Taking Interdisciplinarity Seriously: When Both Students and Teachers Benefit

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Keywords: interdisciplinarity, experiential, teaching team

Abstract: Interdisciplinarity, a relevant alternative to the classic discipline-based approach, remains difficult to implement (Dufour and Nyffeler, 2019). Yet, it appears to be particularly well suited for addressing at least two limitations of undergraduate management education: the siloed vision that students may have of the disciplines they are taught and the lack of meaning in what they learn. In response to these challenges, we designed a semester-long assignment that requires students to use, apply and combine disciplinary knowledge from 5 different disciplines and aims at fostering a global vision of the organization. The activity, designed for first-year Bachelor students, is a real-life consulting mandate for a client organization (generally a non-profit) which spans almost the entire semester and mobilizes the knowledge and skills of five disciplines or “function” courses taught during the same semester: accounting, operations management, marketing, human resources and statistics. For the teaching team, the project is carried out over a period of approximately six months, including the four months of the semester and two months beforehand to prepare the project with the client organization. The mandate is presented to the students in the first week of the semester. Then, to support them in this major team assignment, specific workshops and structured and participative supervision are offered throughout the semester. In parallel, several tandem activities between two or more disciplines are developed within the courses to deepen the learning. The benefits of the activity are obvious for the students, but also for the instructors.