Knowledge objects and knowledge practices in interdisciplinary learning: Example of an organization simulation in higher education

ABSTRACT

Background

Higher education is expected to prepare students with interdisciplinary learning (IDL), which is important for their educational and working life opportunities. The cocreation of knowledge in interdisciplinary teams offers multiple opportunities for the emergence of collective knowledge objects (KOs) and knowledge practices (KPs).

Methods

During iterations of an organization simulation course, interdisciplinary student teams created an offer of human resource services for a client. To analyze the students’ IDL (84 students in 12 teams), we conducted an interaction analysis, drawing on sociocultural and knowledge practice perspectives on technology-mediated learning. First, video-recordings of two teams’ meetings were analyzed to trace the tensions, negotiations, and cocreation of KOs. Second, students’ reflective diaries were analyzed to identify collective KPs.

Findings

The negotiation and cocreation of KOs were mediated by multiple material resources and participants’ disciplinary knowledge. In their diaries, students described the following collective KPs: 1) attending to interdisciplinary problems, 2) responsibility taking, 3) framing expertise and contribution, 4) crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, 5) exploring and concretizing new knowledge, and 6) reflecting and expanding upon practices and knowledge.

Contributions

The study widens our understanding of the intertwined dynamics of KOs and KPs through which students collectively create and engage in interdisciplinary learning.

Introduction

Western societies are in the era of the knowledge societies, where innovativeness, information sharing, interaction, and value creation have become integral to responding to the increasingly complex societal challenges and succeeding in the highly competitive global markets (Kasworm, 2011; Martin de Castro et al., 2008). The importance of promoting students’ interdisciplinary learning (IDL) has thus become a central topic in the academic and practitioner literature concerning students’ educational and working life opportunities and educational change in general (Clark & Wallace, 2015; Lyall & Meagher, 2012).

For the last couple of decades, the emphasis in higher education (HE) has increasingly been placed on the need to acquire transversal 21st century skills, such as interdisciplinarity, digital skills, critical literacy skills, collaboration skills, entrepreneurial skills, lifelong learning, and skills related to social and environmental responsibility (Spelt et al., 2009; Tight, 2021). The ability to think, integrate knowledge across disciplines, and understand the relations between fields of knowledge is considered one of the most critical 21st century skills (Frodeman, 2010; Oliver & Jorre de St Jorre, 2018), as it facilitates the overall functioning of a contemporary knowledge society (Van Laar et al., 2017).

Boix Mansilla et al. define interdisciplinary understanding as

The capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines or established areas of expertise to produce a cognitive advancement—such as explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, or creating a product—in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single disciplinary means. (Boix Mansilla et al., 2000, p. 219)

Interdisciplinarity can also refer to actualizing, contrasting, synthesizing, and changing knowledge through integration that leads to interdisciplinary understanding or interdisciplinary thinking (Klein, 1990). It is a reciprocally interactive approach that aims to create “links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole” (Choi & Pak, 2006, p. 359) and that can, for example, produce an entirely new practice or communication method.

Students trained at HE institutions and entering the working life are confronted with increasingly complex tasks, problems, and ambiguous information (e.g., Barnett, 2012). Interdisciplinary understanding is particularly important for dealing with these challenges as solving them often calls for insights and modes of thinking from several disciplines (Tynjälä et al., 2006). In the context of HE, the development of students’ interdisciplinary understanding “requires a learning process through which learners integrate insights and modes of thinking from a number of disciplines to advance their understanding” (Kidron & Kali, 2015, p. 1). Such an IDL process demands not only time and a high level of understanding of one’s own disciplinary knowledge but also work across disciplines and other epistemic boundaries (Barry & Born, 2013; Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017).

Research on efforts to facilitate IDL in HE has identified several critical features. Students from multiple disciplines typically constitute a heterogeneous group with diverse knowledge and practices (Muukkonen et al., 2010). The collective efforts to cocreate productive dialog and new conceptual understandings and practices may thus be a complicated process in which tensions often emerge (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020; Ludvigsen et al., 2011) and pose challenges for IDL.

This study investigates how interdisciplinary understanding manifests through knowledge articulated and expanded in the creation of knowledge objects (KOs)— i.e., shared artifacts—through IDL. KOs are evolving entities (e.g., reports, guidelines, software, etc.) shaped by interactions between participants (Damşa & Muukkonen, 2020; Nicolini et al., 2012). To go beyond the procedural or discursive aspects of IDL, we address IDL as mediated by KOs, structuring activities, and explication of shared understanding. We also use the concept of knowledge practices (KPs) to examine the emergence and evolution of collective knowledge-creation practices in IDL. KPs can be defined as dynamic epistemic practices through which people jointly create knowledge around open-ended and complex problems (Knorr Cetina, 2001).

Prior research has emphasized the reciprocal interaction between students’ knowledge creation and practices (KPs), suggesting a dual analytical approach beyond “mere” knowledge and “mere” practice (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020). While several researchers have placed more emphasis on the discursive practices in KPs (e.g., Sandoval & Reiser, 2004), this study aims to identify the KOs that emerge during and across the student teams’ discursive interaction. To simplify, in an extended, open-ended collaboration in HE, such as in our course simulation or projects, the KOs are developed based on a collective reason and pursued with engagement in the KPs. Thus, KOs answer why the teams are collaborating and what is expected of them. However, the relationship is reciprocal, as the developed KPs may or may not correspond to the expectations for the KO. Therefore, the questions how the team collaborates (KPs) to meet expectations and what (if anything) the team needs to alter in their KPs. Both the KOs and the collective KPs have so far been underexplored in research on IDL in HE aiming to identify their emerging, mediated, and reciprocal qualities.

To facilitate collaboration and the cocreation of new knowledge and shared tools for collective IDL processes, materially rich learning settings designed to enhance interaction and negotiation are needed (Tartas & Muller Mirza, 2007). Learning environments utilizing game-based techniques and simulations are becoming more popular in HE. Simulation environments follow educational objectives and allow learners to study complex and real phenomena (Sauve et al., 2007) and reconstruct realistic situations and interactions (Chernikova et al., 2020) that can enable them to practice important skills, knowledge integration, and interaction processes. For example, medical education simulations enable students to practice and facilitate complex skills such as diagnostic competency and problem solving (e.g., Heitzmann et al., 2019), and legal simulations (Hertel & Millis, 2002) enable them to apply disciplinary knowledge and real-world skills in interactions. However, we currently lack research knowledge of simulation-facilitated learning with a longer duration and aimed at supporting IDL (Chernikova et al., 2020; Spelt et al., 2017; Stentoft, 2017).

In this study, we investigate shared KOs and jointly established KPs, and their intertwinement with students’ IDL. We do so by examining how a simulation-based learning environment and related learning design can facilitate the emergence and evolvement of shared KOs, KPs, and IDL. We studied IDL as a lengthy, collective learning process, including tensions, negotiations, and the cocreation of KOs and KPs. Due to the longer duration of the simulation, we could follow what kinds of KOs the students generated and engaged with during collaboration. We examined how KOs and KPs could serve as theoretical conceptualizations through which to study collaboration and IDL in the simulations. To contribute to methodological understanding of IDL, we studied team interaction (in videos) around the emerging KOs and students’ reflections (in diaries) on how the evolving practices in teams facilitated or undermined the IDL processes. On the practical side, we studied whether, according to the students, the simulation design met the goal of fostering interdisciplinary understanding and interaction.

Our empirical study was undertaken in four iterations of a master’s-level course on organizational psychology at a public university in Finland. In the course, which included six 3.5-hour long meetings, organization simulation in which the students were expected to create an organization (i.e., the team), a business concept, and an offer of human resources (HR) services to a client was used. In each of the 12 teams in the study, the students were from educational psychology, engineering, economics, humanities, and education degree programs. This involvement of students from multiple fields of study created an environment in which they could engage in IDL, obtain knowledge and integrate it, and produce a competing offer, among other outcomes. The teams worked with the same client for an imaginary company from the field of industrial design and competed with one another to produce the best offer, which would be chosen by the client.

We carried out a socioculturally informed analysis of the learning processes of two selected student teams via video recordings and a larger body of student diaries that captured the students’ experiences throughout the course and while working in their teams. First, video-recorded team meetings of two teams captured team negotiation, coordination, and materially mediated activities about the ideation and creation of the shared KOs. As the second analysis, we then identified the collective KPs described in the students’ diaries, which they kept on a weekly basis.

Knowledge objects emerging through collaboration

KOs (or epistemic objects) are at the core of collaborative efforts in academic professions; examples include new procedural guidelines, new product development, and design or research plans (cf. Knorr Cetina, 2001; Miettinen, 2005; Rheinberger, 1997). The historical roots of this concept stem from the concept of the object of activity as both a motive for collective activities and the more tangible mediating KOs and artifacts (Miettinen, 2005; Nicolini et al., 2012). Stetsenko (2005) has further posited that the nature of object-oriented activity captivates different underlying processes: material production with tools, social interactions among people, and individuals’ activities that regulate these processes.

In HE, shared KOs with an epistemic dimension are designed to form cocreated outcomes, such as research reports, coauthored essays, designs, and software programs (Damşa & Muukkonen, 2020; Muukkonen et al., 2020). In our study, KOs refer to representations of individual and collective knowledge emerging through collaboration (Hakkarainen, 2009), which can manifest as a shared “topic” (similar to an objective), or as a shared, concrete knowledge artifact (plan, model, report, etc.), or as both (Paavola et al., 2011). Due to their multiple mediating qualities, shared KOs guide the collaborative process, raise awareness of gaps in understanding, make visible generated knowledge, and prompt reflection on progress (Damşa, 2014; Van Aalst, 2009) while they are being negotiated and cocreated.

Knowledge practices

In this study, we define students’ KPs as open-ended and dynamic epistemic practices through which they jointly engage in creating and developing knowledge (Knorr Cetina, 2001) and a shared understanding of concepts (Damşa, 2014). We consider KPs embodied and materially mediated practices (Schatzki, 2000), that channel students’ intellectual efforts, further inquiries, and collective learning processes (Hakkarainen, 2009; Stahl & Hakkarainen, 2020; Zhang et al., 2018) and their IDL. Therefore, IDL needs to take into consideration shared KOs and KPs that emerge from a combination of different fields of study and actors.

Here, knowledge creation is defined as a social practice (Knorr Cetina, 2001), and a continuous, complex, relational exchange process (Kimmerle et al., 2010). It consists of individual actions and interactions (Jornet & Damşa, 2021) that contribute to the creation of new knowledge, innovations, and knowledge advancement (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005; Scardamalia, 2002), as well as to the creation of shared KOs and KPs (Damşa, 2014; Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020). It is a tension-laden and creative process and thus has transformative potential (Kimmerle et al., 2010; Lattuca, 2002; Muukkonen et al., 2010). Understanding of KPs requires an awareness of the ecological conditions and factors (e.g., contextual conditions, available tools, and other resources) under and through which KPs emerge and evolve. The interdisciplinary context provides an additional challenge for understanding the ecology of learning, since no common disciplinary base exists for KPs.

Interdisciplinary learning

Enhancing our comprehension of the increasingly complex societal challenges of the 21st century demands IDL (Boix Mansilla, 2017; Nikitina, 2005; Slakmon & Schwarz, 2019). Simultaneously, prior research has reported different dimensions of interdisciplinary thinking and learning. For example, based on their systematic review of theoretical and empirical publications examining teaching and learning in interdisciplinary HE, Spelt et al. (2009) identified five subskills required in interdisciplinary thinking: knowledge of disciplines, knowledge of disciplinary paradigms, knowledge of interdisciplinarity, higher-order cognitive skills (e.g., integrating disciplinary knowledge), and communication skills. An empirical, sociocultural study focusing on academic work, has suggested that IDL amplifies the relational, mediated, transformative, and situated dimensions of learning and creativity (Lattuca, 2002). Furthermore, to go beyond the procedural or conversational aspects of IDL, it may be seen as mediated by shared knowledge objects (e.g., various artifacts, tools, reports, guidelines, software, etc.) (Damşa & Muukkonen, 2020) and collective knowledge practices.

IDL is a complex cognitive process through which students integrate ideas from different disciplines to develop interdisciplinary understanding. In this process, the students first need to establish a purpose or reason for integrating knowledge. Then, maintaining a critical stance, they need to identify knowledge domains and insights from two or more disciplines that are relevant to them. The integration of information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, ideas, concepts, and theories, enabling the development of interdisciplinary thinking, can generate products, explanations, and resolutions beyond single disciplinary means (Boix Mansilla et al., 2000).

In this study, we conceive of IDL as a process that creates new information, innovations, and social practices (Hakkarainen et al., 2004). It takes place through sustained interaction and negotiation activities aiming to create new knowledge through work on shared KOs (Damşa et al., 2010; Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005), and via KPs (Knorr Cetina, 2001). IDL can also be seen as a social process that incorporates multiple distinguishable phases that constitute a cycle of personal and social knowledge building (Stahl, 2000). Furthermore, we interpret the complexity of IDL considering co‐configuration work involving collective, nonlinear learning, and embedded in “transformations, upheavals, innovations, implementations and movements” (Engeström, 2004, p. 16).

Achieving shared KOs, KPs, and IDL among students representing different traditions, domains of expertise, and social languages is often challenging. Learning processes involving students with different knowledge resources (Braun & Campione, 1996) and distinct academic backgrounds may include nonlinear organization of collaboration and overly complex knowledge-creation processes (Stahl & Hakkarainen, 2020). Students’ competences and attitudes differ, and learning in interdisciplinary teams may result in ambiguity, especially among students without prior experience in IDL, calling for targeted facilitation (Song & Wang, 2021; Stentoft, 2017). In addition, the students’ degree of participation in novel learning environments varies, with some students taking more responsibility than the others, such as coordinating joint work and offering support to others (Leskinen et al., 2020), which may complicate the group’s collaboration and productive interdisciplinary engagement.

Adding to the complexity, technologically and materially mediated, creative learning processes often involve surprises and interactions that are difficult to regulate, predict, and script (Sawyer, 2012), which poses challenges for students and their teachers (Kajamaa et al., 2020). Moreover, the multisource and multimodal nature of KOs and KPs (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020) can be challenging for the students. Altogether, IDL is embedded in complex practices of collaboration and thus cannot be taken for granted (Stentoft, 2017). It is not about learning pre-defined conceptualizations or about the transmission of existing knowledge to cope with a given task; rather, it is about the creation of new KOs and KPs that are not there yet.

In IDL processes, tensions and barriers are important, as they may become a resource for interdisciplinary work. Overcoming tensions and the creation of new knowledge in collaboration always requires negotiation and co-construction. These can take place via the emergence and enactment of mutual engagement and a dialogue among diverse actors (Tartas & Muller Mirza, 2007; Wertsch & Toma, 1995). Tartas and Muller Mirza (2007, p. 156) argued that the “moments of tension and negotiation are key points in the elaboration of collaborative work, and help the partners to make explicit—and the researchers to grasp—the psychosocial dynamics at work in the construction of knowledge.”

It is also important to note that in IDL, participants can establish common ground, pursue collaboration, and collective learning and change without abandoning their different viewpoints, based on their own disciplinary knowledge (Sorsa & Vaara, 2020; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2017). Moreover, the establishment of collaboration among participants from multiple disciplinary backgrounds deems not only the establishment of negotiation, mutual engagement, and a dialogue, but also multiple shared tools and practices (e.g., Wenger, 1998), to mediate and support the communication.

Simulation as a vehicle for promoting interdisciplinary learning

Several previous studies have suggested that technology-enhanced learning environments may facilitate the creation of shared KOs and KPs (e.g., Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020; Muukkonen et al., 2010; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). Such environments are also introduced to provide better opportunities for student interaction, collaboration, knowledge creation, and conceptual advancement (Damşa et al., 2010; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). They can entail the breaking of traditional spatial and temporal boundaries of student learning and pedagogical activities, making remote information sources more accessible (Ritella & Hakkarainen, 2012; Suthers, 2006).

Innovative learning environments and game-based techniques, such as organization simulation, are especially useful, as they are more engaging for students than lectures (Wright-Maley, 2015), and promote students’ IDL (Arora, 2012) and learning outcomes (Chernikova et al., 2020). Simulation can, for example, help to adopt existing knowledge by translating university education and knowledge into professional practice (Hopwood et al., 2016) and to develop and model new forms of practices (Gormley et al., 2020). For example, game-based computer-supported collaborative learning simulations, which takes place in virtual internships (VIs), have proven useful for addressing students’ epistemic cognition. In VIs, students participate in epistemic games as virtual interns with other interns and expert mentors and engage in authentic activities, such as in preparing the students for civic and political action (Chen & Stoddard, 2020), that develop their skills, knowledge, and values (Nash & Shaffer, 2013). System dynamics modeling has been applied to support planning and decision-making in HE by combining knowledge from medicine, economics, and sociology. System dynamics modeling, conducted via the development of causal diagrams and computer simulation models, allows users to capture the dynamic, complex, and nonlinear attributes of planning and decision-making. Conducting scenario analyzes with the help of simulation models has, for example, helped policymakers to better understand the development needs of their local HE systems (Strauss & Borenstein, 2015).

The simulation, as an IDL ecology, aims to create an authentic environment of people, material resources, tools, and epistemic objects. In it, the teams are expected to collectively engage in making sense of the environment and available resources, especially to recognize and build on the team members’ different knowledge and expertise. Learning design for an interdisciplinary context entails additional complexity due to the presence of multiple disciplinary backgrounds and thus involves the risks of confusion and insufficient efforts to communicate and cross boundaries (Muukkonen et al., 2010). Therefore, the design needs to involve tasks and scaffolds that specifically support interdisciplinary communication and integration.

Research questions

Our study investigates students’ KOs and models their KPs that contribute to IDL during a master’s-level course via organization simulation. We formulated the following research questions:

1. What is the role of cocreated knowledge objects in the emergence and evolvement of IDL?

2. Which collective knowledge practices that contribute to students’ IDL can be identified during the organization simulation?

Method

Our empirical case study was undertaken in four iterations of a master’s-level course on organizational psychology. We used organization simulation in which students created a business concept and an offer of HR services to a client. Our study applies case-based learning, meaning that a problem or inquiry is used to stimulate and underpin the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to promote authentic learning and student collaboration (e.g., McLean, 2016). We analyzed video recordings of two teams’ interactions and 84 students’ diaries to determine how they explained and reflected on collective KOs, KPs, and IDL. The findings section illustrates the creation process of central KOs, and the artifacts that contributed to the creation of the offer to the client. It also empirically demonstrates the six types of KPs that emerged among the teams.

Context

The Organizational Psychology course (5 credits in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, ECTS) consisted of lectures and as a simulation exercise of a small HR company that entailed making an offer for consultation and training to a client company. The course involved students with backgrounds in educational psychology, engineering, economics, humanities, and education. The weekly 3.5-hour sessions took place for six weeks. Each session started with a plenary lecture on themes in organizational psychology (e.g., organization dynamics, mobile and multi-located work, and trust), lasting 45–60 minutes each. Then, each of the student teams (i.e., the organizations) was given full responsibility for planning, scheduling, and leading their teamwork for 90–120 minutes. Thereafter, everyone reconvened and reflective tasks and discussions were carried out for approximately 30 minutes during each session. The four iterations of the course followed the same structure shown in Figure 1, which shows simulation tasks in the top layer and individual tasks below.

Figure 1. Student activities in simulation and individually, arrows mark additional tasks for organizations.

The course had the following expected learning outcomes: 1) knowledge of central elements of leadership and organizations and their application in different tasks and duties in an organization, 2) skills to observe and reflect on one’s own ways of interacting and representing expertise in one’s own field in an interdisciplinary group, 3) analyze and apply knowledge of team- and organization-related group dynamics, and 4) understanding of individual and organizational factors related to psychological well-being at work.

The simulation aimed to promote productive engagement in team interactions, offer a venue in which to practice teamwork and leadership, and reflect on the teamwork based on course literature and students’ experiences. However, individual learning tasks were central to supporting knowledge uptake and offering viable reading and theoretical understanding related to the different contents and phases of the simulation process. The teams were expected to create 1) an offer for the client, combining the expertise of the organization and other intermediary or contributing artifacts supporting the writing of the offer; 2) a description of the expertise, the roles of organization members, a logo, and organization’s values; and 3) an annual HR plan for their organization. These constituted the shared task for each team but were not graded. Grading was carried out on the individual learning diaries, which documented personal learning and reflection on the organization simulation. The evaluation criteria for the learning diary were as follows: reflections of one’s own learning and organization activities and descriptions and applications of concepts, theories, and research findings in relation to one’s own activities and one’s organization’s activities (scoring: 1 – pass, 5 – outstanding).

Prior studies have suggested that smaller groups or team sizes may offer students a more satisfying collaborative environment (e.g., Kooloos et al., 2011). A meta-analysis (Swanson et al., 2019) also suggested that a group size of five or fewer was associated with better content knowledge outcomes. In this regard, the simulation did not offer an ideal collaborative environment, but rather placed the students in larger interdisciplinary teams of 11–15 members, to simulate working in a small organization. From a learning design point of view, the simulation had two key objectives. First, students would be interacting in interdisciplinary teams to practice coregulation of efforts and collaboration with members with various backgrounds, with the aim of experimenting and reflecting on different approaches and ways of addressing challenging collaboration situations. The second aim was to integrate knowledge from different fields to create the offer and other outcomes expected from the organization. In the last iteration, the course was fully online, which raised some additional challenges for the teams in self-organizing their collaboration.

During the first organization meeting, the teams were instructed to map and describe the expertise of the organization and to appoint a CEO as well as heads for HR, finances, and communications, with dedicated smaller teams to support these functions. The teams then self-organized their collaboration during weekly organization meetings. The client that gave the organizations the initial request for tenders was an external expert in HR. In the end, the same client evaluated the created offers, provided feedback on them, and selected one of the offers as the winner for the imaginary company the client represented.

Course readings were selected to support a conceptual and research-based understanding of organizational processes, while the simulation aimed to offer an experience of coordinating and leading teamwork as well as facing and managing related challenges. The simulation emphasized certain facets of teamwork: for example, the teams had only a short time to plan their collaboration and the offer with unfamiliar teammates, which highlighted the need to map the expertise and define responsibilities. Additional tasks were introduced to echo the, at times, overlapping practices of knowledge work, which calls for the reorganization of the primary activities in the organization. For each task, the teams were provided with written instructions outlining the expected outcomes and deadlines. The steps needed to carry out the tasks, however, were not outlined; they were left for the teams to negotiate and organize.

Participants

The teachers divided the students into teams such that each disciplinary field was represented within each team. The video-recorded teams were Team 1 (11 students) and Team 2 (14 students). Diary data (n = 84) was available from students in the following fields: educational psychology (n = 36), engineering (n = 16), economics (n = 12), humanities (n = 10), and education (n = 10) (see Table 1). Two teachers—one present in all iterations (the first author) and three others participating in alternating years—and the client held lectures and provided feedback. In the second iteration of the course, permission to video record the students was requested. Two teams were formed from participants who gave written permission to record their team interactions and to use them for research purposes; the remaining students were directed to the third team. Altogether, 175 students completed these four iterations of the course. Permission to use their diaries for research purposes was thus received from 48% of the participants.

Table 1. Participants.

Study field	Gender						Age
	Male	%	Female	%	Total	%	Mean	SD
Educational psychology	4	18.2	32	51.6	36	42.9	29.4	8.0
Engineering	12	54.5	4	6.5	16	19.0	28.0	7.4
Economics	4	18.2	8	12.9	12	14.3	26.7	6.7
Humanities	1	4.5	9	14.5	10	11.9	27.2	5.3
Education	1	4.5	9	14.5	10	11.9	32.3	8.8
Total	22	100	62	100	84	100	28.8	7.5

Data collection and materials

The data were collected during and after the course, once informed consent was obtained from the participants. In accordance with local legislation, neither an ethical review nor approval was required. The video recordings of the two teams’ interactions during their team meetings and a representative sample of all learning diaries delivered after the course constitute the primary data. The video recordings consisted of 386 minutes and 296 minutes of video from Teams 1 and 2, recorded during five and four team meetings, respectively (a total of 11 hours 22 minutes). The video recorder was placed stationary in a corner of the room where the team met. The learning diaries ranged in length from 5 to 22 pages (average 13.5 of A4 pages). Nine of the diaries were written by the participants in video-recorded team meetings. Organizations’ written productions, offers, and reflection documentation, as well as teachers’ course materials, were collected as descriptive materials.

Data analysis

Methodologically, our analysis constructs the particular contextual conditions in and through which collaborative interactions, the creation of KOs and KPs, took place. We employed interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to explore the processes of creation of shared KOs in the video-recorded team meetings. We also carried out a qualitative content analysis (Brown & Clark, 2006; Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) on the students’ reflective diaries to identify emerging and evolving KPs.

For the interaction analysis, we used an iterative approach, which is an inductive form of analysis that “encourages reflection upon the active interests, current literature, granted priorities and various theories the researcher brings to the data” (Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009, p. 77). The data were first approached by viewing the video corpus as a whole. Our analysis also applied the techniques provided by Jordan and Henderson (1995) to depict the nature and context of the creation process of KOs—i.e., the units of our analysis. This process was considered to begin when the students shared and integrated their individually held discipline-specific knowledge during their discussions, which typically involved hands-on creative activities, such as drawing logos for their companies or drafting outlines for their offers.

From the students’ interactions, we depicted the development process of several complementary (shared and not shared) cocreated KOs, each followed by one another, and bit by bit, intertwining and forming a constellation of KOs that were meaningful to all the members of a given team and relevant to their successful accomplishment of the tasks. We considered the creation process of the KOs to have ended once the students had finalized the offer to the client, presented it in class, and evaluated their team process in the last course meeting.

In our initial reading of the diaries, we identified two main types of content: accounts of individual subject matter learning descriptions and collective KPs. The diaries were analyzed by first reading each diary and segmenting it into units of analysis constructed based on descriptions of individual (subject matter) learning or collective KPs. The subsequent steps focused solely on collective KPs that described team processes or a personal stance on team processes. For the categorization, a unit of analysis was typically one paragraph or part of a paragraph in the diary (one or several sentences). The categories were constructed as mutually exclusive, and a choice had to be made about the key content, which was often complicated due to the reflective writing. The primary coder (the first author) first analyzed the diaries using NVivo software (Lumivero, 2020). The emergent categorization yielded themes of responsibility taking, collaboration and coordination, knowledge that advanced the tasks, and reflection. During the data analysis sessions, the categories were repeatedly discussed among the authors with examples from the data and refined in light of theoretical conceptualization from the relevant literature (e.g., the expression of crossing disciplinary boundaries). All diaries were then reanalyzed with the refined categorization (see Table 2). To establish the reliability of the analysis the second coder (the second author) scored a representative sample of the data by applying the same analytical framework. We discussed any disagreements in coding (e.g., some of the coding rules were further clarified) until there was agreement. Table 2 outlines the categories, category descriptions, data examples, and category frequencies in this analysis. The excerpts were translated from the original language (Finnish) into English, in line with the standard procedures for translating research data and maintaining the original intention and style of expression.

Table 2. Categorization, description, data examples, and frequencies of knowledge practice categories in interdisciplinary teams.

Category	Description	Data example	f
Attending to the interdisciplinary task and problems	Describing the collaboration activities and phases. Explaining how the work took place, how the team organized itself. Description of problems and tensions as they evolved.	Today, we had a good chance to think about the entire content of the offer, the skeleton structure, with the rest of the team. After this, we divided into groups to think about the different parts of the structure in more detail. At the end, we pulled everything together. After the usual pains, we got good frames made for the offer. Cf64	314
Responsibility taking and commitment	Description of oneself or another team member taking responsibility for some task or function and how that contributed to the teamwork. Describing a lack of responsibility expected from a role. Evaluating team commitment to joint objectives.	Fortunately, the person elected as CEO of our organization did not panic unnecessarily, and the “we spirit” created in the previous meetings prevailed. The CEO started a discussion about how we were going to organize, and although the atmosphere was democratic, the CEO was the person who was more vocal and led us to a compromise. Cf71	162
Framing expertise, roles, and contributions	Considering one’s own expertise and how one is able to contribute to the team. Expressing taking on a new role in the simulation, e.g., more responsibility. Evaluating roles and contributions of other team members, including choice of leadership.	I’m wondering if I should choose my own role from an area where I already have experience, or if I should go for a completely new territory for the sake of learning. The most distant topic to me would have been well-being at work, but I ended up in a somewhat more familiar area, i.e. the management team. In addition, I signed up for the communications manager’s job, where I thought I could find something to contribute as a former communications student. Bf49	167
Crossing interdisciplinary boundaries	Description of how boundaries between fields of study were crossed and knowledge and expertise from the different fields was integrated. Recognition of contradictory conceptualizations or field-related practices.	We felt that we learned many things from interdisciplinary collaboration and organizational work, such as the ability to work under pressure and urgency as well as reacting and anticipating situations (e.g., additional tasks), using different remote working platforms, relying on the team, and listening and applying different perspectives. In addition to these, we got to know interdisciplinary teaching methods. Em97	64
Concretizing and exploring new knowledge	Explication of going deeper into a subject in teamwork. Materialized the integrated knowledge into a tangible outcome. Considering improvements based on feedback from the client.	Currently, our offer consists of two sections, one of which is devoted to improving occupational safety and the other to occupational well-being. Today we split into two teams. Although in our own team we didn’t make much progress in the making of the offer, we still got a better outline of what kind of service we offer and how to get it sold to the client. The outlines started to form and for the next time is left to write the offer. Cf62	116
Reflecting and expanding practices and knowledge	Reflection of the simulation experiences (personal and team) and expressions considering how the simulation could be improved or repeated in a more fluent or improved way.	At the beginning of the course, I didn’t really know what to expect, but towards the end I started to understand and see how the different theories come out in practice. The stages of group formation came up so strongly in our own organization that those will not be easily forgotten. Am3	260
Total			1083

Finally, we examined how these KPs were distributed across the six weeks of the simulation (when this information was available). The aim was to determine how students emphasized KPs across the simulation trajectory.

Limitations

The video data were collected during one course iteration from only two teams because several members of the third team did not consent to being video recorded. The participants in the course were very homogenous in terms of cultural background, thereby limiting our views. However, this context may have especially highlighted the nature of IDL compared to other contexts in which multicultural factors might have influenced the learning processes.

The diary data have limitations in terms of their potential for elucidating KPs and the IDL process. The diaries conveyed the participants’ individual perspectives on the collaboration process, and there was considerable variation in the depth and lengths of the participants entries. A comparison of the average grades for the diaries, although some data from non-participants was missing, revealed that the participants who had given permission to use their diaries earned higher grades (average score: 3.84/5, range 2–5) compared to those who did not give permission (average: 3.51/5, range: 1–5). This suggests that although there was a high proportion of best grades in both groups, those who had given permission may have invested more effort in the course.

Findings

This section presents the results of the two analyzes: 1) which KOs were created and how they evolved based on the video data and artifacts from teams and 2) what kinds of KPs were described in the diaries and how they were distributed across the simulation trajectory. Both analyzes also add to the description of how the KOs and KPs contributed to IDL.

Knowledge objects that contribute to interdisciplinary learning

The first research question aimed to determine the role of KOs in the emergence and evolvement of IDL. We first provide an overview of the instrumental use of tools, artifacts, and course materials as resources for learning. The teams adopted different tools to share their notes, drafts, and materials. Both teams used affordances in the class, taking notes on a whiteboard, on a flip chart, and in shared online documents. Typically, teams adopted one application for communication and sharing pictures of notes and sheets with instructions (Facebook and WhatsApp in the two teams) and another shared online tools (MS Word online, Google Docs) for drafting and editing. Although their time was dedicated to team discussions with all team members, the participants spent part of their time on their laptops in pairs or in smaller teams. Mobile phones were frequently used to conduct searches and access resources. Particular artifacts started to structure the discussion, and the teams increasingly began to build on the material resources to negotiate and extend their understanding of the task. These were considered to form the KOs for teams.

Next, we identified the key KOs that were cocreated by the students during their weekly meetings. Table 3 presents examples of how the KOs were formulated through the collective creation of artifacts in interactions, contributing to IDL in the teams.

Table 3. Knowledge objects and contributing artifacts with examples from teams (IDL = interdisciplinary learning).

Weekly organization meeting	Knowledge object	Contributing knowledge artifacts	Examples of team artifacts and interaction	Digital Tools	IDL challenge
1	Expertise in team	Introduction of the members and responsibilities		MSWord	Explore and describe expertise in team
1	Organiza-tion identity and marketing	Organization’s logo and values		MSWord, PowerPoint, design tools	Negotiate organization identity and mission; Externalize values and design of logo
1,2	Competing offer for the client (1/2)	Draft ideas for the offer		Meeting notes, whiteboard notes	Ideate and organize activities to plan services and a competitive offer
2,3,4	Competing offer for the client (2/2)	Draft structure		Whiteboard, Google docs document, MS word document	Decide on components of the offer; Plan and coordinate team responsibilities
3,4	Understanding of HR activities (1/2)	Playing the BestBoss game		BestBoss game (2018) http://service.mekiwi.org/playgain/bestleanboss/	Learn about HR activities in an organization; Achieve adequate game scores
3,4	Understanding of HR activities (2/2)	Team annual HR resources plan		MSWord, PowerPoint presentation	Define HR-process and plan of investments in HR-activities
4	Cooperation negotiations	CEOs and communication responsibles: Video to announce negotiations		Mobile phones, laptops https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_23sO8mEvc	Communicate leadership decisions
4,5	Finalized offer for the client (1/3)	Pricing the services and budget for the offer		Spread sheets, tables, costs, price per hour	Economics expertise to calculate budget together with expertise on the chosen services
5	Finalized offer for the client (2/3)	The finalized offer		Pdf document	Collectively iterate and finalize the offer for the client
6	Finalized offer for the client (3/3)	Final offer presentation		PowerPoint	Offer presentation for the client and the class; Client’s feedback to offers
6	Evaluation	Evaluation notes on a template for evaluation discussion in teams		MS word	Reflect on team processes and conclude teamwork

The first- and second-week KOs were named expertise in teams and organization identity and marketing. The teams introduced themselves and created a name, logo, and values for their respective organizations, which required them to build an understanding of members’ expertise and assign responsibilities. These were all submitted in documents.

The central KO that manifested in several team meetings was ideating and drafting the competing offer for the client. The participants elaborated on their experiences and ideas regarding what kinds of services should be offered to the client. They generated a vast array of ideas of services for improving work environments, well-being at work, profitability, management practices, and training needs, among others. These stemmed from their fields of expertise and personal experiences at work (e.g., experiences from early education services or HR services in an IT company). Draft ideas were presented in weeks 1 and 2 and further elaborated and negotiated in weeks 3 and 4 to reach an agreement regarding the draft structure of the offer. Teams used the whiteboard in class and created documents to construct the outline. Team responsibilities were revised to ensure that each one received the expertise required.

The next KO became apparent during the teams’ next task––creating an understanding of central HR processes in organizations and how services could be designed to improve productivity and well-being to respond to the client’s expectations. The contributing artifacts and tools were both an AI-based game played by teams (http://service.mekiwi.org/playgain/bestleanboss/) and the design of an annual HR resources plan for their organization. Their purpose was to familiarize the organizations with key HR activities.

Week 5 presented a disruption for the organizations as cooperation negotiations involving all teams were announced. The CEO and head of communications were tasked with making a video announcing negotiations regarding plans in accordance with reduced available resources in a hypothetical situation.

Partly overlapping the previous tasks, the team needed to continue to create a finalized offer for the client. For example, the pricing of the services and a budget for the offer needed to be negotiated, which required expertise in economics and an understanding of the offered services (e.g., planned interventions, interviews, or questionnaires to identify the efforts and costs involved). The finalized offer was delivered to the client and presented during the last course plenary meeting. A team self-evaluation concluded the simulation.

Regarding the video data on ideating and drafting the competing offer for the client, three episodes of interaction in which the KOs were articulated must be highlighted. Episodes 1 and 2 provide evidence of deliberate attempts by two students in Team 1 (during their third meeting), to draw attention to the available material resources, namely the course readings and weekly assignment readings, supporting them in building the offer for the client. Since these students were majoring in educational psychology, they may have been more familiar with the conceptualizations in the materials. These discussions started when one team member, Kata, wanted to draw attention to the reading materials in the course (a book), to suggest approaches to selecting intervention methods to be included in the offer and to present evidence of their effectiveness. However, this was acknowledged by only one other team member. Instead of proceeding based on evidence of effectiveness, the team continued to discuss how to proceed and how to ask the client questions, thus ignoring Kata’s suggestion. At this point (Episode 1), a second member, Mikko, pointed to the necessity of creating links between the weekly assignments and the client’s needs, thereby returning to the question of evidence:

Episode 1

Mikko: It came to my mind that, in the request for offers, a goal was to increase commitment to work, so the weekly assignment was completely related to that. There’s a lot on it … .

(silence)

How do we proceed, do we continue in the same smaller groups and the same topics, or do we discuss together, since not everyone was there last time?

Hanna: Could repeat what has been planned so far.

Here, the others did not respond to the initiative proposed by Mikko, and the discussion turned to the ideas and plans generated earlier. Apparently, the other team members considered creating the outline for the offer, as well as the offer itself, to be a more pressing discussion topic. Later, in Episode 2, Kata returned to the need for information from the psychology literature about the methods that support organizations:

Episode 2

Kata: I got the feeling again last night when I read the latest research that had been done on this, the other party [the client] would probably appreciate it if we really had that expertise.

Timo: Yes, yes.

Kata: We would ground our offer on what the research shows are the effective ways to do that.

(general agreement)

At this point Timo, who had a background in economics, moved to the flip chart and started to write and outline his view on the process with key steps and methods for the offer in a very long monologue. After a while, Kata spoke again to express her disagreement.

Kata: Well, not that—based on what I just heard and what I’ve read. It’s just that they should get those people, the supervisors, involved in doing it; we don’t come and do it for them …

(General agreement)

Kata: We should come up with such ways that they start doing it.

This exchange within the team between Kata and Timo highlights the different expectations they had regarding how to construct the offer. Kata wanted to seek information from research on interventions and their effectiveness to generate a basis for the offer, stemming from the general practices of her discipline. Timo wanted, instead, to have the process outline—that is, what the offer included—clearly expressed, including how to move ahead step by step. Although Kata expressed her disagreement, the approach she suggested was influenced by Timo’s process outline. She, however, turned the attention in the process from what they, as the HR consultants, would do according to the offer to what the interventions should achieve by engaging the clients effectively.

The use of the flip chart to mediate the discussion and turn of the focus to how the team’s efforts should be structured for the benefit of the client was a turning point in the discussion. It provided a shift from the activities of their team to knowledge about and the activities of the client which opened a productive path for seeking methods that would serve the client. This episode offers insights into the need to explain, negotiate, and converge the different disciplinary expectations and different viewpoints. Such negotiation of the KO integrating the various disciplinary viewpoints transforms the KO.

In the second team, the third meeting included a long discussion about different approaches for the services and methods in the offer, including interviews, questionnaires, and strategies to support well-being at work. The discussion touched on a wide variety of options, and this lack of focus generated some tension and frustration. Then, the team’s CEO stood up and went to the whiteboard:

Episode 3

Mari: Should we get organized? These are the problem areas for which they [the client] requested help. What can be included in our offer in the plan?

Liisa: It’s a fact that not everything can be impacted. What are the ones we want to grasp?

Mari: This organizational change, what is included? Is it related to, for example, team size?

Pia: They [the client] talked about self-managing teams.

Liisa: Then it was the turnover that worried them.

Mari: How do we start to cover it? What does a self-managing team mean?

Pia: So, what needs to be defined is how THEY [the client] think of self-management.

Mari, the CEO of the organization, who had a marketing field background, took the lead and invited the team to “get organized” to abandon their prior unfocused discussion. The team members who next responded to this, Liisa and Pia (who had educational psychology and history backgrounds, respectively), took up Mari’s question regarding the “problem areas” with which the client wanted help. This triggered the team to turn back to the call for tenders and find answers to what the client was actually expecting from them. Furthermore, it required defining the core terms to be used in the offer. This team also discovered the importance of taking the client’s perspective into account, a process mediated by the call for tenders. In this episode, the participants’ disciplinary backgrounds did not stand out; what appeared to be equally important was that someone took responsibility for directing the negotiations toward a common goal, namely the “problem areas” in the client’s tender, leading to a structured organization of the KO.

These episodes demonstrate the emergence and evolvement of the KO formulating the competing offer for the client. They show how students needed to collectively define the purpose, take responsibility for coordinating activities, and introduce additional knowledge and further needs. Students from different disciplinary backgrounds generally started with different expectations and premises on how to formulate the offer. These negotiations regarding the purpose, process, and content of the offer involved tensions and disagreements, which were also reflected on in the diaries.

Collective knowledge practices through which IDL emerges and evolves

The second analysis addressed which collective KPs could be identified in the diaries. The units of analysis in the diaries were categorized into six collective KPs through which IDL emerged and evolved: 1) attending to interdisciplinary problems, 2) responsibility taking, 3) framing expertise and contributions, 4) crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, 5) concretizing and exploring new knowledge, and 6) reflecting on and expanding practices and knowledge. The frequency distribution (in Table 2) shows that the first and sixth categories were the most prevalent, while explicit mentions of crossing interdisciplinary boundaries were the least frequent.

Attending to the interdisciplinary task and problems

Attending to the interdisciplinary task and problems was a fundamental prerequisite for the organization’s collective activities to be initiated and IDL practices to emerge. Many participants described this process from the point of view of how the team started their collaboration and formed a collective understanding of tasks or how they struggled with them, organized shared files and selected means of communication.

How members with different academic backgrounds started to disentangle the challenge in different ways came to light with the realization that they had different discipline-related approaches to the tasks. As illustrated in the following quote, some participants highlighted that they considered the efforts to identify a common thread vital and strove to sustain discussion through questions and prompts.

The CEO suggested right at the beginning that we split into sub-teams to think about the offer and then bring ideas together and create a consensus. I think that before dividing into sub-teams, the essence of the offer should be thought out together so that each sub-team does not go in completely different directions. During today’s organizational work, I tried to ask questions and identify the common thread of the offer and the basis for the offer, and we actually got to think about it a bit. (Cf64)

Sometimes, however, even if some discrepancies were noted, the participants did not take action out of fear of dominating the team activities or due to disagreements between team members.

It became apparent that several members had different ideas about the content of the offer. I didn’t want to dominate the group’s activities, so the final offer was quite different from what I had in mind. (Cf55)

Responsibility taking and commitment

The participants raised the need for and challenges related to responsibility taking as well as committing to teamwork in multiple ways. For example, they described the processes of responsibility taking in the first meeting, evaluated their own and the team’s responsibilities, and made efforts to balance any perceived problem.

At the end of the organization time, we were satisfied with what we had achieved, but we concluded that we might have to make our operations more efficient and spend time on the organizational task outside the time reserved within the course. In part, this aroused different views in the team about how much time everyone was willing to spend. (Cf67)

Issues concerning leadership generated multiple challenges and solutions. In some teams, the leadership role was assumed strongly by one person, sometimes with support from the team and sometimes with clear opposition and dissatisfaction as evidenced by the diaries. In some teams, no one was willing to take responsibility, which left the team disorganized, as shown in the next excerpt. However, in all diaries, responsibility taking was highlighted as a central factor contributing to the efforts of integrating knowledge and modes of thinking from several disciplines.

I feel that the formation of the organization could have happened in a very different way, [at a different] pace, and [with a different] division of tasks, if there had been a person who had wanted to be responsible for the whole. When no one wanted to be the decision-maker and the sole bearer of responsibility, the responsibility was on everyone and no one. (Cf63)

Framing expertise, roles, and contributions

The diaries also addressed participants’ personal expertise and contributions, and those of their team members. Personal expertise was often initially described with either confidence or uncertainty over possible contributions. The latter was more typical for students from the educational sciences, compared to others.

At first, I had a lot of questions about, among other things, what my own role in the group would be and how I fit into a large group. I was also nervous about the fact that I don’t have any special areas of expertise that I would have acquired, for example, through my work. (Bf38)

The students also provided explanations of team expertise, roles, and contributions in their diaries. They frequently described how the different academic backgrounds resulted in versatile expertise, which was projected in discussions, and that a team introduction session was crucial to assign roles in the teams. A smaller team composition was created based on the responsibilities discussed in the first meeting: an HR team, a communications team, a management team, and so forth. The roles in the groups turned out to be a defining factor in the simulation, as participants assumed expertise and acted on role expectations in the organization and in the communications in all the teams.

However, as the simulation proceeded, some serious challenges emerged, with some participants even referring to a crisis. This created a need to reorganize the tasks, reconfigure the objectives, or enhance the communication between some members:

However, the crisis turned into an opportunity one step at a time, when we were able to redistribute the tasks. It wasn’t until after this crisis that I actually got a sense of how our organization works and what were some previously hidden abilities and qualities of different people. At the beginning, the slightly timid atmosphere became more direct, but the conversation was factual. (Cm70)

Crossing interdisciplinary boundaries

In two thirds of the diaries, the notion of IDL was explicitly mentioned, and it was typically related to interdisciplinary boundaries and their crossing. At the beginning of the course, many of the students expressed anticipation of starting an ID collaboration and some admitted that they knew little about the other fields of study and the ways other participants worked.

Overall, the different expertise and working practices were perceived as a great challenge for teamwork, and participants expressed how knowledge integration would require time. How the team’s time was used was seen as an important factor in working toward IDL. An issue hindering boundary crossing was time pressure, which sometimes resulted in others’ ideas being ignored.

Reaching the common tone of the multi-professional and interdisciplinary working group now required time that the group members did not feel they had. The lack of time or the failure to rationalize the use of time caused the first dissonance in the work community, where the ideas of others were not grasped or were regarded with suspicion. (Bf46)

The range of expertise was seen to be based in not only several fields of study but also prior work experience. In addition, fresh ideas from younger participants were appreciated:

We refined our offer carefully and wanted it to be as official as possible without extra and vague content. Our team members had experience gained through work, both in responding to requests for tenders and in industrial companies, so we worked on the offer based on these concrete experiences and the knowledge gained from them. (Cf56)

However, the diaries also identified the need for the integration of disciplinary knowledge and learning multiple issues from each other, such as finance, communication, project management, and educational psychology.

There was also a big difference in how students from different fields understood some concepts. One of these was leadership. For people from the technical side, it mostly meant managing things, while for the educational sciences, it was about managing people, i.e. leadership. Noticing such differences gives me a good foundation for working life, because there will certainly be colleagues from different backgrounds. (Bf42)

Concretizing and exploring new knowledge

Throughout the simulation, teams were expected to contribute to the documents and presentations collectively. The main products were written mostly during the meetings. Only the last week prompted additional efforts, before submitting the final offer to the client. The diaries described efforts to make expertise visible, to explain it to each other, and to seek knowledge on the internet. A central way forward, for each of the teams, was to plan a structure, negotiate the content, and set explicit standards for the offer:

We discussed how the offer should be more concrete instead of vague jargon and how we should be able to present how we actually offer training and development services as well as practices and methods for developing work well-being, preventing absenteeism, and increasing productivity. (Cf56)

Diaries often mentioned evaluations of team offers based on feedback from the client and comparisons with competing teams. This comparison led to many integrated reflections combining team outcomes, the process, and gaining new knowledge from the feedback:

After this, we moved back to one space and started to present the offers. It was exciting that each group had quite different offers and paid attention to different issues. One team paid attention to practice, another to the idea of the simulation game, and our group to official matters. However, all the offers were really interesting, and it was meaningful to see the final results of the other teams. (Cf61)

Reflecting and expanding practices and knowledge

Reflection on the course as a process was central to the diaries. In the reflections, the organization’s activities were taken up as effective and ineffective. An important aspect was how the students reflected on ID collaboration and what they personally (or via collective reflection) suggested as more advanced ways of collaborating. For example, participants reflected on reasons for lapses in motivation, how a good team spirit was created, and how collaboration was limited or constrained through lack of commitment or time. They also reflected on the large team size and the need to self-organize into smaller teams to carry out dedicated tasks:

When there were only 10 minutes left, the others also realized that the task had not been done in a reasonable way. I think this time was a good lesson for our organization that we should not panic, even if there is little time and a lot to do. We decided together to change the way we worked next time. [] how much more difficult it is to work in a large team of more than 10 people than in a small group of five people. In the worst case, everyone just follows the situation from the side and no one takes responsibility for the tasks or ensures the tasks are done in a smart way. I can say that this time was, in my opinion, a good example of how not to work in an organization. (Bf39)

The students also described how they learned new ways to orient across the additional tasks (e.g., annual HR plan and cooperation negotiations), as these kept repeating. They explained that after the first additional task, their work in the organization had fully stopped, but due to the repeating experience, they were able to adapt their approaches and adjust more fluently. The simulation was perceived to create collective expectations for learning that differed from those of more typical university courses. This, in particular, related to the course’s relevance to working life and work-related competences:

I think that many people in our organization were very focused on making the offer, and I myself sometimes got too carried away by the HR manager’s surprise tasks, such as the annual HR plan. In the end, however, the core of the course seems to be precisely this kind of work, where you have to manage several different areas at the same time, just like in working life, and become familiar with how you are able to function under pressure and in surprising situations. (Bf47)

To summarize the findings regarding the emergence and evolvement of collective KPs, we examined the weekly distribution of the KP categories across the teams (Figure 2) and identified a stronger emphasis on the need to attend to ID problems and team members’ expertise in the early weeks of the simulation. Responsibility taking was evenly considered across the weeks, which suggests that it plays an important role in formulating KOs and collective KPs. This trend was also observed in the video recordings. Mentions of boundary crossing were not very frequent but were evenly distributed across the weeks. A stronger emphasis on concretizing and exploring with new knowledge in the latter weeks may have been due to competitive pressure and the stress of having to finalize the offer and use various resources to do so. Reflection on knowledge and practices quite naturally increased in the later weeks.

Figure 2. Distribution of categories of collective knowledge practices in diaries across the six course meetings.

Discussion

Our study examined how knowledge objects and knowledge practices contribute to students’ interdisciplinary learning in a higher education course employing an organization simulation design. The study also focused on investigating the complex and intertwined dynamics of KOs and KPs through which the students collectively created and enacted IDL.

Intertwined knowledge objects and knowledge practices

In both teams, the emergence and production of the KOs was heavily dependent on material artifacts, tools, and resources that mediated (e.g., Miettinen, 2005; Nicolini et al., 2012) and supported students’ interactions, negotiations, and decision-making (Tartas & Muller Mirza, 2007). For example, the use of the whiteboard and other forms of note taking played an important role during the meetings, such as anchoring and documenting discussion points. As our examples showed (Table 3), the co-created KOs, which consisted of individual and collective knowledge that emerged through collaboration, were pivotal for guiding the collaborative learning process toward the successful completion of the offer to the client. The KOs were crucial to raising awareness of gaps in shared understanding, revealing the new knowledge generated, and prompting reflection on the groups’ progress (see also Damşa, 2014; Van Aalst, 2009). In the video data, many of the student encounters also involved initiation and responsibility taking by individual students, and thus held the potential for cognitive advancement, such as explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, and creating a product (Boix Mansilla et al., 2000). The videos also allowed us to identify collective cognitive advancements that were subsequently documented in the cocreated KOs. They also provided evidence that tensions and demands often give rise to opportunities for the students’ progress, such as developing creative and novel solutions to the interdisciplinary tasks and problems at hand.

The analysis of the students’ diaries focused on the collective KPs in the data, which described reflections on and personal stances on the teams’ processes. In this analysis, we identified six KPs. First, attending to interdisciplinary tasks and problems, was fundamental to start discussing the common tasks and objectives. The students mostly accomplished this by establishing a safe environment in which to present and discuss their ideas, but not always. Second, the students recognized a need to take responsibility, which reflected commitment and shared epistemic agency (see also Damşa et al., 2010; Scardamalia, 2002), and they began to consider various role-related expectations for responsibility taking and distribution of leadership tasks (Kajamaa & Tuunainen, 2022). Third, the framing of expertise addressed one’s personal expertise and contributions, and the contributions of the other team members, thereby representing disciplinary knowledge but also the integration of various types of disciplinary knowledge. Fourth, crossing boundaries between disciplines, however, was not without tensions and required conscious effort and time (see Kidron & Kali, 2015) throughout the whole course. Fifth, via concretizing and exploring new knowledge the students cocreated multiple useful KOs, to materialize their integrated knowledge and IDL. Finally, in their reflecting and expanding practices and knowledge, the students envisioned ways to reconfigure their IDL processes in their future studies and professional lives.

In the student teams, the intertwined KOs and KOs channeled the students’ intellectual efforts, further inquiries, and collective learning (see Hakkarainen, 2009; Zhang et al., 2018). In some of the teams, however, students’ multiple disciplinary backgrounds created tensions, disagreements, and confusion (also Muukkonen et al., 2010), even when the KOs were successfully created. Furthermore, some of the teams struggled to establish trust and collaboration.

According to Damşa et al. (2010), epistemic actions contribute to the conceptual and tangible progress of the shared KOs and regulative actions to processes needed to direct and support the collaborative activity. In the present study, employing the concept of KPs (instead of actions) was related to the need to accommodate the diary data, which did not allow us to address the detailed level of actions; rather, we examined the practices at a larger grain size. The identified KPs conveyed students’ reflections on how the evolving practices in teams facilitated or undermined the IDL processes, representing longer strings of actions.

Our study contributes novel insights to the literature on students’ IDL processes related to the collective knowledge production in the socio-material context of HE. The multiple KOs and KPs were materially mediated (Miettinen, 2005; Nicolini et al., 2012) in the simulation environment. The KOs and KPs offered analytical concepts to examine the ecology (Jornet & Damşa, 2021) and frame the perspective and context of students’ interactions and collective IDL.

Our investigation also further advances the framework on the cognitive demands of IDL proposed by Boix Mansilla (2017). Our findings not only reflect the four processes in that framework—establishing purpose, weighing disciplinary insights, building leveraging integrations, and maintaining a critical stance—but they also extend the analysis of KOs and KPs in IDL processes. In our HE course, the students’ IDL evolved as they made use of the simulation ecology, and integrated knowledge and practices from their disciplines and areas of expertise to fulfill the client’s expectations. All the teams were able to negotiate and complete tasks, and solve problems requiring IDL, and they demonstrated collective cognitive advancement by producing a novel offer in ways that would have been unlikely through single disciplinary means (Boix Mansilla et al., 2000). However, it is impossible to identify whether all the team activities would fall under the definition of IDL, as we did not trace in detail how the written offers progressed and which role each member took in formulating them. Methodological solutions developed in learning analytics can offer future options for advancing such analysis of textual contributions aligned with team interaction.

Simulation as a context for interdisciplinary learning

Initially, the teams’ discussions were highly emergent and focused on what could be described as possibility knowledge (Engeström, 2007). In other words, in creating new knowledge, the students generated “transitions of positions in a field, which destabilizes knowledge, puts it in movement and opens up possiblities (sic)” (p. 271). In the simulation context, this manifested as the production of a vast array of ideas related to creating an offer to meet a client’s needs. The proposed ideas reflected the students’ disciplinary backgrounds and previous work experiences and generated novel combinations of ideas, stemming from the interdisciplinary discussions.

The interdisciplinary tasks and problems provided by the simulation-based course were located at the intersection between HE and working life. In other words, echoing previous research on IDL (Arora, 2012), the simulation environment offered a temporal—relational context of student-centered joint activity, enhancing boundary crossing between university education and professional practice (see Hopwood et al., 2016). Further research could make more salient how both the HE and organizational contexts feed into the learning design and IDL ecology more explicitly.

Implications: IDL mechanisms related to knowledge objects and knowledge practices

The mixture of structured learning design and the unique team processes and outcomes appears characteristic to our simulation as an IDL ecology: the simulation required the students to make their own choices on how to involve their disciplinary knowledge and negotiate the collective decisions to meet the expectations of the client (and the course). Identifying and constructing the KOs in teams entailed intensive ideation and efforts to explain, negotiate, and converge the different types of disciplinary knowledge and expectations. Episodes 1 and 2 in the Findings section introduced how knowledge stemming from various disciplinary backgrounds was not taken up in the team until the participants negotiated how the distinct perspectives could converge with other disciplinary positions; only then did it have a transforming impact on how the KOs were constructed.

Our findings echo those of previous organizational studies emphasizing the need to express different values and negotiate to reach across different disciplinary understandings and knowledge in multidisciplinary organizational contexts (Denis et al., 2007; Sorsa & Vaara, 2020; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2017). Similarly, in our study, participants’ joint accounts were established via negotiation of strategic priorities (Denis et al., 2007) without abandoning their own disciplinary knowledge to produce the offers for the clients (Sorsa & Vaara, 2020; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2017). Further research on IDL could engage with these concepts to bridge the educational gap between professional contexts.

Conclusions

This study contributes to our understanding of the complex and intertwined dynamics of knowledge objects and knowledge practices by which student teams create and enact IDL. As our original contribution, we identified the creation processes of specific shared KOs and six collective KPs through which the students’ IDL emerged and evolved. Our study also widens the understanding of the educational potential of simulations in HE. It points out organization simulation as an ecology for IDL where student engagement can be supported by learning design structuring IDL, such as the various tasks and the call for tenders from the client. Echoing previous research that has reflected on KPs as collective and non-linear processes in local contexts (Miettinen, 2013), our study also depicts IDL as a nonlinear, tension-laden, and dynamic process involving the creation of multiple KOs and KPs. Although the organization simulation course offered the structure for joint activities, each team eventually constructed unique knowledge objects and their own IDL trajectory.

From a learning design perspective, additional measures to monitor the emergence of productive KOs and KPs to enable teachers’ timely pedagogical involvement in case of high tensions could be included in the simulation design. The diaries provided evidence of the need for students to recognize how their expertise can contribute to team efforts and how team members become fully aware of their various expertise and experience, both of which are issues that the learning design should specifically take into account. Moreover, interdisciplinary simulation-based learning environments call for further specification of pedagogical strategies (Gormley et al., 2020) to provide meaningful criteria for evaluating IDL processes.

Our study demonstrates the importance of accounting for the diversity and temporal unfolding of KOs and KPs through which student teams develop their IDL and understanding beyond the scope of a single discipline. Our analysis encourages HE institutions to experiment with simulation-based learning environments to better prepare and equip students to tackle complex social problems requiring IDL and to facilitate productive interdisciplinary engagement.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful for the course students for their generous participation and the collaborating teachers Jutta Karhu, Heli Kiema-Junes, Marko Kesti and Ville Tikkanen for their expertise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.