High education for addressing grand challenges: on students’ sensemaking process from inter- to trans-disciplinarity

Given the role of grand challenges and the urgent need to manage and solve them, we face, as society, the moral imperative to train students to address wicked and complex problems teaching them cross-discipline expertise. Today, an interdisciplinary educational approach is mandatory. Even if universities, identified as essential actors which deal with disruptive development or grand challenges, have begun to organize to offer interdisciplinary programs, the perceptions of students on the effectiveness of these programs are unexplored. The meanings they associate to interdisciplinarity are crucial in shaping their identity and future actions. Through the lens of sensemaking theory, the study explores how students make sense of interdisciplinarity. Drawing on information obtained from semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in the Italian National PhD on Sustainable Development and Climate Change, we show that their process of sensemaking is a closed-loop which includes several steps, but where each of these could be the head or the tail of the entire process. Students, when making sense of interdisciplinarity, achieve a transdisciplinary meaning. The paper contributes to sensemaking theory and research on interdisciplinary education, an essential element for achieving sustainable development.