Background: Societal challenges that call for a new type of engineer suggest the need for the implementation of interdisciplinary engineering education (IEE). The aim of IEE is to train engineering students to bring together expertise from different disciplines in a single context. This review synthesizes IEE research with a focus on characterizing vision, teaching practices, and support.Purpose: We aim to show how IEE is conceptualized, implemented, and facilitated in higher engineering education at the levels of curricula and courses. This aim leads to two research questions:What aspects of vision, teaching, and support have emerged as topics of interest in empirical studies of IEE?What points of attention regarding vision, teaching, and support can be identified in empirical studies of IEE as supporting or challenging IEE?Scope/Method: Ninety‐nine studies published between 2005 and 2016 were included in a qualitative analysis across studies. The procedure included formulation of research questions, searching and screening of studies according to inclusion/exclusion criteria, description of study characteristics, appraisal, and synthesis of results.Conclusions: Challenges exist for identifying clear learning goals and assessments for interdisciplinary education in engineering (vision). Most pedagogy for interdisciplinary learning is designed to promote collaborative teamwork requiring organization and team management. Our review suggests that developing interdisciplinary skills, knowledge, and values needs sound pedagogy and teaming experiences that provide students with authentic ways of engaging in interdisciplinary practice (teaching). Furthermore, there is a limited understanding of what resources hinder the development of engineering programs designed to support interdisciplinarity (support).

Most professional development activities focus on individual teachers, such as mentoring or the use of portfolios. However, new developments in higher education require teachers to work together in teams more often. Due to these changes, there is a growing need for professional development activities focusing on teams. Therefore, this review study was conducted to provide an overview of what is known about professional development in teams in the context of higher education. A total of 18 articles were reviewed that describe the effects of professional development in teams on teacher attitudes and teacher learning. Furthermore, several factors that can either hinder or support professional development in teams are identified at the individual teacher level, at the team level, and also at the organizational level.

Can you ask students from three different bachelor programmes to help solve planning and routeing problems for hospitals? In the presented case an interdisciplinary approach was shown to be successful after some redesign. Students from Applied Mathematics, Civil Engineering and Industrial & Engineering Management jointly designed solutions for ‘traffic’ to and through the hospital using stochastic modelling. Importantly this project was scaffolded through coursework, supervision and problem-design. The particular scaffolding strategy employed by the teaching team offers other teacher teams ideas for making interdisciplinary project-based learning a more effective learning opportunity. At the same time we need to ensure that students feel at home in their own programme and will be empowered to work with other specialists.

Even though the urge to transform educational practices towards sustainability has been widely recognized, teachers struggle with implementing socioscientific issues (SSI) such as climate change and loss of biodiversity into their lessons. While the research on SSI grows, the literature remains limited in terms of (i) the use of SSI in facilitating education for sustainable development (ESD), and (ii) teachers’ professional learning of SSI-based instruction as a means towards ESD. In this empirical study, we aimed at characterizing five STEM pre-service teachers’ pedagogical design capacity (PDC) by focusing on what resources they use and how they interact with these resources to design SSI-based instruction to teach about the sustainable development goals (SDGs). For this qualitative study, the data were collected through field notes, reflection reports, and semi-structured interviews. Our results reveal that pre-service teachers referred to teacher resources the most, followed by collaborative resources, and instructional resources during their design. Even though their use of resources shows strong connections between SSI and their pedagogical content knowledge, preservice teachers’ consideration regarding assessment remains inadequate. Furthermore, our study shows that professional development sessions have the potential to foster pre-service teachers’ use of PDC resources to address ESD.