Abstract
Abstract:
This article reflects on a collaborative teaching and learning project that employed
transdisciplinarity to guide the students’ learning experience and to expose them to different
epistemologies. The departments of Digital Design and Strategic Communication at the University of
Johannesburg in South Africa co-created and co- presented lectures on innovation aimed at bridging
the divide between education and practice through participative collaborative learning. A key
argument in this article is that to achieve learning through practice, multiple levels of knowing
must be employed that transcend multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and emphasise a
holistic solution-based outcome that could not be achieved otherwise. This is referred to as
transdisciplinarity. From this perspective, students from two disciplines were tasked to
conceptualise the social challenge of inequality in the workplace. The students needed to work
together to develop communication strategies to tackle and propose solutions to their selected
organisations’ poly-contextual gender inequality issues. This article is a retrospective evaluation
of the project, showcasing how a multi-pronged assessment design allowed two educators to
facilitate shared collaborative spaces and mediated engagement between students, and how their
collaboration yielded creative and more sustainable solutions developed by the
students.