Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning: Addressing Challenges Through Transdisciplinary Research

Course Objective

The objectives of the course Interdisciplinary Community Service
Learning: Addressing Challenges through Transdisciplinary Research are
that students:
• Become familiar with, acquire practical experience with, and obtain
competencies in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and
Community Service Learning (CSL).
• Acquire insight into the complexity of wicked problems and
corresponding multi-actor systems.
• Are able to integrate knowledge and insights from different
disciplines in order to produce results, insights, and solutions for
various complex societal challenges that transcend disciplines and
organizational barriers.
• Develop the ability to collaborate in a cross-disciplinary team,
through effective interdisciplinary communication, team role definition,
and joint goal-setting.
• Gain experience with critical self-reflection to become aware of their
own position in the team, critically challenge their assumptions about
science and their discipline, and take an active role in their own
learning process.
• Are able to communicate and have a dialogue about the research
findings and implications with a broad audience including researchers of
a variety of disciplines and also interested community members and
community partners.

Course Content

In the 21st century, we increasingly face complex societal challenges,
such as climate change, pollution, social segregation, digitalization,
and inequality in health, literacy, and wealth. These so-called ‘wicked’
problems transcend disciplines and involve a wide variety of actors. Due
to their complex and interrelated nature, addressing these challenges
requires a transdisciplinary approach: integrating knowledge from
different academic disciplines and actively connecting actors from
universities and a variety of societal organizations.
This course runs parallel to a thesis, graduation project or internship.
Interdisciplinary student teams integrate their individual research
projects to contribute to a larger relevant societal issue, through
research questions that have been defined in the preceding course
“Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning: Defining Challenges in a
Multi-Stakeholder Context”.
The course translates these research questions into various research
projects and adds interdisciplinarity through integration and
reflection. Interdisciplinary student teams meet periodically for
intervision, reflection, and integration. A joint research question is
defined at the beginning of the course, and the team works toward
answering the joint overall research question and subquestions. The
teams work towards a collective report that integrates the different
disciplinary findings, to arrive at a higher, more applicable, and more
holistic answer to the overall research question.
The course builds up to a Dialogue Event near the end of the course. The
results of the course are presented and discussed in a joint
transdisciplinary process, in which students, societal actors and
scientists share, discuss, interpret and integrate knowledge, and
experiences to define opportunities for follow-up activities.

Additional Information Teaching Methods

‘Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning: Addressing Challenges
through Transdisciplinary Research’ is a part-time course, spread out
over a 28-week period (6 ECTS). The total study time is approximately
164 hours. Tuition methods include supervised and unsupervised group
meetings, lectures, reflection and feedback meetings, group project
work, and the Dialogue Event.
The different elements have the following study time:
• Face-to-face meetings (workgroups, training, intervision and other
meetings): 40 hours
• Project work & self-study (assignments, preparation of Dialogue
Event): 124 hours
Attending the Dialogue Event is a mandatory requirement, it will not be
possible to pass the course without having attended this meeting.

Method of Assessment

The course grade is based on a grade for the written end report, a grade
for the participation at the Dialogue Event and a grade for personal
performance. Each partial grade needs to be 5.5 or higher to pass the
course.

Literature

Literature will be made available at the start of the course.

Additional Information Target Audience

The course ‘Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning: Addressing
Challenges through Transdisciplinary Research’ is an elective within the
master program ‘Management, Policy Analysis and Entrepreneurship in
Health and Life Sciences’, but it can be followed as an optional course
for master students from the VU University and other universities.
The course is especially relevant for students who want to explore
hands-on interdisciplinary cooperation to find effective approaches for
societal challenges.
Please contact the course coordinator prior to enrollment.

Additional Information

• Registration through Vunet, but an intake interview is required. For
more information, please contact the course coordinator Eduardo Urias
via eduardo.munizpereiraurias@vu.nl
• The entire course is in English.
• For more information about the course, see www.vu.nl/icsl. The website
also features a video with the experiences of students who participated
earlier in this course.
• A related course Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning:
Defining Challenges in a Multi-Stakeholder Context can be followed that
runs in period 2 of the academic year. It is focused on the definition
of societal challenges together with community members and partners,
thus providing a good preparation for this course.

Explanation Canvas

All lectures, reading materials, videos, assignments and further
information will be provided on Canvas