Supporting Transdisciplinary Learning Through Global Academia–Society Collaborations: A Four-Pillar Framework

As global challenges become more complex, higher education teaching is increasingly expected to contribute to societal impact through collaboration with actors beyond academia. Such arrangements offer threefold benefits: students simultaneously develop their personal, disciplinary, and professional competencies; educators gain experience in facilitating learning in complex environments; societal actors benefit from knowledge exchange and co-creation with academia. Capitalizing this potential requires careful course design and implementation.

In this contribution, we introduce a framework for academia–society collaborations that invites reflection on how to strengthen cross-disciplinary and -sectoral learning and impact. The framework stands on four pillars: study project design, stakeholder roles, student selection, and teachers’ roles and practices. We showcase this framework through the Sustainable Global Technologies (SGT) Studio course at Aalto University, which, for twenty years, has developed interdisciplinary education through global academia-society collaborations. In SGT, interdisciplinary student teams work on real-world challenges in collaboration with external partners, typically based in the Global South (e.g., NGOs, businesses, governmental organizations). Throughout the course, each student team is mentored by an appointed teacher – commonly a practitioner with topical expertise, master’s students, doctoral researchers, or postdoctoral researchers – to guide the students’ learning process.

Through the case study of SGT, we examine the implications of different design configurations (across past, present, and future of the course). Firstly, we show how study project designs can evolve from local desk studies to transdisciplinary and international project cases in response to changing societal needs and gradual development of pedagogical capacity. The degree of openness and disciplinary breadth impacts students’ ability to identify and recognize the connections between technology, innovation, design, entrepreneurship, and social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

To further support this, the selection and role definition of stakeholders is key in how students contextualize their theoretical knowledge in real-world settings. By engaging with stakeholders, students get to discuss and negotiate diverse perspectives, including value conflicts and forms of knowledge beyond academia.

At the same time, strategically composing student teams by aligning diverse backgrounds with the nature of project is central in enabling boundary-crossing dialogue and broadening students’ understanding of their disciplinary contributions to societal challenges.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we discuss how teachers’ roles have transformed from supporting individual student teams toward establishing and sustaining structures through various research- and practice-based educational initiatives. These structures enable peer learning and cross-teaching among educators from different disciplines, cultures, and institutions.

Taken together, our contribution exemplifies how course design choices influence transdisciplinary learning and generate impact across multiple actors. The proposed framework acts as a practical tool that supports educators seeking to strengthen interdisciplinary and impactful education. Importantly, SGT shows that there is no fixed recipe for designing learning that remains relevant forever. By presenting a course developed over 20 years, we illustrate how interdisciplinary education adapts to a changing world and raises questions about the future direction of academia-society collaborations, and what is needed to support these directions to maintain meaningful and societally relevant education.