Interruption, interrogation, integration and interaction as process: How PNS informs interdisciplinary curriculum design

We focus on the decision to include PNS in the curriculum for a first year tertiary environments degree. Building on case studies that described complex environmental issues, we understood PNS actions to require a critical gaze at our disciplines and then a process for change. We used the idea of disrupting—or interrupting—the established ways of reading the literature and ‘accepted stories’ of what occurred. The interruption allowed the creation of a space in the academic discourse to question the interpretation- and discipline-based assumptions underpinning subject discussions. This opening of a place for questions about the various case study situations allowed students to act as extended peer communities and to acknowledge other stakeholders in to the discussion. The commonest interruptions were to recast the issue as part of a wider and more complex system, to acknowledge uncertainty and to consider the drivers and risks in scaling up and down within systems and sub-systems. We actively promoted interdisciplinarity and extending science as cornerstones to dissolving paradigms and to facilitating negotiation of innovative ways of ‘seeing and knowing’.