Social Hydrology: interdisciplinary research as part of higher education

Interdisciplinary work can be a challenge even for experienced scientists. Integrating different work methodologies, utilizing different skillsets, and effectively communicating across different fields are all essential to successfully completing such projects. How can we then design an interdisciplinary study program that is engaging for the students and clearly presents the challenges of interdisciplinary work without becoming too problematic and disillusioning?

The course Social Hydrology is organized at the Humboldt University of Berlin for students of both social and natural sciences. The goal of the program is to encourage students to engage with water-related problems in a wide interdisciplinary context while conducting an individual research project.

What keeps the course together is the subject: each year the lecture is built around a selected smaller river near the city of Berlin. The course starts with an excursion along the selected river, where walking along the river we visit all the relevant locations along them. The students use this excursion to collect impressions of human-water relations through photos, sound or text. During these excursions, the students come up with research questions which are then further distilled with the help of the lecturers. After the excursions the students are given input on various research methods, which then they can use to carry out independent project work.

The goal of the project work is to create reports in the form of research articles, which are then published online in the form of storymaps. Hence, the generated knowledge remains accessible beyond the lecture, and could be used as a basis for future research in the region. During the last years, the course became popular among the students, many of them choosing to write a master thesis on the topic of hydrology. In a few cases, the study carried out during the course was further developed into an actual research paper.