Patric Wallin

The context for this study is the interdisciplinary course ‘Environments for learning in higher education’, where 20 to 30 master students from various study programmes, including e.g. engineering, social science, and design, work in groups of five over a period of 15 weeks on self-defined research projects. By defining, planning and running their own research projects, students can raise questions about university learning environments that they deem important and remain in control as to how to conduct and frame their research.

Based on perspective dialogues with the students, I will explore what happens when undergraduate students become researchers, and illustrate how various positions emerge, change and fluctuate within the educational space of an interdisciplinary course. A key interest is to highlight how the act of challenging traditional knowledge hierarchies, disciplinary boundaries, and well-established roles also requires a revision of the students’ relations to each other and the emerging dynamics within the students’ work groups.

Positioning students as knowledge producers means that their positions emerge as central rather than additional. By re-considering the relationship between undergraduate teaching and academic research and building upon Student as Producer, the course offers opportunities to re-establish the university as a place for collaboration between students and academics with the shared purpose to produce knowledge and meaning. It is through the interdisciplinary negotiations on the nature of knowledge production in their own work and what research is that students start to establish a common ground to reconnect natural and social sciences and contribute to the ‘creation of one science’. The traditional positions of teachers and students are dissolved, which is further emphasized through the interdisciplinary nature of the groups. In this way, all participants can occupy liminal positions that challenge assumptions, disciplinary boundaries, research paradigms, and reference frames in new ways.

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