2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The shift towards convergence education, which integrates knowledge across disciplines to address complex societal challenges, has gained momentum. Transdisciplinary approaches play a key role in this shift by fostering innovation, enhancing job readiness, and preparing students for real-world problem-solving. The National Science Foundation has emphasized the need for higher education to adopt more transformative practices, in STEM fields and beyond, since transdisciplinary education has become increasingly important. While convergence education focuses on merging different fields to tackle global challenges, transdisciplinary teaching is a way to do that by engaging multiple disciplines in collaborative learning across traditional academic boundaries. Despite the benefits of such approaches, including enthusiasm from faculty, implementing transdisciplinary teaching and learning at large research universities remains difficult due to rigid institutional structures. This paper offers insights from qualitative research on five transdisciplinary instructional planning grants at a STEM-focused university. These pilot grants supported projects that spanned 10 academic units and reached over 750 students, underscoring the growing importance of transdisciplinary initiatives. The first author is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology and thereby brought a distinctive anthropological lens to this study. Through in-depth interviews with principal investigators (PIs), a focus group dialogue session, and a document review, the first author analyzed both the barriers and successes of these projects. Preliminary findings revealed persistent challenges such as institutional silos, the misalignment of cross-disciplinary goals with traditional tenure and promotion structures, difficulty securing discipline-specific funding for transdisciplinary courses, and a lack of long-term administrative support for sustaining these initiatives. However, there were many successes to make transdisciplinary teaching possible such as reworking existing courses, utilizing institutional structures such as research centers and institutes, and connecting research initiatives to the courses. These findings showed that passion and motivations for transdisciplinary teaching can challenge institutional barriers, but without long-term strategies and institutional support the pathways for sustainable convergence education are unclear. Through an anthropological approach, the first author examined how these barriers are not just logistical or administrative but are deeply rooted in the social and cultural practices of academia. By grounding these insights in both anthropological theory and empirical data, this work contributes to ongoing conversations about designing academic structures that better support collaborative teaching and learning, with a view towards making education more inclusive across disciplines.