Training students to cross boundaries between disciplines, cultures, and between university and society: Developing a boundary crossing learning trajectory

The competence to work together and co-create with others outside one's own scientific domain, institute, and/or culture, is a critical competence for future engineers to respond to emerging global challenges. In this context, Boundary crossing (BC) competence is crucial. In a university-wide Comenius Leadership project we currently develop BC learning trajectories for various study programmes that aim to foster BC competence development by explicating and aligning BC learning activities. Within the context of this project, we focus on disciplinary, cultural, and university-society boundaries, but consider these to be exemplary for other boundaries. Our fundament is the boundary crossing theory of [1] and its four learning mechanisms (identification, coordination, reflection, transformation) representing catalysts for learning. In this concept paper we explain, what boundary crossing competence is, why it is important for engineers, and what steps to take towards BC competence development in a study programme. In our oral presentation we will explain how we operationalised these mechanisms into concrete educational tools: the BC-rubric for explicating learning across boundaries, a blueprint learning trajectory, and a tool to be used in teacher teams to identify BC learning activities in curricula. We will share examples of BC learning activities and their alignment into curricular learning, and how we aim to assess and monitor the implementation of the BC learning pathways and their effects on students and teachers. This concept paper gives a solid fundament for engineering educators to critically reflect on how they explicitly address, coach, assess and further develop students' boundary crossing competence required for the engaged engineer.