Boundary crossing explained

Boundary crossing is the competence to learn from, and co-create with, others outside one’s own scientific domain, institute, culture, or context. Boundary crossing is central to the educational vision of Wageningen University and is an important theme in its educational innovation and research. It is essential for educating the graduates — in our case engineers — of the future. Being able to learn across boundaries (i.e., to engage in boundary crossing) is necessary for working together on the major societal, global, and often sustainability-related challenges of the world. Only by learning and working together across these boundaries is the co-creation of innovative solutions possible.

What is boundary crossing?

Learning across different practices (e.g backgrounds, disciplines, cultures etc.) can be enriching both for yourself and for the challenge you are faced with. However, can a diverse group of students from different practices be expected to automatically learn with and from one another and work across the differences that exist between them? The answer is no. Explicitly supporting and challenging students to make use of their differences in a positive way, can help to co-create new ideas as well as gain a better understanding of themselves and their own perspective. Incorporating boundary crossing in your education can help doing this.

The BC@WUR education innovation project

From 2018 onwards, WUR started to design and implement boundary crossing learning activities and trajectories in education. To read all about this Comenius Leadership project, the steps taken, the lessons learned, the key success factors and other relevant information for other educational institutions who want to start working on BC in their education read this paper ([in English] Fortuin et al, 2023) or this paper ([in Dutch] Oonk et al, 2023)

Innovation and engineers of the future

Engineers of the future can work on challenging societal problems and science for impact. Not only from a technical viewpoint, but also considering social, ethical, cultural and societal sides of the problem. It requires people to effectively collaborate and make use of the diversity of perspectives, with a critical and open stance towards their own perspectives, values and expertise. However, collaborating with people different from you is difficult and can lead to tensions and misunderstandings and sometimes brings about internal – or identity – conflict as well. This is where boundary crossing competence becomes essential, also as part of students’ educational path.

Developing BC competence: the four learning mechanisms

Boundary crossers see differences between people as learning opportunities. Opportunities to create more together, broaden one's horizon and grow as a professional. However, our initial human response in the face of tension between people who are different then you are, is to look away and to make it easy on ourselves.

The four learning mechanisms of boundary crossing (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Gulikers & Oonk, 2019) offer handles to develop boundary crossing competence. They can be used in defining learning objectives, creating learning activities and assessment of courses and learning trajectories. Through the Comenius Leadership Project “Boundary Crossing as modus operandi @ WUR”, WUR teachers have developed activities, tools, learning trajectory designs, professional development activities and templates as well as a further conceptual understanding of how boundary crossing can enrich the education of the engineer/graduate of the future. The tools, and later updates, can be found in the Boundary Crossing Toolbox.

More information and explanation on the four BC learning mechanisms, can be found in this knowledge clip, in this document or on this paper on a BC rubric.

Do you want to know more about boundary crossing?

This educational initiative is grounded in the boundary crossing theory, you can check out our knowledge clips:

Or you can read the article Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011). Boundary crossing and boundary objects.Review of Educational Research,81(2), 132-169.

Toolbox

The BC team has collected examples of boundary crossing learning activities and materials. These are examples from fellow teachers. In the toolbox you will find examples and materials that you can use or draw inspiration from to implement BC in your own courses!

Go to the toolbox

If you have an example yourself or know of colleagues that have learning material or activities that fit our toolbox, we would love to be able to showcase them in our toolbox. You can send over the materials to us at boundarycrossing@wur.nl.

Contact

For more information, you can contact the BC team via boundarycrossing@wur.nl.