Reflection on a collaborative teaching project about gender inequality: students learning by doing through transdisciplinarity

Abstract

This article reflects on a collaborative teaching and learning project that employed transdisciplinarity to guide the students’ learning experience and to expose them to different epistemologies. The departments of Digital Design and Strategic Communication at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa co-created and co-presented lectures on innovation aimed at bridging the divide between education and practice through participative collaborative learning. A key argument in this article is that to achieve learning through practice, multiple levels of knowing must be employed that transcend multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and emphasise a holistic solution-based outcome that could not be achieved otherwise. This is referred to as transdisciplinarity. From this perspective, students from two disciplines were tasked to conceptualise the social challenge of inequality in the workplace. The students needed to work together to develop communication strategies to tackle and propose solutions to their selected organisations’ poly-contextual gender inequality issues. This article is a retrospective evaluation of the project, showcasing how a multi-pronged assessment design allowed two educators to facilitate shared collaborative spaces and mediated engagement between students, and how their collaboration yielded creative and more sustainable solutions developed by the students.

How to cite this article:

SITTO, Karabo; DAVIS, Corné; MATEMA, Lerato. Reflection on a collaborative teaching project about gender inequality: students learning by doing through transdisciplinarity. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South v. 2, n. 1, p. 21-41, Apr. 2018. Available at: http://sotl-south-journal.net/?journal=sotls&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=28

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