1. What brought you to INTED?
My involvement with INTED began when Anders had the idea of developing an initiative in interdisciplinary education through a Centre for Excellence in Education (SFU). I was invited to participate in the process of developing the application, and I was immediately drawn to the vision. Interdisciplinarity seemed to me to be a field with great potential, particularly in higher education, and one where there was still considerable room for development in the Norwegian context. The application process marked the beginning of a broader academic interest in how interdisciplinarity can be understood, practiced, and embedded in education over time.
2. What aspects of interdisciplinarity do you think deserve more attention or exploration?
There are several. I have worked extensively in interdisciplinary contexts, particularly in research, and I have also been involved in interdisciplinary teaching. Through these experiences, I have become increasingly aware of aspects and challenges that have received too little attention.
This includes administrative barriers that make it unnecessarily difficult to establish and run interdisciplinary educational initiatives, but also cultural and linguistic challenges that affect the quality of collaboration across disciplines. In both education and research, people often encounter different terminologies, working methods, and disciplinary traditions that can make interdisciplinary collaboration challenging. These structures are often invisible, yet they have a major impact on whether interdisciplinarity works effectively in practice.
I see significant potential in addressing both the structural and cultural conditions needed for successful interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly in education. INTED represented an opportunity to work with these issues in a more comprehensive and systematic way and to contribute to the development of more sustainable models for interdisciplinary education.
3. What inspires or drives your interest in interdisciplinarity?
What primarily inspires and motivates my interest in interdisciplinarity is the experience of gaining a new understanding of something. There is something particularly valuable about bringing different academic perspectives into conversation with one another and working together to make sense of complex issues.
The most rewarding moments are often when ideas, concepts, or solutions developed within one discipline can be applied to problems that seem difficult or stuck within another. The opportunity to discover new connections and genuinely move closer to a solution is what continues to drive my interest in interdisciplinary work.
4. Why is INTED important?
I believe our work at INTED highlights and takes seriously something that is often underestimated in interdisciplinary collaboration: the importance of time and process.
One of the things we continually learn through our work is that there are no shortcuts to successful interdisciplinarity. If collaboration is to succeed, sufficient time must be spent getting to know one another, building trust, and developing a shared language. This means not assuming that people understand one another or agree from the outset, but instead creating opportunities to explore different perspectives, assumptions, and interpretations through repeated dialogue.
This type of work is essential for addressing complex challenges together. The time invested is not simply social interaction or informal conversation, but a necessary foundation for genuine interdisciplinary integration. At INTED, we have seen that the effort devoted to these processes has a significant impact on the quality of both collaboration and outcomes.
We have also seen the value of concrete, well-tested tools and methods for interdisciplinary collaboration. These tools help structure dialogue, make disciplinary differences explicit, and support collaboration in a more intentional way. Our experience shows that they not only make collaboration easier but also more meaningful.
5. What do you see as the potential of interdisciplinary education?
I think the answer depends somewhat on how we understand interdisciplinary education and what we consider disciplinary education to be. To engage meaningfully in interdisciplinary work, one must also have a disciplinary foundation. A certain depth of knowledge and expertise is necessary.
For that reason, interdisciplinarity should not be viewed as an alternative to disciplinary education, but rather as something that builds upon it. One of the most important goals is to provide students with opportunities and experiences that help them develop interdisciplinary competence.
This includes helping students understand how their own discipline fits within a broader context and what other disciplines can contribute when addressing different kinds of challenges. Equally important is developing the ability to listen to other disciplinary perspectives and recognize their value. To support this process, students should also be given access to concrete tools and approaches that enable interdisciplinary collaboration in a structured and thoughtful way.
6. With the growing focus on interdisciplinarity, how do you envision the future of higher education?
That depends somewhat on whether we are talking about how I think higher education will develop or how I hope it will develop. There are elements of both.
We often hear that the world is changing rapidly and that education must adapt to an ever-changing labor market. There is certainly some truth in that, but I do not think higher education should primarily be about producing cogs for a larger machine. Its purpose is to educate people.
We do not know what the future will look like, and for that reason higher education must provide students with more than a set of specific skills. It should help them find employment, but it should also support their development as reflective, responsible, and independent individuals.
I hope we continue to develop educational programmes that balance disciplinary depth with broader perspectives and that create opportunities for students to meet, collaborate, and engage in dialogue with one another.
I also believe social interaction will remain essential. While technology already plays, and will continue to play, an increasingly important role, we should be thoughtful about how it is used. It would be unfortunate if technology replaced meaningful human interaction. We should use technology where it is genuinely effective, while continuing to focus on what humans do best: being human.