Envisioning and interpreting interdisciplinary engineering education (IEE): different dimensions of understanding interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary engineering education (IEE), gaining importance given complex socio-technical problems beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries, also undergoes inconsistencies and ambiguities. In this paper, we inductively identify and document the plurality of conceptualisations of interdisciplinarity, which emerge from 22 interviews with engineering educators and engineers in practice. Clustered in three themes, nine dimensions offer a broad scope to capture the distinct yet interconnected ways through which actors perceive interdisciplinarity. The first theme unpacks interdisciplinarity as capacities: form of knowledge integration; scope of content; generic skills; epistemic virtue; and addressing differences beyond disciplines. The second theme conceptualises interdisciplinarity as identity, which especially reveals tensions reconciling specialism and generalism. The third theme frames interdisciplinarity as three-folded institutional practices: micro-level pedagogical choices; meso-level organisational alignments; and macro-level cultural contexts. These dimensions reflect the complexity of practical interpretations in IEE and offer ways to compare different interpretations of interdisciplinarity and make more explicit and informed choices.