Transdisciplinary Learning in Practice: MESH

As we have explored often in this book, solutions to our contemporary health and environmental challenges extend well beyond the traditional expertise of engineers who are rarely trained outside their disciplinary boundaries, isolated from social, environmental, economic, and political conversations, policies, and developments. We are considering approaches to bring this breadth to students in ways which shift their very perspective of the body of knowledge they are learning. In 2020 we saw the beginning of what is now a familiar and unwelcome challenge to global health. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and everyone across the globe, in all walks of life, experienced irreversible changes to their lives. During the same period, we saw increasing unrest amongst those who understood the inequities in our systems. We saw the impact of climate change at an ever-increasing rate with floods and wildfires, to add insult to injury to those already suffering the impact of the pandemic. Emerging from this period of hell on earth came the question: how can our engineering education programme at the University of San Diego live up to our institutional values of care for our common home and of social justice? How can we support the development of graduate capabilities for an unknown future? This chapter tells the emerging story of MESH (MS Engineering, Sustainability and Health), which is just graduating its first class at the time of writing. We will discuss the origins, the content, the process of learning, and initial student responses. More so than a single university course, we hope that MESH forms a paradigm of change towards true transdisciplinary learning, embodying the ideas of this book in practice.