Abstract:

Interdisciplinarity is presented as an essential strategy to address the challenge of adapting to an increasingly complex and constantly changing world, since it promotes a comprehensive education that transcends the boundaries of traditional disciplines.

The authors of this contribution belong to the educational innovation project LIFEPRO-STEAM ("Interdisciplinary Language to Foster Understanding among STEAM Professionals”), from University of Málaga. This project aims to provide students with an interdisciplinary training experience on different disciplines, as well as to encourage students’ creativity and skills in the transmission of their knowledge, and to make visible the relevance of female participation. The disciplines participating in these seminars are diverse, founding students from Economics, Architecture, English Studies, Law, Computer Science and Engineering.

This contribution aims to perform an analysis of the effectiveness of ten different interdisciplinary seminars, from the professors’ experience. To this end, a series of questions were formulated and sent to the professors in charge of each seminar to identify their degree of satisfaction and perception of different aspects of the activity. The variables analysed are: difficulty with integration of disciplines, motivation of students, relevance of seminars and role of women in leading tasks. It should be mentioned that all the questions are evaluated using Likert scale.

The results draw outstanding conclusions. First, in relation to the difficulty, although Professors find it relatively easy to find subjects related to their own, they point out that, in some cases, it is difficult to prepare content that fits both disciplines. However, despite the difficulties encountered, all lecturers indicate that their seminars complement the content of their subjects (with an average rating of 3.72). Regarding the motivation, professors found these seminars have motivated the cooperation between disciplines (scoring 4.45), resulting advantageous in terms of knowledge and exchange of disciplines, with a score of 4.81. On the other hand, it has been analysed the role of women in leadership tasks. Through this analysis, it has been identified that the level of female presence in leadership and decision-making tasks is low, with a score of 2.45. To alleviate this issue, during group activities in seminars, women were encouraged to take the leader role, helping them to express their ideas. Thus, professors consider that these seminars have slightly motivated female students to show their leadership skills in most seminars (scoring 3.27). Finally, the main conclusion of these seminars is that the project's innovation should be extended and incorporated to university subjects to intensify interdisciplinary collaborations and STEAM professionalism in the future, scoring 4.9 out of 5.

As can be observed, the results are positive and satisfactory, where it has been possible to observe how the students have been able to work from a different perspective, which is very necessary in professional careers. Additionally, professors describe this activity as an enriching experience, which has helped them to understand the interaction between students from other disciplines, as well as to exchange views with professionals from other fields. As an aspect to be improved, it is suggested to increase the time of the seminars, as well as to establish a predetermined location for all the activities.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinarity, STEAM professions, leadership, training experience.