A new McGill report calls for stronger, more intentional transdisciplinary education at the university, arguing it can better prepare students to address complex societal challenges while strengthening the university’s connection to the wider world.
Brian Robinson, associate professor in the Department of Geography and associate member of the BSE, applied for a BSE grant to fund the study. He said the project emerged from a desire to improve how graduate students work across disciplines and beyond academia.
“The whole purpose of the Ignite grant that we applied for was to help build a better graduate interdisciplinary cohort at McGill that spanned across faculties and across disciplines,” he said.
As the initiative developed, Robinson and colleagues recognized a need to take the conversation further. “We were missing a next step, something else to do, or a way to segue into how do we do this better at McGill more broadly,” he said.
The paper entitled Envisioning the Future of Transdisciplinary Sustainability Training and Scholarship at McGill, was a workshop that brought together faculty, graduate students and administrators from across the university. “The report is the outcome of that workshop,” Robinson said, describing it as a collective effort to examine the future of transdisciplinary education and research.
“Transdisciplinarity is when you go outside of the walls of academia,” he said. “You’re trying to solve some of society’s biggest problems, and you can’t do it with just research alone.”
He added that tackling issues such as climate change or biodiversity loss requires engaging decision-makers, communities and other stakeholders early in the process. “Those matter just as much and sometimes more than the cutting-edge science,” Robinson said.
While noting that McGill already excels in interdisciplinary research, Robinson said a more systematic approach would strengthen both education and impact. “I think we could do that in a bit more of a systematic way,” he said. “We can build these things into how we shape graduate programs and how we think about some coursework.”
Yet McGill is largely already doing more than it realizes. With many programs at the university practicing transdisciplinarity without explicitly recognizing it.
With students increasingly wanting these opportunities, this report aims to help departments lean on their strengths of these already successful programs with a framework to make them even better.
Robinson said transdisciplinary training also equips students with practical skills. “It gives you a bit more of a taste for what being in the workforce is like,” Robinson said, pointing to project management and communication skills that are often missing from traditional programs.
This approach can accelerate the real-world impact of research. Traditionally, higher education has separated theory and practice, with universities focused on thinking and analysis and hands-on work occurring later in one’s career. The report emphasizes the need to shorten this lag and bring these stages closer together.
“Some studies have estimated that it's kind of a 22-year pipeline for producing evidence." “It’s not going to cut it for some of the problems that we face today.”
Robinson called the university’s proposed sustainability park “a huge opportunity,” adding that transdisciplinary education could become “a foundational idea that crosses disciplinary boundaries and sectors of society.”