Telling the world why interdisciplinary learning matters

Reflections from the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference in Edinburgh 2026

Looking back on the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference 2026, I still feel deeply grateful and inspired. My strongest impressions come from the formal presentations as well as the informal interactions around them: the gatherings before and after the conference, the exchanges over lunch, and the moments when people continued to think together, or quietly on their own, after each session had ended.

These moments mattered to me because they reminded me that interdisciplinarity is not only a concept discussed in formal academic settings. It is also a way of communicating and practising across different fields, spaces, and contexts. Conference participants came from different institutions, disciplinary backgrounds, educational levels, and professional roles. In this sense, the conference itself became a small interdisciplinary space: a place where different ways of thinking could meet, connect, challenge, and enrich one another.

This year’s conference theme, “Interdisciplinary Pathways”, connected closely with my research. When “pathways” are mentioned, many people may think of routes through curricula, modules, degree structures, or institutional arrangements. I understand pathways more broadly as lived experiences: the ways in which learners and teachers move through unfamiliar ideas, methods, tools, spaces, collaborations, and expectations. Pathways are not only designed through formal structures; they are also experienced, negotiated, and reshaped by people.

I gave a five-minute flash talk at the conference based on my emerging PhD project, which explores how undergraduate students experience boundary crossing during interdisciplinary learning and teaching in postdigital learning spaces. As this was my first in-person academic conference presentation, I felt a little nervous but more excited. In the project, I am interested in two undergraduate pathways into interdisciplinary learning: students enrolled in interdisciplinary degree programmes, and students from single-discipline degree programmes who take interdisciplinary electives. Rather than evaluating which group performs better, I hope to understand how different pathways shape students’ interdisciplinary learning experiences, including what feels exciting, difficult, unfamiliar, supportive, or transformative.

This interest in different pathways matters because students do not all begin from the same starting point when they enter interdisciplinary learning spaces. Some students may understand interdisciplinarity as part of their programme identity from the beginning. Others may experience it as a temporary movement away from a more familiar disciplinary background. Some students may need more support in recognising the value of their own disciplinary background in an interdisciplinary space, while others may need more opportunities to understand what interdisciplinarity means beyond creativity, collaboration, or innovation.

One line from the conference particularly stayed with me: “We teach students to grow food, manage forests, and protect ecosystems. The least we can do is to teach them the language to tell the world why it matters.” I found this sentence powerful because it frames language not only as a means of communication, but also as a way of making knowledge visible, meaningful, and connected to the wider world. If we read “language” as a metaphor for interdisciplinary education, then every time we answer the question “What is ‘interdisciplinary’?”, every time we respond to “How do we understand it?”, and every effort we make to design and practise interdisciplinary courses or projects, we are also trying to tell the world why it matters.

Knowledge and skills become more meaningful when students can connect them to wider contexts, communicate their significance, and understand why they matter beyond a single classroom, discipline, or professional field. In this sense, interdisciplinarity is not simply a supporting skill. Rather, it works as a bridge, connecting expertise with society, knowledge with responsibility, and learning with the wider world.

This also made me reflect on a common misunderstanding of interdisciplinary education. Sometimes, interdisciplinarity is misunderstood as training students to know “a little bit of everything”. From that perspective, it may seem less valuable than becoming highly specialised in one clearly defined field. For a long time, we have lived in a world that celebrates exceptional expertise within particular domains: the mathematician, the engineer, the AI specialist, the translator, the economist, the designer. Of course, disciplinary depth has enormous value, and interdisciplinary education does not aim to deny this. At the same time, interdisciplinarity does not stand in opposition to expertise, nor is it an attempt to replace traditional disciplines. Disciplines remain essential foundations of universities and knowledge-making. Rather, interdisciplinarity asks creative and necessary questions: how can deep knowledge speak to other forms of knowledge? How can different forms of expertise be connected, translated, challenged, and reimagined in response to problems that cannot be contained within a single field?

This matters because students are entering a world that is not organised according to disciplinary boundaries. Climate change, health inequalities, urban futures, sustainability, and education itself are all complex, entangled, and uncertain. They cannot be fully understood or addressed through one lens alone. These “wicked” problems certainly require specialists, but they also require people who can move across differences, communicate across fields, and hold multiple perspectives in view.

I think the meaning of interdisciplinary education goes far beyond simply “integrating disciplines”. It is not only about putting different disciplinary methodologies or theories together. Rather, it is about cultivating a way of thinking that can move, connect, and translate. It helps students open their minds and begin to engage with larger questions about humanity, society, and the future, rather than remaining within narrow, discipline-bound ways of responding to questions. It invites them to encounter what they do not yet know, to become more comfortable with uncertainty, and to see unfamiliarity not only as a weakness, but also as a possible beginning.

The deeper value of interdisciplinary education lies in this possibility. It is not about producing students who simply “do everything”. Rather, it supports learners who can connect, translate, communicate, collaborate, and imagine across boundaries. These learners may not always fit easily into traditional categories of expertise, but this is precisely why they matter: in a world where many urgent problems are complex, interconnected, and resistant to single-discipline solutions, the ability to move across boundaries is no longer optional, but necessary.

This is why interdisciplinary education should not be understood as a rejection of depth. Rather, it is a way of helping depth “travel”, cross boundaries, and translate into wider contexts. It allows knowledge to move among people, practices, tools, communities, and futures. It enables students not only to learn what matters, but also to find ways to tell the world why it matters.

Last but not least, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to David Overend, Jenny Scoles, and everyone involved in organising the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference 2026. The conference was deeply thought-provoking and meaningful for me. It reminded me that interdisciplinary education is not only about courses and projects, but also about how we understand the entanglements between learners, knowledge, spaces, society, and the future.

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Kunqi Huang is a PhD student at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, based at the Centre for Research in Digital Education within the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research mainly focuses on interdisciplinary education in the postdigital context. Kunqi Huang’s research interests include interdisciplinary education, comparative education, postdigital education, and intercultural education.