Teaching Across Difference: TransINNOVATE Publishes Its Research Report

The TransINNOVATE project consortium has completed and published its research report — Teaching Across Difference: A Research Synthesis on Transdisciplinary Education in the Technology–Arts–Humanities Space (D2.1). The report marks the conclusion of Work Package 2 and provides the evidence base on which the project’s training course, micro-credential standard, and AI-supported learning application will be built.

What the report covers

The report draws on four complementary research activities conducted between January and April 2026:

a literature review of 56 academic and policy sources on transdisciplinary pedagogy, competency frameworks, and the role of AI in education;
a quantitative survey of 135 educators and practitioners across the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Slovenia;
30 in-depth expert interviews with educators, institutional leaders, arts and design practitioners, humanities scholars, and cross-sector facilitators;
a cross-case analysis of 17 transdisciplinary programmes from 14 European countries, with calibration cases from the United States and Hong Kong.

A concluding synthesis chapter triangulates findings across all four instruments and identifies convergent conclusions and design implications for the course development phase.

What the research found

Several findings stand out across all four research instruments.

Motivation far exceeds infrastructure. 91.9% of survey respondents rate transdisciplinary training as important or highly important for their students. At the same time, 79.3% are unaware of any published frameworks or resources for teaching transdisciplinary competencies. The bottleneck is not commitment — it is the institutional architecture needed to act on it.

The Technology–Arts–Humanities triad is not yet the natural unit of cross-disciplinary work. Only 12.6% of survey respondents currently combine all three domains. The dominant pairing in practice is Technology and Social Sciences. Arts and humanities — particularly humanities — are structurally underrepresented. The project’s course will need to construct the value of the triadic configuration through design, not simply assume it.

Transdisciplinary pedagogy is a pedagogy of orchestration. Across all four research instruments, effective TD teaching is characterised not by specific content but by the quality of the interactions it designs: who meets whom, around what problem, under what conditions, with what feedback loops. Format design — not content selection — is the challenge practitioners most frequently report.

AI as a facilitator of transdisciplinary work is the field’s next frontier — and a question that demands careful design. Of the 17 programmes analysed, only one uses AI as a didactic instrument rather than as a subject of critical study. No survey respondent reports using AI for integration facilitation or cross-disciplinary dialogue. The research is clear that AI can support sense-making and translation across disciplinary vocabularies, but cannot replace value negotiation, trust-building, or final meaning-making — tasks that remain irreducibly human. TransInnovate’s AI learning application will be built on this distinction.

The project’s target audience is uniquely underserved. No programme in the 17-case corpus is designed primarily for educator continuing professional development at the Technology–Arts–Humanities intersection. Higher vocational education and training is almost entirely absent. TransInnovate is entering a space that existing provision has not yet reached.

Who the report is for

The report is addressed primarily to the project’s course development team. It will also be useful to:

educators and curriculum developers looking for an evidence base on what makes transdisciplinary teaching work and what institutional barriers practitioners typically encounter;
institutional leaders and policy makers in higher education and vocational training considering how to create conditions for transdisciplinary education;
researchers working on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary pedagogy, competency frameworks, or the role of AI in educational settings.

Readers with a specific focus may go directly to the relevant chapter. Chapters 1–4 can be read independently. Chapter 5 — the cross-source synthesis — is the recommended starting point for those who want the research conclusions without the full detail.