This book is not just about thinking or acting in transdisciplinary ways, but about being transdisciplinary. To achieve this requires a deconstruction of our current way of acting within the definition of being that others impose upon us. Transdisciplinarity is a phenomenological perspective of reality and its manifestation in the world in which we exist. The volume develops a widely based transdisciplinary understanding of the issues faced by higher education institutions and those who work within and with these institutions to educate professionals. It incorporates international contributions from organisational theory, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, social sciences, philosophers and practitioners to create a volume that makes an important and distinct contribution to the literature on higher education and professional practice.

Transdisciplinarity provides one of our greatest challenges in higher education, both to the way it is organized and to the nature of the curriculum. This book is an important contribution to the debate about its implications.

Higher education is being challenged by the nature of knowledge and how it is organizedthe world is transdisciplinary but out institutions are constrained by the disciplines. This book contributes to the important debates about the challenges  transdisciplinarity provides to our institutions.

Professor  David Boud
Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney

Paul Gibbs is Director of Education Research at the University of Middlesex. He is a professor of the University, founder of the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Open University in Hong Kong and the University of Cyprus. He is an educator and researcher, having taught notions of transdisciplinarity alongside social realism and Heideggerian hermeneutics, and has over thirty successful transdisciplinary professional doctorate students. He has published twenty books on topics ranging from the marketing of higher education to vocationalism and higher education, and has published more than eighty academic articles. His particular approach to transdisciplinarity that informs his work is through the works of Heidegger, neo-Confucian thought and the insights of Basarab Nicolescu. He is also the series editor ofSpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education andDebating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives for Springer Academic Press. 

Preface: Why We Need to be Transdisciplinary, Paul Gibbs, Professor, Centre for Research and Scholarship Middlesex University.- SECTION 1 Educational Perspectives on Transdisciplinarity.- Chapter 1 Transdisciplinary Pedagogy in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Learning, Learning Cycles and Habits of Minds, Dr Sue McGregor, Professor Emeritus, Mount St Vincent University, Canada.- Chapter 2 Seeing What is Questionable: Transformative Pedagogies and the Hermeneutic Subject, Dr Jon Nixon, Honorary Professor, Centre for Lifelong Learning Research and Development, The Education University of Hong Kong.- Chapter 3 Transdisciplinarity and the Postgraduate Curriculum, Dr David Scott, Professor UCL/IOE, University of London.- Chapter 4 Transdisciplinary Thinking: Pedagogy for Complexity, Dr Paul Gibbs, Professor, Centre for Research and Scholarship, Middlesex University.- SECTION 2 Contexts for Transdisciplinary Practice.- Chapter 5 A Transdisciplinary Approach to Postgraduate Education: Challenges and Strategies, Barbara Hawkins, Visiting Research Fellow, UWE.- Chapter 6 Transdisciplinary Content Pedagogy in Undergraduate Engineering Education: Being Pulled up Short, Drs H. Greenhalgh-Spencer, K. Frias, A. Ertas, Texas Tech University.- Chapter 7 Integrating Architecture and Crime Science: A Transdisciplinary Challenge, Dr Hervé Borrion, UCL University of London, Dr Daniel Koch, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm.- Chapter 8 Lessons Learned in Transdisciplinary Graduate Education: Claremont Graduate Universitys Decade-long Experiment, Dr Patricia Easton, Professor, Co-Director of the Transdisciplinary Program, Claremont Graduate University, USA.- Chapter 9 A New Kind of Learning: Somatics, Dance Improvisation and Transdisciplinarity, Dr Vida L. Midgelow, Professor of Dance and Choreographic Practices, Middlesex University.- Chapter 10 Working in Corners, Spaces, Bends and Turns: How Transdisciplinary Approaches and Attitudes Might Challenge and Shape the Practices of Educational Developers and Early Career Academics, Dr Carole L. Davis, Head of Educational Development, Queens Marys University of London.- SECTION 3 Issues Relating to Transdisciplinarity.- Chapter 11 Technological Singularity, Dr Basarab Nicolescu, Professor.- Chapter 12 Transdisciplinarity as a Global Anthropology of Learning, Dr Kate Maguire, Associate Professor, Institute of Work Based Learning, Middlesex University.- Chapter 13 ArtScience and the Metaphors of Embodied Realism, Dr Brett Wilson, Professor of Graduate Education, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester.- Chapter 14 Transdisciplinarity (circa 2016): A Critical Catechism, Dr Ifan Shepherd, Professor, Middlesex University.- SECTION 4 How to Build Bridges: Career Stories that Connect Humanities and Sciences.- Chapter 15 How to Build Bridges: Career Stories that Connect Humanities and Sciences, Dr Kenneth L. Campbell, Professor, University of Massachusetts and Noston College, Kenneth L. Campbell, Arthur Eisenkraft, Margaret Hart, Conevery Bolton Valencius, S. Maria Sonin, Jungah Kim.- References.