The magic of partnering with students to create transdisciplinary STEM curricula

![CDATA[CONTEXT: Co-creation of curriculum with a range of different partners is an increasing practice of learning and teaching in the higher education sector. In research, partnership models for collaboration with a range of stakeholders, notably industry, are well established and practiced, but fewer models exist that show how to partner in teaching. The growing success stories of curriculum co-creation with student partners show that partnering with students is a practical and a sustainable way to create engaging curricula. A benefit is that student outcomes and desires often align with institutional aims such as producing capable and confident graduates that can work in any industry beyond geographical and disciplinary constraints. This contrasts with industry partners who are often interested in job ready graduates for the specific industry or sector. In this study we are presenting our learnings from partnering with students in designing transdisciplinary curricula. PURPOSE: The aim was to design minors that attract and encourage students from non-STEM backgrounds to use their elective space to study curriculum that helps them to develop STEM capabilities. This aim is in line with training job ready graduates and strategies to address National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund (NPILF). The minors were designed in consultation and collaboration with industry partners and academics from different disciplines. APPROACH: Two minors were designed by choosing subjects from four different disciplines and a capstone project was added to create a hands-on learning opportunity for students. Subjects were chosen from four different schools to ensure the trans-disciplinarity aspect of the design. The most important criterion for subjects included in a minor was the lack of restrictive prerequisites to ensure that all students could enrol. OUTCOMES: Collaboration with Industry allowed us to implement development of STEM skills or capabilities as the learning outcome, but collaboration with students was instrumental in designing curricula that was attractive to students and relevant to the future generation of graduates. Therefore, students were embedded in the process of design of these minors all the way from ideation to marketing the curricula. Minors were built around two topics of health and sustainability that a) students found interesting and b) where industry indicated there were current and future job opportunities. The curriculum design was fine-tuned following several discussions with student partners and surveying a larger group of students. In consultation with subject coordinators the student partners critically evaluated the assessments in each of the subjects to ensure that students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds would be able to complete the subject. The minors were presented to a larger group of students before presenting them to various academic committees for approval. In addition to developing traditional resources such as the handbook entry, marketing videos were produced by student partners to communicate the new curricula to incoming students. “Innovating For Humans“ and “Eco-Socially Conscious Design & Manufacturing” were offered in the first academic session of 2022. CONCLUSIONS: Designing trans- multi or interdisciplinary, curricula is not just bringing subjects with no prerequisites from different disciplines around a core topic. It is vital to ensure that the subjects are indeed linked by a common theme, but that learning outcomes are scaffolded and achievable and that the subjects can be completed successfully by students from all disciplines. We soon discovered that learning guides were not the most reliable source of information and going through the learning activities and assessments with student partners and unit coordinators was essential to identify the hidden assumed knowledge and disciplinary focused skills. Subsequently, learning activities and assessment of some subjects were revised and the unit coordinators designed extra resources and supports to assist students from other disciplines. This process also benefits students from within the discipline. As STEM educators we did not anticipate that the biggest challenge of designing transdisciplinary curricula in STEM was to get the right level of STEM content to achieve the intended learning outcomes while keeping them attractive to students from other disciplines that were raised in an education system that presented STEM as a “difficult subject”. The outcome and process of this curriculum development work would have been very different without collaboration with student partners from different disciplines. Working with students was a great learning experience that can be described as designing a product for the end users with them and eliminating assumptions and predictions. Although this work was on designing interdisciplinary curricula, we believe this model is an efficient strategy that can be applied in designing of engaging discipline focused curriculum.]]