Transdisciplinary Higher Education

This book is not just about thinking or acting in transdisciplinary ways, but about being transdisciplinary. To achieve this requires a deconstruction of our current way of acting within the definition of being that others impose upon us. Transdisciplinarity is a phenomenological perspective of reality and its manifestation in the world in which we exist. The volume develops a widely based transdisciplinary understanding of the issues faced by higher education institutions and those who work within and with these institutions to educate professionals. It incorporates international contributions from organisational theory, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, social sciences, philosophers and practitioners to create a volume that makes an important and distinct contribution to the literature on higher education and professional practice.

“Transdisciplinarity provides one of our greatest challenges in higher education, both to the way it is organized and to the nature of the curriculum. This book is an important contribution to the debate about its implications.”

“Higher education is being challenged by the nature of knowledge and how it is organized—the world is transdisciplinary but out institutions are constrained by the disciplines. This book contributes to the important debates about the challenges  transdisciplinarity provides to our institutions.”

Professor  David Boud
Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney

• transdisciplinary practice
• professional education
• postgraduate education
• Basarab Nicolescu
• transdisciplinary research
• research methodology
• postgraduate curriculum

• Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

  Paul Gibbs

Paul Gibbs is Director of Education Research at the University of Middlesex. He is a professor of the University, founder of the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Open University in Hong Kong and the University of Cyprus. He is an educator and researcher, having taught notions of transdisciplinarity alongside social realism and Heideggerian hermeneutics, and has over thirty successful transdisciplinary professional doctorate students. He has published twenty books on topics ranging from the marketing of higher education to vocationalism and higher education, and has published more than eighty academic articles. His particular approach to transdisciplinarity that informs his work is through the works of Heidegger, neo-Confucian thought and the insights of Basarab Nicolescu. He is also the series editor of SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education and Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives for Springer Academic Press. 

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