Convergence Education: Cross-College Co-Teaching and Student Experiences Across Disciplines

In the modern globalized world, new challenges have emerged and have been met with a call for innovators across disciplines and more novel solutions. Meeting this demand begins in educational spaces. Convergence education brings together both students and instructors from multiple disciplines to produce solutions to meaningful problems in ways that leverage knowledge from multiple subject areas and develops transdisciplinary innovation skills. The undergraduate Mission, Meaning, Making program provides a convergence education experience, focused on design and innovation, through a unique collaborative teaching model that brings together the academic disciplines of engineering technology, business, and liberal arts. This study examined the student perspectives of this educational approach and investigated how these students believed the convergence education experiences affected their innovation skills of integrative learning, problem solving, and teamwork. This knowledge can be valuable to better understand how convergence education approaches may influence groups of students differently, which is of importance because the promise of convergence education cannot be realized without bringing different disciplines together in meaningful and respectful ways. Therefore, this study specifically explored how these student perspectives varied based on their academic disciplines/majors. Using retrospective pre- and post-survey responses from students, one-way ANOVA statistical analyses were conducted to compare perceived skill growth across different academic disciplines/majors. Open-ended survey responses were also analyzed to identify themes regarding student experience. The study found that there was no significant difference in the perceived change of student skillset for the students across disciplines/majors, and that student experiences shared similar themes regardless of their disciplinary background. With the study’s results, educators and transdisciplinary course designers can be better informed in their course development and provide students from all disciplinary interests and backgrounds with a more mindful education that prepares them to be the valued innovators of tomorrow.