), and concurrently enabling them to learn integration in practice (eg., applying, experiencing and experimenting with integration methods and tools; designing, planning and implementing integration processes; generating integrated outputs) (right side of the figure).
- Introducing core elements of integration
Conclusion
These principles and activities are based on a master’s degree course in environmental sciences that we co-taught in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
What do you think? Do the principles and activities we outline resonate with you? Are there others that you would add? Are there other ways of teaching integration that you have found to be effective?
To find out more:
Hoffmann S. and Vienni-Baptista, B. (2026). Training integration in science, policy and practice: Insights from designing and implementing integrative teaching and learning. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 13, 1. (Online) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06523-6
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Microsoft Copilot Chat (M365 A5 Faculty (educational institution) plan; Basic tier) was used in October 2026 for brainstorming the structure for a draft of this i2Insights contribution. The authors then revised the structure and filled it with content. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Sabine Hoffmann PhD is group leader of inter- and transdisciplinary research at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, in Duebendorf, Switzerland. Her research focuses on integration and integrative leadership in large inter- and transdisciplinary research programs.
Biography: Bianca Vienni-Baptista PhD is a social anthropologist and Professor of Transformative Sustainability Science at BOKU University (Universität für Bodenkultur / University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences) in Vienna, Austria. Her research examines practices, institutional dynamics, funding and evaluation systems for interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. In addition, she co-designs transformative transdisciplinary processes for sustainable development.
Thank you for turning your article into a blog post. The format gives us a little more space to engage with these ideas as propositions, beyond the descriptive account of your experience and context.
Whenever I read the word integration, I feel an urge to ask what it is and what exactly we are integrating. To be honest, I ask this about integration far more insistently than I do about defining transdisciplinarity. I suspect this comes to me because I see integration already practised in every monodiscipline, so principles such as connecting theory with practice, experiential learning, and critical reflection, which I value, don’t yet tell me what is distinctive about it here. Still, I understand and appreciate the motive for placing it at the centre of transdisciplinary practice.
I struggle with integration as an umbrella concept, especially when understood as “weaving different and previously unrelated perspectives together into a whole with a view to: a) enhancing scientific understanding of complex problems, b) generating policy- or practice-oriented solutions, and/or c) producing synthesis products tailored to the specific needs of different target audiences”. I find myself wondering how such a formulation engages with knowledge traditions that may not seek integration into a common whole, but instead maintain distinct commitments regarding the nature of knowledge, reality, and human flourishing. I was glad to see that the full article engages with the worry about the “whole”, following O’Rourke et al. (2016) in emphasising the process of establishing connections over a final product. Even so, the definition still reads to me as close to project-management language. “Weaving” suggests threads of comparable kind and strength, and it carries a quiet normative assumption that connection is desirable before establishing it in relation to the context. The definition risks flattening the ontological, epistemological and normative layers of whatever we bring to the table, whether an academic tradition or a non-academic one (A line of argument that I outlined briefly in my provocation piece HERE, and now exploring and developing more fully in a paper currently under review).
Other literatures take up this concern. Barry, Born and Weszkalnys (2008) distinguish integrative-synthetic logics of interdisciplinarity from agonistic-antagonistic ones. Tengö et al. (2014) argue for treating knowledge systems as distinct and complementary, and Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice raises the question of who gets to be woven, and on whose terms. I noticed that the article already points in this direction: it names a pluralistic principle (Norström et al., 2020), power dynamics (Oliver et al., 2019) and positionality (Freeth and Vilsmaier, 2020). My first question is how these could be developed further in the guiding principles, so that other knowledge systems are engaged as full systems and not as inputs. Could “not integrating” also be taught as a legitimate and responsible outcome?
My second question concerns the fine line between integration as a teachable set of practical steps and sensitising students to their disciplinary boundaries, so they can sit with the discomfort of integration. The team-building exercises (the team charters, the “Chief Happiness Officer”, the theory-of-change backcasting) clearly create the safe space you describe, and I see their value. But they take place among peers sitting in the same class. I wonder whether they can simulate the hostile or indifferent settings students may meet with policy-makers and commercial practitioners, and whether they risk presenting consensus as the goal instead of a process. I also wonder whether they risk presenting consensus as the goal rather than as one possible outcome of a more complex process.
Relatedly, I am reminded of the risk of superficial conceptual integration observed by Horn and Urias (2026), where students rush toward shared terminology without fully unpacking the assumptions and commitments embedded within their respective traditions. To be honest, my own observation is that much transdisciplinary education is designed around the assumption that conflict and tension are undesirable, or that they are simply symptoms of misunderstanding. I am increasingly convinced that this is a misreading. Many tensions are not merely communicative problems; they stem from bigger differences in ways of knowing and doing, differences rooted in distinct ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political commitments. These commitments, I would argue, require careful exploration rather than premature flattening in the name of integration.
From this perspective, Hackett’s (2005) “essential tensions” and Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort suggest that the discomfort itself may be what needs teaching. I am also reminded of the work of Ronald Barnett, whose writings on higher education place considerable emphasis on learning to live productively with complexity, uncertainty, and contested realities.
That is why I found the students’ reflections so valuable: the readings were “difficult-to-grasp”, and one group felt the foundational papers were not appropriate because integration is so case-dependent. Rather than only bridging this gap with how-to knowledge, could it become an object of critique in the classroom?
Thank you again for sharing this work.
References (mentioned here, other than the one in your article):