‘It is ambiguous, but I know what I am doing’: undergraduates’ experiences and agency in an interdisciplinary programme

Abstract

<p>Responding to the increasing need to develop graduates with capabilities for solving complex problems, interdisciplinary degree programmes are growing in numbers. However, few studies have investigated undergraduate students’ learning experiences in these programmes despite acknowledging such experiences can be challenging and confusing. Moreover, the current understanding of experiences in interdisciplinary programmes is also limited by the lack of studies that fully recognise the liminality in students’ experience and their agency. We drew on the concepts of liminality and agency to analyse student learning experiences in one interdisciplinary programme integrating arts, science, and social sciences. Data were collected from 29 semi-structured interviews conducted by four student co-researchers. Our main findings are that students exercised their agency in different forms, for example, finding their anchors and pursuing a second major, in response to the liminality of the learning environment. Some individuals creatively anchor their experiences with their own aspirations, allowing them to find directions to move forward in interdisciplinary learning. The implications are to avoid presenting a single way of navigating interdisciplinarity and to support students’ agency by helping them find their aspirations and anchors.</p>