The Future of Education

Keywords: Transformation of education, Transdisciplinarity, Lifelong learning, Higher education, Learner’s concepts ​​

Numerous factors influence how people learn and work today, such as (multilateral) digital networking, collaboration, and information sharing, as well as increasingly globalized economic, political, environmental, and technological issues. As a result, both (higher) education and the professional sector face challenges in promoting opportunities for future-oriented skill-building [1], which are required in these new working and learning environments and for which clear values (like responsibility, accountability), attitudes (like the willingness to cooperate) as well as future-focused skills (like data literacy, reflexivity, anticipation, a mindset that is solution- or innovation-focused, and inclusiveness) are necessary. To meet the needs of today's complex learning and working environments, businesses, non-industrial organizations, and educational institutions must change their specialized knowledge-teaching settings into transdisciplinary learning contexts [2]. 

The methodology of the transformation process (a) and the learners' implicit concepts accompanying the transformation (b) will thus be the two main areas of emphasis in this article.

(a) A transdisciplinary approach that promotes situated, experiential, and/or informal learning by involving relevant cooperation partners outside the learners' discipline-specific focus appears to be very promising [3]. This approach reorganizes disciplinary learning structures in education and the professional sector. In this way, transdisciplinary forms of cooperation displace traditional, "isolated" bodies of knowledge, approaches, and competencies and open up the possibility of exploring skills, values, or concepts inherent to other disciplinary contexts.

b) To promote the new skills, it is necessary to reinforce the concepts underlying the sustainable development of learners within this transdisciplinary approach. This paper identifies and describes the initial supportive concept approaches within a transdisciplinary context. We seek assumptions that are beneficial to particular transdisciplinary settings. We intend to determine which (in)dependent variables impact concepts in this context and how to promote these beneficial concepts.

The participants are also encouraged to discuss the various elements that influence the concepts in the context of transdisciplinary learning.  

[1] Enders, T., Hediger, V., Hieronimus, S., et al. (2019). Future skills: six approaches to close the skill gap. World Government Summit. 2

[2] Bain, B., Griffith, K., Varney, J. (2019). Transdisciplinarity Practice in Higher Education. In V. Wang (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Transdisciplinary Knowledge Generation. IGI Global. 115-131. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-9531-1.ch009

[3] Schmohl, T., Philipp, T. (2021). Handbuch Transdisziplinäre Didaktik. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. 13-24. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839455654