(PDF) Sustaining interdisciplinary education: developing boundary crossing governance

Sustaining interdisciplinary education: Developing boundary crossing governance John Hannon, Colin Hocking, Katherine Legge, Alison Lugg Department of Education, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; Department of Education, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; Department of Pharmacy and Applied Science, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; Department of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia This is a PREPRINT version of the following publication: Hannon, J., Hocking, C., Legge, K. & Lugg, A. (2018) Sustaining interdisciplinary education: Developing boundary crossing governance. Higher Education & Research Development 37(7). https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1484706 Abstract Interdisciplinarity has become part of contemporary university discourses on knowledge in both research and curriculum. The move to break down traditional disciplinary boundaries reflects emerging forms of enquiry into knowledge that are less hegemonic and more distributed, and more tuned to its production, practices, and the needs of its practitioners. A focus on complex problems that draws on multiple knowledge domains and an emphasis on professional knowledge have engendered a loosening of discipline boundaries in the development of curriculum and degree programs. In this case study, we investigated teaching practices across discipline boundaries: how interdisciplinary curriculum and teaching are understood, practiced and supported within an Australian university that typifies a discipline-based organisational structure. Through interviews with relevant academics, managers and professionals, we explored the challenges and strategies in sustaining interdisciplinary curricula that were managed between several disciplinary Schools. Our findings were two-fold: engagement with interdisciplinary knowledge had profound effects on academic culture and identities among participating students and teaching staff; and significant challenges arose in the coordination and administration of interdisciplinary education, with institutional structures highlighted as a contributing factor. While the literature on interdisciplinary education emphasises academic collaborations and leadership, there has been less attention to the role of institutional processes – mediated by procedures, artefacts and routines – in supporting and sustaining interdisciplinary education. Aspects of the case study are used to analyse the conflicting practices arising with interdisciplinary education, and to develop the potential for boundary crossing modes of interdisciplinary governance to counter the legacy of discipline-based structures. Keywords: interdisciplinary education, teaching, curriculum, governance, disciplines, boundary crossing, higher education Introduction Interdisciplinary teaching and learning has become increasingly integrated into the student experience in undergraduate and postgraduate programs, as curriculum crosses both knowledge boundaries and institutional structures. Many definitions of interdisciplinarity emphasise integration – of knowledge, methods and modes of thinking drawn from two or more disciplines (Petrie, 1992; Davies & Devlin, 2010; Kandiko & Blackmore, 2012; Millar, Toscano & Baik, 2014; Bossio et al., 2014). We draw on these authors to understand interdisciplinary education in pragmatic terms, as the integration of knowledge and ways of thinking from two or more disciplines to produce an outcome that advances student learning in a way that is not possible from a single discipline. Interdisciplinarity, according to Dillon (2008), “is the most widely used term for breaking out of disciplinary boundaries” (p. 256), and usually understood to strive for an ‘integrative synthesis’ (Klein, 1990, p. 188) in the development of novel approaches to complex problems. University strategies for research and curriculum support the integration of disciplinary perspectives to tackle complex problems, the development of new fields of inquiry and forms of knowledge production, and an emphasis on the education of professionals (Davies & Devlin, 2010). Nevertheless, interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum are located at a tenuous and uncertain nexus within university structures that are themselves founded on the stability of disciplinary knowledge. As universities have responded to a more competitive higher education sector and mass student participation (Marginson & Considine, 2000), they have developed more corporate or ‘enterprise’ forms of governance. This development has brought an ontological shift that has meant rethinking the role of the university with respect to knowledge and the disciplines. With the traditional role of the university under pressure, emerging corporate cultures, according to Gerard Delanty (1998), signify a retreat from the Enlightenment goal of the pursuit of ‘knowledge as an end’ to a decentred and commodified pursuit that weakens the disciplinary boundaries of that knowledge. In this new era of higher education, interdisciplinary curriculum has flourished, framed around complex, relevant, ‘real-world’ problems that draw on multiple knowledge domains. Yet it is in the arrangements and dynamics of this process of interdisciplinary work – the negotiation of knowledge and collaboration across discipline boundaries – that problems arise. Woelert & Millar (2013) describe a ‘paradox’ in which discourses of interdisciplinarity that are encouraged at policy level become constrained as they are implemented through discipline-based structures. Within this paradox, governance that is embedded in existing institutional structures presents challenges for the support of interdisciplinary initiatives. Our focus in this paper is on the competing practices involved in the interactions and crossings of disciplinary boundaries, that is, the practices that can nurture and sustain interdisciplinary education within the competing institutional and academic agendas of the university. This paper is a response to calls for a more systematic response by universities to support interdisciplinarity through academic collaborations and School-based practices: to develop interdisciplinary cultures (Klein 1990; Hegarty, 2009; Davies & Devlin, 2010; Millar, Toscano & Baik, 2014), and a ‘strategic and holistic approach to interdisciplinarity’ (Bossio, Loch, Schier & Mazzolini, 2014, p. 209). In a synthesis of literature, Klein & Falk-Krzesinski (2017) highlighted the need for policies and practices that recognise interdisciplinary and collaborative work, noting that this was ‘not a quick fix in any one part of an academic organization’ (p. 1058). In this case study, set in an Australian university that typifies a supportive policy environment for interdisciplinary research, teaching and learning, we investigated the experiences of relevant academics, managers and professionals, with the aim of first understanding how interdisciplinary education was done or put into practice in the university, then analysing the challenges that emerged and articulating the conditions that can strengthen and sustain these practices. Mobilising interdisciplinary knowledge in the contemporary university The landscape of higher education has been undergoing ‘geomorphic’ changes in the territories of the disciplines, according to Becher & Trowler (2001), as the onset of mass education, a competitive sector and the emergence of corporate structures in universities reshapes disciplinary cultures and academic work. Becher & Trowler mark this development as a shift from ‘mode 1’ knowledge that is pursued through traditional discipline structures to ‘mode 2’, interdisciplinary, problem-oriented knowledge (drawing on Gibbon et al., 1994). They locate mode 2 knowledge as external to the university and point to innovative strategies of the future founded on a ‘triple-helix’ of university, industry and government relations (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 8). In this new landscape, interdisciplinarity can produce new forms of knowledge in response to challenges of complex issues and real-world problems in a way that single disciplines cannot. The integrating and synthesising effects of interdisciplinarity distinguish it from multidisciplinary approaches, marked by distinct contributions from separate disciplines, and cross-disciplinarity, involving transference or borrowing across disciplines (Davies & Devlin, 2010). The term multidisciplinary, in this paper, is used to describe structural arrangements, such as multidisciplinary teams or student cohorts, and quotes from interview data. Despite crossing discipline boundaries, interdisciplinary initiatives must contend with the dominance of the disciplines in the structures of the university, or with ‘disciplinary and administrative compartmentalisation’ (Davison et al., 2012, p.3). Interdisciplinarity has become, according to Callard and Fitzgerald (2015), ‘at once a governmental demand, a reflexive orientation within the academy and an object of knowledge’ (citing Barry & Born, 2013, p. 4). It is a ‘fractious’ achievement (p. 8), requiring the coordination of incongruent discourses that intersect in ways that generate political tensions. As a way of thinking through this multiplicity, we scoped our inquiry to include the structural arrangements as well as the academic collaborations that constitute the governance of interdisciplinary education. Governance in interdisciplinary settings can be distinguished from management. In her study of governance in the contemporary university, Rowlands (2016) frames academic governance as incorporating ‘principles and practices related to internal and external relationships, decision-making, accountability and integrity, amongst other matters’ (p. 26). Discussions of university governance frequently contrast collegial and corporate goals (Harman & Threadgold 2007; Rowlands, 2016). Rowlands (2017) notes a ‘diminished academic voice’ in the contemporary university and calls for a more sophisticated approach to academic governance beyond the binary opposition between corporate and collegial, one that recognises how academics can exercise administrative and managerial roles. Governance has significant effects on academic work and culture in the disciplines (Cannizzo, 2016; Rowlands, 2016). Indeed, for Delanty (1998), the blurring of disciplinary boundaries arises more from ‘the imposition of audit cultures on the university’ (p. 16), than from interdisciplinary endeavours. Delanty draws on Power’s (1997) idea of the ‘audit society’ to describe the shift in the relationship between universities and governments to an emphasis on financial accountability, with the consequence that the managerial role adopted by schools and faculties ‘more closely resemble businesses than the traditional sites of unaccountable knowledge’ (p. 16). Yet to a large extent, the literature on interdisciplinarity is concerned with its types, models, enactments, forms of collaboration, partnerships and networks of leadership across the disciplines, while institutional structures and processes are assigned a subsidiary role (Hegarty, 2009; Davison et al., 2012; Bossio et al., 2014; Millar et al., 2014). Models of leadership that appear to meet the collegial settings of interdisciplinarity have been critiqued for their over-reliance on non-hierarchical structures based on ‘relations of trust and reciprocity’ (Davison et al. 2012, p. 10). It is not clear how an interdisciplinary mode of governance can be held together through collaborative partnerships sustained by tenuous relations of trust, and there is the risk of partnerships faltering from a lack of resources or hierarchical authority (Gosling, Boldern & Petrov, 2009). In this study, we sought to scope our inquiry into practices of interdisciplinary education broadly, in order to account for its ‘often complex and politicised interactions’ (Bossio et al., 2014, p 198). Interdisciplinary education functions at the intersection of discipline and institutional cultures of academic governance: it must negotiate multiple interests across both knowledge domains and School structures. Because interdisciplinary work is so contingent on broader institutional agendas, questions about sustainability arise: What modes of governance sustain interdisciplinary education? How do pedagogies of, for example, problem-solving and experiential learning, integrate knowledge and sustain cohesion across disciplines? What collaborative arrangements across disciplines will be enduring rather than ephemeral? To encompass these questions, we framed our inquiry around the practices and institutional arrangements that compose interdisciplinary education. Researching practices of interdisciplinary education Questions of sustainable interdisciplinary education involve collegial practices across hierarchal structures. Relevant to this inquiry, therefore, was how arrangements for interdisciplinary education were put into place, and what resources and practices are brought to sustain them. We drew on two theoretical resources: the first was Bernstein’s (2000) ‘pedagogic device’ to trace the movement of knowledge across distinct domains or fields. Shay (2016) describes this process: … knowledge is de-contextualized from its site of production—whether this is a research publication, scientific laboratory, a newsroom, a design studio or a factory floor—and recontextualized into a curriculum. This relocation requires choices about selection, sequence, pacing and evaluation. (p. 771). The pedagogic device constitutes the generative rules for the selection, sequencing, pacing and evaluation through which disciplinary knowledge is recontextualised into educational knowledge in both curriculum and pedagogy. Implicit in Bernstein’s approach is the view of curriculum as an emergent rather than goal-driven process (Kandiko & Blackmore, 2012). This process attunes us to the resources and practices brought to the interdisciplinary synthesis emerging from competing demands on curricula, that is, the work of relocating Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge or translating disciplinary depth into curriculum breadth. The second theoretical resource was a conceptual framework for the analysis of data across multiple domains. The notion of boundary crossing (Star 1989; Dillon, 2008; Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) brings an analytical focus on the discontinuities across both disciplinary knowledge domains and institutional structures. These discontinuities can be identified by boundary objects that mediate practices of interdisciplinary education. The idea of boundary objects, according to Leigh Star, ‘refers to artefacts doing the crossing by fulfilling a bridging function’ (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 133), such as a teacher’s portfolio that circulates between a school and institution. Boundary objects are not definitive, thus Star proposes that ‘[b]oundary objects are a sort of arrangement that allow different groups to work together without consensus’ (2010, p. 602). They offer a methodologically useful concept for tracing interdisciplinary education through its objects and practices that take effect across settings. Boundary objects are also heterogeneous in character since they can be identified in a range of settings, including institutional, technological, and teaching and curriculum. Both these resources enabled us to focus on interdisciplinary education as practices that are constituted through materials and activities that can be mobilised and sustained. Methodology and Setting This paper develops findings from a single university case study of interdisciplinary teaching practices. It was the result of a small internal grant for a project conducted in 2016 that aimed to ‘develop a sustainable and adaptable strategy for the development, governance, curation, and co-ownership of interdisciplinary subjects’ at the university. The study, approved by the University Human Ethics Committee, gathered artefacts and interview accounts of experiences of interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum. The research questions for the study structured the interviews in stages, inquiring into interdisciplinary education through participants’ experiences, challenges and potential strategies: (1) How did staff and students experience and engage with interdisciplinary education? (2) What factors and practices sustain or constrain interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum? (3) What strategies or approaches have potential to develop capacity for interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum? As an instance of case study research, this study seeks salience and usefulness through findings that apply to similar settings elsewhere. Their value, according to Yin (2009), lies not in providing comparative data, but in their relevance and applicability to a shared domain of practice. Participants, curriculum and institutional documents Staff were invited to participate based on their involvement in prominent interdisciplinary subjects that were current in the university. There were 12 participants, all full-time staff, 6 female, 5 male. Of these, there were 6 teaching academics (1 early career), 3 with academic management roles, and 3 professional staff. The 8 academics were drawn from Schools in Business, Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, and 4 were located at regional campuses. A sample of 20 subjects were taught or coordinated by participants, representing a range of interdisciplinary teaching across the university. Subjects were located, or ‘owned’ by Schools in Science, Humanities or Business, with enrolments drawn across School and disciplinary boundaries. Subjects reflected a range of strategic contexts with their own distinctive characteristics: • Two subjects were developed by cross-Faculty teams, as self-initiated, internally supported initiatives. Climate, Sustainability & Society, and Science and the Media, both integrated traditionally distinct disciplines around the issues of climate change and Science journalism • Subjects developed through Faculty sponsored strategic curriculum projects: (i) the Hallmark program of six undergraduate subjects were an instance of ‘high-flyer’ programs (Kandiko & Blackmore, 2012, p. 46) that draw together students across the university to do a sequence of subjects that related to “big questions relating to interdisciplinary research” (Coordinator, Hallmark programs); and (ii) seven Discovery subjects, where students select 1-3 electives for Bachelor of Arts with an interdisciplinary focus, for example, Discover Australia, and Mapping the World • Five subjects developed around graduate readiness and with cross Faculty appeal: (i) four online subjects concerning career planning and work integrated learning, and (ii) Food, Water & Environment - an online third year subject There were two institutional documents referred to by participants: the curriculum Essentials that were embedded into all undergraduate degree programs – Global Citizenship, Sustainability Thinking, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and an evaluation report on Climate, Sustainability & Society, ‘From the Ground Up’ (2010), which reported on ‘a pilot project to develop, deliver and evaluate a first-year cross- disciplinary subject’. Thematic analysis Transcripts were analysed using NVivo software for qualitative research by a research assistant external to the project. Braun and Clarke (2006) define thematic analysis as a ‘method for identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns within data’ (p. 79). The three research questions (above) provided an analytical lens for the initial process of coding, in which codes were assigned, then related and clustered into categories and subcategories. These were then developed by the researchers into a set of themes that reflected patterns of practice. In the following section, themes are exemplified with quotes from participants that illustrate practices of interdisciplinary education. Analysis: Disentangling practices of interdisciplinary education Four themes were developed from the analysis of interview transcripts. These reflect the pattern of responses to the three research questions that structured the interviews: how staff and students experienced interdisciplinary education (theme 1), what its sustaining or constraining factors were (theme 2), and what strategies can develop capacity for interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum (theme 3 & 4). The themes are: (1) Forming and reforming academic identities (2) Institutional arrangements that constrain interdisciplinary education (3) Strategies for ‘de-siloing’ curriculum (4) Developing modes of boundary crossing governance. Three modes that emerged were: (i) Aligning practice to policy; (ii) Forming internal and external partnerships; (iii) Sustaining co-ownership of curriculum. Applying the framework of boundary crossing and Bernstein’s pedagogical device means moving away from understanding experiential accounts in subjective terms or offering human-centred explanations, for example, in terms of individual motivation and commitment. Rather, experiential accounts were analysed as activities that crossed boundaries of both knowledge domains and organisational structure, with the aim of making visible the connections that can mobilise and sustain interdisciplinary education. For example, the analysis of the 12 interview transcripts concerning interdisciplinary education drew on associated curriculum materials and institutional data on student evaluation. 1. Forming and reforming academic identities Participants reported strong variation in student experiences with interdisciplinary subjects, with both positive and negative feedback from the same cohort. Engagement with ‘other’ disciplines evoked varying degrees of disorientation: [Students] are still very tied in with their discipline … you can still see the tendencies sometimes of students who are from the same disciplines to bond very early on, and they form a cluster, and you have to actively go in as a teacher to try to break it up a little bit in a sensitive way (Academic, Humanities, female, early career) [Students find it] rewarding across cross disciplinary teams so getting to know students from for example agricultural sciences and international development, international relations, business (Academic, Science, female) Some of the responses have been really quite vitriolic [laughs] partly because we asked them to do a group assignment and they hate it…My experience, in terms of marking work is that those coming from a journalism background don’t research things in the same way as historians do, and therefore, they tend to only skirt over the top of the topic rather than get to the nitty gritty (Academic, Humanities, female) Engaging with peers from other disciplines prompted students to articulate disciplinary differences and even resist ‘other’ ways (of doing and researching). The intensity of the student response to the cross-disciplinary encounter, both positive and negative, marked the formation of academic identities around a discipline. Teaching staff also encountered strong boundaries between disciplines while working with academics and tutors from other disciplines. A common response concerned teaching and coordination practices: There doesn’t seem to be a community of practice around that’s cross discipline at all. So it’s, academics kind of tend to stay in their own area, they don’t talk to each other across disciplines (Manager, professional, male) The absence of any ‘community of practice’ across disciplines resulted in boundaries defined by School-based structures. Despite such structures, there was some openness to contributions from multiple disciplines to teaching practices, exemplified by this reflection on an interdisciplinary cohort: Teaching people from other disciplines is really eye opening in many ways, in the sense that, you know, this kind of exchange between different voices, both students and teaching staff, it’s something that should be really fostered more as well. (Academic, Humanities, female) The interdisciplinary ‘exchange between different voices’ enabled students and academics to consolidate disciplinary boundaries and negotiate an academic identity within or across these boundaries. These exchanges were mediated through curriculum – group tasks, teams, contrasting research approaches – objects able to perform the ‘bridging function’ in boundary crossing. Through these curriculum objects, students were to a large extent reliant on staff in efforts to orientate the interdisciplinary space and form an identity within it. As participants engaged with interdisciplinary teaching (‘really eye opening’), they reported an uncertain and inconsistent experience that was contingent on the intrinsic commitment of teaching staff. A process of re-forming academic identity, or becoming interdisciplinary, was engendered among staff in calls for a shared approach and for ‘fostering’ the teaching team in formal or recognised processes for collaboration across Schools and disciplines. Practical examples were proposed – a printed guide or staff development program – to develop an interdisciplinary culture across the embedded institutional structures of academic work and learning. 2. Institutional arrangements that constrain interdisciplinary education The institutional arrangements for interdisciplinary subjects presented conflicts and difficult negotiations for teaching and subject coordination across structural boundaries of departments and Schools (research question 2): [There are] the structural issues ... the department that does the teaching gets the money and that always creates conflicts when you have to split money between different areas. (Manager, academic, male) The reason doing things like this don’t work in my experience is all to do with finance and all to do with workload management. And so no amount of good pedagogical cross-disciplinary design will solve the fact that if a subject’s in the other college then you don’t get paid for it (Academic, Social Science, male) The actual support in terms of the organisation, in terms of all that paper work, all the legal requirements, there [are] a lot of grey areas (Professional, female) Interdisciplinary subjects became organisational ‘grey areas’ as administration processes that were standard within local structures were translated across institutional boundaries. Coordinators found themselves negotiation funding and workload arrangements across Schools and allocating tutors from other Schools. Procedures that resisted crossing School boundaries included timetabling, workload systems, plagiarism and complaints processes, and formulas for funding teaching. Such processes constrained the coordination or ‘ownership’ of interdisciplinary subjects: I: So what are the challenges in establishing this subject as a sustainable and attractive subject? P: There are administrative [challenges], it’s the structure that drives – if every department had a stake in it and they knew they had a stake in it, it would just be like any other subject they’ve got to deliver. It’s because we didn’t have that structure that it end up falling back on people’s good will. (Academic, Business, female) Administrative processes became problematic with the lack of clarity in the ‘ownership’ and reporting of interdisciplinary subjects. The absence of ‘stake’ or commitment by associated departments meant the onus for delivery fell to individual ‘goodwill’. The interdependence between administrative arrangements and interdisciplinary subjects was highlighted in the comment that ‘no amount of good pedagogical cross-disciplinary design’ will resolve workload management issues (where only one teaching department receives funds). The subject in question, Climate, Sustainability and Society, had been developed through an internally funded curriculum design process and taught over three Faculties for over five years. It exemplified the lack of fit between interdisciplinary education and systems of School governance. This theme captures the effect of institutional arrangements that acted to constrain and contain rather than guide or support interdisciplinary education. These arrangements took material form – funding formulas for teaching and workload allocation, and systems for, timetabling and plagiarism – boundary objects that required time and effort for academics to negotiate and adapt local administrative regimes so that they translated across School boundaries. 3. Strategies for ‘de-siloing’ curriculum As the institutional processes for interdisciplinary education presented challenges, participants recounted strategies for working across structural boundaries (research question 3). The ‘de-siloing’ metaphor captures the concerns of interdisciplinary curriculum design, and marks an orientation to work with multiple domains of knowledge and terminology, as observed by an academic manager: We have disciplinary silos and it becomes very inward looking…in the sense that people don’t know other disciplinary areas. I know that universities have quite good conversations and communication across those boundaries (Manager, academic, male) The speaker drew on his experience in several universities of managing the tension between ‘disciplinary silos’ through a dialogue beyond silo boundaries around a curriculum. The dangers of a silo approach are indicated by this description of a ‘broad’ degree program: It seemed like let’s just push together a whole lot of stuff and that’s not really designed from the ground up as a distinct program…. Academics want a real conversation where you really have co-teaching and not just wheel someone in for the guest lecture on X, but actually have those two academics from quite different disciplines and really develop something quite unique and different (Manager, academic, male) Designing ‘from the ground up’ captures the double recontextualisation process of Bernstein’s pedagogic device (Shay, 2016), integrating disciplinary knowledge first into curriculum knowledge, then into teaching. This contrasts with a ‘patchwork’ approach that lacks cohesion or a narrative ‘arc’: You don’t really have an arc … in something that’s sort of pick and mix subject, you end up wondering about the vignette you teach and what value it had (Academic, Social Science, male) Critical to this ground-up process of curriculum design was assessment design: connecting disciplinary knowledge to activities by designing tasks around a complex problem that has relevance (to students) and invites engagement with two or more disciplines. For example: A lot more attention needs to be given in designing the assessments in such a way that … allow students with different skills sets and prior knowledge and experience to be able to input and also demonstrate their learning in a fair and equitable way. (Academic, Business, male) De-siloing curriculum, in this study, emerged as a key approach for interdisciplinary education. It entails collaboration through stable curriculum teams, with a focus on designing assessment and activities (rather than lectures) for a multidisciplinary student cohort. This theme has parallels in two relevant (OLT) studies, the first by Davison, Pharo, Warr et al (2012), who found there was a constraining effect of ‘siloed disciplinary structures’ on academic collaboration (p. 25). They called for ‘cross- disciplinary’ teaching networks and cautioned against fixed notions of the disciplines. Similarly, Millar et al. (2014) noted the dynamism and blurriness of discipline boundaries that had developed in response to problem-based teaching and research was not reflected in School-based structures for university teaching (also Bossio et al. 2014). In this study, de-siloing curriculum involves crossing discipline and institutional boundaries with pedagogical artefacts: vignettes, assessment tasks, learning activities, and ‘real world’ problems. But how can these partnerships, processes and artefacts be coordinated across obdurate institutional structures? 4. Developing modes of boundary crossing governance Meeting the challenges for interdisciplinary education identified in this study – engaging students and colleagues across institutional structures; working with and around institutional systems; and developing ‘ground-up’ curriculum across disciplines – prompted proposals to develop boundary crossing governance. This theme emerged from the third research question’s focus on developing capacity, in which participants reflected on ways to establish coherent processes among multiple institutional actors outside their department or School. The experience of interdisciplinary education, for many participants, was of curriculum initiatives that were unsustainable in a practical sense. Several comments identified subjects that have ceased altogether or, as has transpired since this study, are no longer actively on offer. These instances demonstrated that an interdisciplinary subject persisted if there was a stable teaching team. This stability was contingent not only on the relations within the interdisciplinary team, but also on interactions between discipline ‘cultures’: Our challenges had to do with us being based in different Faculties, different Colleges, so that we are dealing with completely different cultures, you know, my Head of Department doesn’t understand the staffing profile that Humanities uses and vice versa (Academic, Science, female) The conflicting ‘discipline cultures’ experienced in this instance suggests tensions between the territories of disciplinary knowledge (Becher & Trowler, 2001). In this study, however, different ‘cultures’ take effect through the mundane practices of coordination and administration of interdisciplinary subjects, practices (for example, managing staffing profiles) that become challenged by School-based processes based on disciplinary legacies. These challenges surfaced in issues of ownership of interdisciplinary subjects, their promotion and communication to students, and the success of staff collaboration and engagement. Prompted by interview questions around developing capacity and sustaining interdisciplinary teaching, participants offered three strategies for cross-institutional support, or modes of boundary crossing governance. In summary, these are: (i) Aligning practice to policy Making explicit the policy initiatives that supported interdisciplinarity would develop capacity. Participants cited two such initiatives: university research clusters with an interdisciplinary focus; and the curriculum ‘Essentials’ that teaching and learning policy specified for every undergraduate degree program: You could in fact consider each and every… academic staff’s responsibility for keeping the curriculum relevant to today’s students … some students are becoming more multidisciplinary through the embedment of Essentials – the Essentials themselves are by nature multidisciplinary (Professional, male) This comment on ‘responsibility’ implies the need for a stronger connection to university-wide policies supporting interdisciplinary practices: the development of relevant problem-based inquiries that align to research clusters; and embedding the ‘Essentials’ into curriculum to develop an interdisciplinary grounded graduate. Enacting this policy, participants emphasised, required the promotion of interdisciplinary subjects to students and arguing their relevance to program outcomes and graduate employability. (ii) Forming internal and external partnerships Interdisciplinary collaborations that relied on tenuous relations of trust could be strengthened through partnerships that reached beyond academic teams to external actors: Students need to work on real subjects which are by their nature multidisciplinary, so I would like to think that the real driver of creating these types of subjects would be industry, you know, the end employers of our students. And so, as who actually initiates it I don’t know, but it really should come from, I guess, areas from in the university that are, that have broad responsibility for ensuring our curriculum is appropriate for the students of today (Professional, male) External partnerships with industry and professional bodies strengthen the rationale for interdisciplinary education, demonstrating practical applications to professional practices, for example, student projects or placements in professional settings, and engagement with mulitidisciplinary practitioners. Their governance, according to this participant, would be better guided through university processes with curriculum responsibility outside discipline-based Schools. (iii) Sustaining co-ownership of interdisciplinary curriculum Proposals for a form of ‘co-ownership’ of subjects by interdisciplinary teams was favoured as an alternative to the default, department-based location of curricula. In such teams, according to one participant, ‘everybody’s’ got a responsibility to consider the impact on the other members of the team’ (Academic, Business, female). The dominance of a discipline-based governance prompted a more disruptive proposal: I think the solution to any of these multidisciplinary subjects is that they should be housed outside of the college, school disciplines. Now that’s quite an extreme answer but unless the university can fix all these other problems, can make people think of themselves as part of the university, not part of a discipline then it’s going to be very difficult. The administrative thing is to start pulling everything back to my school (Academic, Science, female) This proposal would locate interdisciplinary subjects outside School and discipline structures, with the intention of establishing a mode of interdisciplinary governance to counter the ‘pull’ to the disciplines. It was qualified as an ‘extreme answer’, suggesting difficulties with this proposal given strong disciplinary boundaries. A radical restructure of governance to incorporate interdisciplinary teaching, for example the Melbourne Model (Davies & Devlin, 2010), would require the mobilisation of political will that is unlikely to be available in most universities. The problems arising from School-based ownership indicated above – funding, staffing and workload arrangements – confirmed the findings of the internal report ‘From the Ground Up’ (2010), where administrative legacies acted to confound the capacity for sustainable interdisciplinary education. The challenges for interdisciplinary education that surfaced in accounts of curriculum ownership and cross-School collaboration were enacted in institutional mechanisms, for example, for funding subjects and allocating workload. Is it possible for institutional processes for interdisciplinary education to simply follow the curriculum and cross structural boundaries? Discussion: Governance for interdisciplinary education In this study, we investigated the experiences of academic and professional staff involved in interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum initiatives. We found that the existing institutional arrangements for coordination and administration of curricula were an uncertain match for interdisciplinary teaching, to the extent that the conditions for a sustainable governance of interdisciplinary education were not in place. Despite initiatives to support boundary crossing knowledge practices in research and curriculum in the university, the disciplines persisted as a structuring force, enacting a tension between the policy discourses of interdisciplinarity and governance processes of teaching (the paradox described by Woelert & Millar, 2013). The limitations to this study, in the sample size and the single location, suggest caution in drawing generalisable implications. Yet the study captured some of the unintended effects of higher education governance in which competing agendas produced tensions when enacted in everyday professional and academic work (Rowlands, 2016). The characterisation of interdisciplinary education developed from the thematic analysis of 20 interdisciplinary subjects offers an insight into how institutional arrangements can enable or destabilise interdisciplinary education. To this end, the study suggests proposals to address matters of governance that relate to structures of curriculum ownership and coordination. Bernstein’s pedagogic device offers insights into the work involved in relocating disciplinary knowledge into interdisciplinary curricula through a selective process of recontextualisation and synthesis. Participants in this study described how knowledge from two or more disciplines was melded or synthesised around a shared problem, then designed into activities and assessments. Participants overall affirmed the success of their interdisciplinary curriculum designs in achieving knowledge synthesis, despite some reports of minimal interaction between staff across discipline boundaries. The real sticking points for interdisciplinary education occurred at institutional boundaries: in the routines and objects of academic work. Tasks considered to be incidental or routine tended to operate smoothly as invisible ‘black boxes’, becoming apparent only in cases of breakdown (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). In this study, breakdowns in the governance of interdisciplinary education occurred primarily in the routine objects of institutional processes – funding formulae, staffing, coordination, workload allocations – arrangements designed to operate within and to reinforce School-based discipline boundaries. The literature on higher education governance reflects the dynamic tensions between collegial and managerial models in a changing sector (Rowlands, 2017). These models bear on interdisciplinarity: internal partnerships, distributed leadership, peer networks and communities of practice, all of which enact modes of governance (Harman & Threadgold, 2007; Hegarty, 2009; Davison et al., 2012). There is, however, less emphasis in the literature on the institutional processes that support interdisciplinarity. Support issues were briefly identified in the OLT reports: Davison et al. (2012) noted the ‘challenge of breaking down the siloed disciplinary structures preventing teaching collaboration’ (25), and Millar et al. (2014) suggested further investigation of staff support through workload models and ‘professional development around pedagogical and logistical considerations’ (p. 4). While such institutional challenges were flagged in these reports, they occurred as subsidiary matters. The strategies proposed by participants in this study to support interdisciplinary education – shared ownership of teaching with multidisciplinary teams, partnerships with external or industry organisations, ‘ground-up’ curriculum design to integrate knowledge across disciplines, and ‘de-siloing’ discipline-bounded structures – require institutional mechanisms that cross institutional boundaries. Establishing modes of governance outside Schools may entail a realignment of agendas and considerable political will, yet without these there is the risk that interdisciplinary partnerships, curriculum and academic work will continue to be defined within, and limited by, structural boundaries. Conclusion This research study draws attention to the relatively neglected role of institutional processes in enabling, stabilising and sustaining interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum initiatives. Our study found that interdisciplinary education became a precarious arrangement as it became entangled with traditional discipline-based governance structures. The key finding emerging from the case study, that institutional processes rather than teaching, coordination and curriculum practices emerged as primary obstacles to sustainable interdisciplinary education, highlights the disparate elements from which interdisciplinary projects are assembled. They also highlight the effort required to hold such projects together, through the minutiae of academic work that constitutes and sustains what Callard & Fitzgerald (2015) refer to the ‘mundane actions, spaces and efforts [that] make up … the “plasma” of interdisciplinarity’ (p. 25). The links between the everyday practice of academic work and governance, we argue, are easily overlooked in strategies for developing sustainable interdisciplinary education. This study contributes to the literature on higher education governance and interdisciplinarity that has comparatively scant emphasis on institutional barriers to interdisciplinary education. The conceptual resources of the pedagogical device and boundary crossing used here has offered a useful analytical lens through which interdisciplinary education becomes visible in practices: in the artefacts and objects that mediate boundary crossing – curriculum, resources, workload and funding models. These offered insights into how connections are made, how partnerships and cross-disciplinary teams can endure and persist as networks across the silo-ed structures of the university. Rowlands observed that academic governance ‘can be a fraught and contested social space’ (2017, p. 9), operating as a site for negotiation and adaptive decision- making where managerial and collegial practices are entangled rather than opposed. This study confirmed that establishing and sustaining interdisciplinary education was dependent on efforts to bridge and build connections across discipline boundaries. However, if the partnerships resulting from these efforts are to endure and be sustained, they need modes of boundary crossing governance that disentangle School-based institutional processes. Funding This project was funded by the Disciplinary Research Program: Remaking Education, La Trobe University References Akkerman, S. and Bakker, A. (2011). 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