Postdisciplinarity makes claims on ontological, epistemic, and methodological levels, but it is inevitably a personal philosophical stance. This article represents an existentialist approach to the discourse on postdisciplinarity, offering reflective narratives of three academics. Tomas Pernecky discusses creativity, criticality, freedom, and methodological and epistemic pluralism; Ana María Munar reveals her journey of epistemological awakening; and Brian Wheeller underscores the importance of researchers' subjective and emotive voice. Jointly, the authors depict postdisciplinarity as an invitation to conceptual and interpretive eclecticism, critical analysis, and creative problem solving.
MULTIFILE
Though there are different interpretations in the scholarly literature of what a social learning is: whether it is an individual, organisational, or collective process. For example, Freeman (2007), in his study on policy change in the public health sector, conceptualised collective learning of public officials as a process of epistemological bricolage. In his interpretation, the new policy ideas are the result of this bricolage process, when the “acquired second-hand” ideas are transformed into “something new”. The literature on (democratic) governance points opens another perspective to the policy change, emphasising the importance of public engagement in the policy-making process. Following this school of thought the new policy is the result of a deliberative act that involves different participants. In other words, the ideas about policy are not borrowed, but are born in social deliberation. Combining the insights gained from both literatures – social learning and governance – the policy change is interpreted, as a result of a broad social interaction process, which is also the social learning for all participants.The paper will focus on further development of the conceptualisation of policy change through social deliberation and social learning and will attempt to define the involved micro mechanisms. The exploratory case study of policy change that was preceded by a broad public debate will help to describe and establish the mechanisms. Specifically, the paper will focus on the decision of the Dutch government to cease the exploration of natural gas from the Groningen gas field. The radical change in national policy regarding gas exploration is seen as a result of a broader public debate, which was an act of social deliberation and social learning at the same time.
The learning innovation we report in this article is an international rapid-prototyping event (48 hours) in which teams of international BSc and MSc students from two universities (Western Europe and South-East Africa, respectively) jointly designed and developed a prototype for a local small-business owner in a developing economy. The learning innovation has its origin in the simple observation that the majority of the current theories, cases, and learning activities that characterize entrepreneurship education have their origin in western-oriented epistemologies and ontologies. The goal of this entrepreneurial learning activity was to develop students’ entrepreneurial competencies through interaction and cross-boundary entrepreneurial problem-solving between university students from western and non-western origin. The results underpin that it is very worthwhile for higher education teachers—who look for new, cost-effective “wide” entrepreneurship education programs—to adopt such events. The results show that the program not only contributes to short-term impact (e.g., joy of learning and collaborating, confidence in the own expertise, and seeing where to contribute) but also enables longer term impact (e.g., moving from intention to an actual start-up). Moreover, the activity produces actual solutions that, in this case the cheese maker can implement, can help the business to grow and survive.
