Transdisciplinary learning as U-shaped learning

6 thoughts on “Transdisciplinary learning as U-shaped learning”

1. This is a fascinating way of looking at the competencies needed in transdisciplinarity learning. As someone who’s involved in coordinating this within a transdisciplinary research center, this framework illustrates much of what we’re aiming to do in our internal and external education efforts. Thank you for sharing and I look forward to more of your contributions.

   Reply

2. Gemma, this is a beautiful blog … I’ve been waiting for it.  

   I’d like to begin with a question before sharing some of my thoughts and thinking alongside your work, since we’re navigating the same terrain ;).

   The T‑shape model assumes a developmental progression: students begin grounded in professional or disciplinary training, building the vertical “stem” before they can meaningfully contribute to the horizontal “top”,  the space of integration. In the U‑shape metaphor, actionability and integration appear as core components, and visually, with the U-shape metaphor, seem to carry similar weight (something I remain cautious about). My question is: how can we translate these expectations (educationally) for students who are still on their learning journey in a field? 

   And to relate this to Faye’s comment, while I agree that our attachment to our own fields can lead us to overlook alternative ways of doing things when we focus too narrowly on the stem of the T, I think an additional challenge is that other capacities for learning and lived experience also form a kind of “stem.” Individuals continually accumulate practice‑based and experiential knowledge, and this shapes their grounding just as disciplinary training does. I wouldn’t equate lived experience with integration or actionability, as people can become anchored in habitual modes of knowing and doing even when those modes are not academically disciplinary.

   My comment on transdisciplinary education as a space for developing competencies begins with Piaget. He is often referred to as the person who coined transdisciplinarity (though I find this historically inaccurate, as Mahan was already defending his thesis on transdisciplinarity by the time Piaget entered the conversation, but this deserves further investigation). Still, it is interesting,  and slightly ironic,  to link Piaget to current debates: he shaped early discussions on transdisciplinarity in higher education, yet his work in moral psychology emphasised developmental thresholds. He argued that there is little purpose in training children in moral reasoning before certain cognitive structures have matured (he placed this threshold around age seven, if I remember right). In one way or another, he was suggesting that a certain level of maturity is required before specific capacities can form.
   While later research has challenged aspects of his developmental staging, I find it striking how far our discussions of transdisciplinary competencies sit from debates in moral and developmental psychology. There is much to learn and integrate from those conversations.

   I realise I’ve drifted into morality (I do tend to take the long route to make my point), but this is precisely where my unease with the duo of integration and actionability sits. In our own diagnosis of transdisciplinarity in education (Zeidan et al., 2016), we noticed that most attempts to introduce it into educational settings are led by practitioners of transdisciplinarity itself. And like any field, transdisciplinarity is not immune to the implicit values and biases researchers bring with them.

   Integration and actionability often reflect the language of a projectified version of transdisciplinarity, pop‑transdisciplinarity, where quick, surface‑level integrative exercises are used to rapidly “activate” a solution.  A vocabulary that is increasingly seeping into educational discourse. A similar unease is present in Barnett (2021)’s critique of higher education, where he traces how corporate and market‑driven language has shaped educational reforms for decades: the shift from knowledge to skills and employability; the reconstruction of students not as agents but as customers and consumers; and the co‑optation of critical thinking and knowledge production to serve employability and performativity, measurable through “impact.”

   Now, I am raising these points as (sharing the same boat) I am still trying to understand what transdisciplinary education is becoming. In many ways, it feels like we are repurposing earlier conversations about skills and employability, then about social entrepreneurship as a “better” version, and recently, with integration being a major theme in conversations about transdisciplinarity, we seem to be replicating the language of the consulting field. This is not to question the relevance of integration and actionability, but rather to ask myself, and others: what is genuinely different in what we are doing?

   While integration and actionability certainly matter, they are contextually situated. This does not mean we should ignore them, but when transdisciplinarity presents them as its core values, I worry it risks narrowing its own horizon. Both aspects rely heavily on discipline, not only academic discipline, but epistemic grounding more broadly. It is difficult to imagine meaningful integration achieved by generalists who have not yet developed depth in their own field, epistemology, or methods.

   The same applies to actionability: today’s complex problems require more than methodological competence. They require long breath, persistence, dedication, and the willingness to bend methods in service of how we tackle the problem and how we bring others on board. These are character traits, not merely competencies. And these traits are usually mobilised through a mix of normative stance and methodological commitment. Yet questions of normativity remain extremely implicit, often gestured toward through broad language about inclusivity or participation.

   This reminds me of a well‑framed argument about the purpose of education (Biesta, 2008), which uses the Parks–Eichmann paradox to show that if we focus solely on skills and competencies, we risk producing technically capable individuals who follow procedures well but lack moral and political judgment, such as the figure of Eichmann. In contrast, through this lens, Rosa Parks represents educated disobedience.

   To wrap up this long comment, I appreciate this conversation as it offers a generous space for thinking alongside one another. These exchanges are genuinely helpful for me as I continue developing work I’m currently writing that I hope will see the light of publication soon. I also see considerable room for revisiting how transdisciplinarity is positioned within our broader knowledge‑production systems, and what questions it is actually trying to answer.

   thank you deeply

   – Barnett, R. (2021). The philosophy of higher education: A critical introduction. Routledge.
   – Biesta, G. (2008). Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 33-46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-008-9064-9
   – Zeidan, H., Rai, S. S., & Zweekhorst, M. (2026). Making sense of transdisciplinarity in education: Re‐visiting its conceptualisation, configuration and competencies. Review of Education, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.70147

   Reply

   • Sorry for the wrong citation of Biesta work.
     Below is the right one.

     Biesta, G. (2020). Can the prevailing description of educational reality be considered complete? On the Parks-Eichmann paradox, spooky action at a distance and a missing dimension in the theory of education. Policy Futures in Education, 18(8), 1011-1025.

     Reply

     • Thank you, Hussein, for your considered reflections and careful analysis. Such analysis and questioning is vital if we are to avoid “a projectified version of transdisciplinarity” or “pop‑transdisciplinarity”, as you call it. Transdisciplinarity seems, sometimes, forever doomed to be accused of dilettantism; and without methodological and conceptual rigour, it could be in danger of transforming into a set of buzzwords that would not be out of place in a consultancy meeting.

       The issue however here, I would argue, is not TD but that the university community is operating with a dearth of research-informed guidance on how to “do” TD and how to progress to address the very valid concerns you express here. This is changing in recent years but we still have a way to go. Certainly, the U-shape is a compass. But all compasses need a map to pinpoint where you are or where you are going. As an educational science community in higher education, we are still creating the maps we need.

       Why do we have a dearth of maps? The discipline of education and dominant theories of education stem from observations of children. Hence pedagogy. The theories of Piaget (and Vygotsky and others) derived from the study of young children. Universities are not involved in pedagogy but andragogy, which remains under-researched in the educational science field. Studies on higher education, to date, predominantly comprise Scholarship of Teaching and Learning or SoTL. This entails academics (who commonly do not have doctoral training in education) attempting to understand if what they are doing in the university classroom (which is frequently designed without educational expertise) works or not. To really advance and strengthen new approaches like TD, universities need to invest in research programs that inform higher education with the same quality of research that primary and secondary education have benefitted from.

       But there is excellent work happening within our community. For example, the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, where I am based at Utrecht University, funded a three-year project to research how to enhance inter- and transdisciplinarity learning. We created an institutional theory of change, first, to define TD. We then mapped causal pathways to change that built on practice at the institute and recommended new areas for development. We re-designed a university-wide course Climate & Society as an experiment. We used arts practice and journalism as integrative and actionable knowledge boundary objects. We used systems’ thinking and realist evaluation as integrative methodologies and also to explicate causal pathways to change. We used a new format created by our colleague from the Urban Futures Studio, Kelly Streekstra, to help students “future” and integrate their own values and lived experiences into a vision of what is “absurd” about the present and what is a “seed of change”. We worked with the HKU Utrecht School of the Arts to offer students an artistic perspective and the opportunity to express their findings through art. Students worked in teams. During the course and at the course end, students submitted reflections on the process. We are using these to iteratively inform the course but also to analyse if our “experiment” worked. We will publish these results for others. What we found is that students can meaningfully develop integrative capacity through mastering and practicing these methodologies in this setting. We found that students were able to create action pathways that not only gave them a sense of agency but increased their feelings of hope.

       We should all, as a community, continue to question the quality and rigour behind the conceptualisation and practice of TD. Not least, because those with the power to change policy and fund innovation, legitimately call for a rigorous evidence base for change. I have many misgivings about the term “competency”, for example (see O’Sullivan, 2023), which I borrow from educational science. The term “competency” is accepted in educational science as a legitimate expression of learning gain (see, for example, Helker et al., 2024; O’Sullivan et al., 2025; Vermunt et al., 2018). But I chose it (as opposed to capability, for example) because I wanted to use the language of those actors who are operating in arenas where they can directly influence educational and research policies and funding for change.

       As a community, it would be great to continue this conversation on how we can inform developments with the quality of evidence needed to instill confidence in what are vital innovations in knowledge creation, transfer and learning.

       References
       Helker, K., M. Bruns, I.M.M.J. Reymen, and J.D. Vermunt. (2024). A framework for capturing student learning in challenge-based learning. Active Learning in Higher Education 0, no. 0: 14697874241230459. doi:10.1177/14697874241230459.

       O’Sullivan, G., Baggen, Y., Tho, C., Georgiou, D., Pennings, H. J. M., & van den Beemt, A. (2025). The role of academic and extra-academic actors in transdisciplinary challenge-based learning. Teaching in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2468978

       Vermunt, J. D., Ilie, S., & Vignoles, A. (2018). Building the foundations for measuring learning gain in higher education: a conceptual framework and measurement instrument. Higher Education Pedagogies, 3(1), 266–301. https://doi-org.utrechtuniversity.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/23752696.2018.1484672

       Reply

3. Thank you, Gemma for this great and interesting post, and for your research on this. I think the U shaped model is a very useful reframe and a clear way to describe a complex experience and process for TD work, for all actors involved. I also think the ballast idea captures how these interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive competencies are not just add-ons but the very things which provide balance to the whole process being pulled in so many disparate directions.

   U shaped offers a challenging critique to the T shaped approach, as TD work is so different to the collaborative process that T shaped skills were designed for. T shaped still implies a pre-existing vertical bar of expertise for each individual and just the ability to bridge between them, but TD work is about producing new knowledge which didn’t exist before and collaboratively defining problems alongside extra-academic actors who don’t have any of this vertical bar at all, such as a person with lived experience of floods from your example. There is no room for that kind of expertise in T shaped, nor is there anything representing actionable knowledge capacity and closing the knowledge–action gap only going as far as people being able to take other perspectives into consideration.

   The ballast is playing quite an important role in your model that the horizontal bar of T shaped never intended. U shaped’s two arms map directly onto filling both gaps – the down-stroke into integration makes space for diverse knowledge, including non-disciplinary expertise, and the up-stroke into action gives the missing endpoint T shaped never had.

   I wonder if you see the ballast competencies as TD learning developing differently for students versus extra-academic actors, given that they enter the U from such different starting points? Does the model assume a shared pace of development, or is that variation part of what “co-creating the process” means?

   Thanks again, I’m interested to see how the U shaped model develops.

   Reply

   • Dear Faye,

     Thank you so much for the time you took to read the post and reply with such thoughtfulness. I created the U-shape so I could make sense of the maze of transdisciplinary (TD) approaches. Prior to this, the T-shape had been proposed as an illustration of how disciplinary education needs to be complemented by broad competencies so graduates can function better in the workplace. The U really focuses on what capacities any actor at any stage needs to work with other complex networks of actors and complex networks of knowledge with the intention of creating knowledge that leads to action. Usually, in the literature, this action or action pathway is in response to a problem that is shared by all actors and that is defined and analysed by all. The action pathway needs to take into consideration the needs of all and to acknowledge that values are implicit in the problem definition and perceived action pathway.

     You highlighted something very important that I did not address: how is this different for students, academics or extra-academic actors? I dare say: ‘Not at all’. The ballast is akin to Nicolescu’s “included middle” and the logic of this space. Your description of the arrow sweeping down through integration and up into action brings this alive to me. The ballast is the space of uncertainty that we occupy as human beings whenever we bring what we know into a situation with others – who know other things – and together we try to create new understanding somewhere in the middle. If we can reach understanding, we can act.

     This isn’t a comfortable space or easy work. And to be able to be present actively in this space, it is suggested we need to have certain inter- and intra-personal and cognitive competencies. Much has been written here by Tanya Augsburg, Shalini Misra and others.

     TD is a paradigm shift because it emphasises that all human engagement is an engagement of all we are as people. More akin to what Hussein, in his comment of 3 June 2026 on this website, described as the work of al‑Ghazālī and Syed Muhammad Naquib al‑Attas: this is the human as a “composite of faculties: ʿaql (intellect), nutq (reason/speech), nafs (self), qalb (heart), and rūḥ (spirit)”.

     The ballast says that when we want to act in a TD way, we are entering a space where we need to feel competent and assured of what is happening internally and between us and others.

     Integration is not a destination, it is a paradigm shift for how we work together to create knowledge that leads to action in this place we call society. It asks us to recognise that this composite of faculties is influencing how we are present in this included middle. It says that if we ignore that many knowledges are present in the included middle, we risk, like a metal ball in pinball machine, being stuck in a moment, unable to act. Or stuck forever in loops of misguided action that exclude crucial actors and networks of knowledge. We will not know what we do not know.

     The U asks us to step away from boxes created by the old system of hierarchies of knowledge (who is a student, who is an expert, who “knows” and who “believes” etc.). We do not presume that the difference between a 19-year-old undergraduate and an experienced middle-aged scientist or policymaker is an advancement of inter- or intrapersonal competencies with age or experience. (Sometimes, it can feel like the opposite!) The U is, therefore, a universal learning process. When you participate in TD you are invited to reflect on what your competencies are and how you could grow them to act more meaningfully in a space by embracing uncertainty and clearly acknowledging your values and beliefs. This holds true for all actors involved.

     Thank you for prompting this thinking! I look forward to continuing this conversation.

     Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.