SASUF Sustainability Forum 2024

In 2015, the United Nations adopted seventeen global sustainable development goals (SDGs), and there is now a rapid expansion of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) across nations and universities. Quality ESD requires students to develop a range of key competences such as systems thinking, strategic agency, collaborative skills, critical and creative problem-solving, self-awareness, and deep understanding of different normative values. Coupled with these skills, there is also an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to address so-called wicked problems. However, in spite of previous efforts to strengthen students’ interdisciplinary learning, most ESD have ended up in multidisciplinary approaches only with no actual integration of different disciplinary perspectives (interdisciplinarity) – and the same phenomenon can be observed in many ‘interdisciplinary’ doctoral programmes across the globe, both within and beyond the field of sustainable development. Still interdisciplinarity per se is a quality criterion in the EU framework of innovative doctoral education, which has reached attention far beyond European universities.

A general challenge in all ESD is that multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research are defined in different ways in the literature, and that these concepts are often used in exchangeable ways in practice. In doctoral education, one also needs to consider that institutional organisations, curricula, and supervisors are seldom adequately prepared for promoting interdisciplinary research. As a result, doctoral students’ learning processes sometimes lead to the opposite outcomes, such as when they rather strengthen their mono-disciplinary positions than collaborate across disciplines. Thus, there is now a situation where interdisciplinary research is a global key word in higher education policies to address the SDGs – yet without a clear understanding of how this can be promoted in doctoral educational practice. Also, considering the increased internationalisation of doctoral education, this picture is further complicated by the fact that national needs and contextual meanings of attaining diverse SDGs vary by country.

Against this background, our overall project (funded by a SASUF seed grant) aims to develop a context-sensitive pedagogical framework for developing ESD key competences and interdisciplinary supervision in doctoral education in South Africa and Sweden. Based on participatory research methodology within the context of interdisciplinary doctoral education, interviews have been conducted with supervisors and doctoral students at two universities in South Africa and two in Sweden. Within each country, data was collected from: (1) interdisciplinary doctoral programmes with an explicit focus on sustainable development, and (2) interdisciplinary doctoral programmes lacking this profile. Based on thematic analysis of the interviews, we will offer a preliminary context-sensitive pedagogical framework for enhancing interdisciplinary doctoral research. So far, such frameworks have generally been missing – especially within the research field of sustainable development studies, where our workshop will be an original contribution.

We will present the findings from the project and invite workshop participants to discuss interdisciplinarity and sustainability in doctoral education, from both a doctoral student and a supervisor perspective. The following questions will guide the workshop:

How do supervisors and doctoral students conceptualise interdisciplinary doctoral research?
What challenges do supervisors and doctoral students experience with supervising/generating interdisciplinary doctoral work, and what support do they need in this process?
How are their interdisciplinary approaches shaped by potential connections to the SDGs in the doctoral students’ projects?
How do their interdisciplinary approaches vary by national and educational contexts?
There will be opportunities in the workshop to interact on ideas for future research collaborations.

A presentation onf our project with sasuf-seed money 2023 – 15 min
An interactive workshop where we introduce four to five key concepts in interdisciplinarity and sustainability followed by four to five group discussions – 90 min
Concluding with discussions on what similar projects and/or new research ideas the workshop participants have in order to see what possibilities for cooperation there are beyond the sasuf-week – 15 min

Keywords: Doctoral education, doctoral supervision interdisciplinarity, PhD student competence, sustainability key competencies