As many members of INSciTS know, solving today’s complex problems—such as climate change and global pandemics—requires many disciplines and stakeholders to work together, integrating their unique perspectives to generate effective, holistic, and sustainable solutions. However, it is rarely any one person’s job to integrate these perspectives into a unified whole (Bammer, 2017). Nor do traditional educational programs typically equip students with the knowledge, mindsets, and skills needed to fill this role. There is growing agreement that we need individuals who have expertise in knowledge integration and knowledge mobilization to facilitate this essential work.

This problem has become sufficiently acute that scholars are calling for more educational programs that teach individuals to become problem-solving integrators (Bosque-Pérez et al., 2016). In this talk, I demonstrate how the Knowledge Integration (KI) program at the University of Waterloo in Canada can serve as a model for this type of education. KI offers a four-year undergraduate degree that goes beyond the traditional liberal arts and science model by explicitly teaching students key theories, frameworks, and skills that enable them to effectively collaborate in cross-disciplinary teams. (This model is especially significant in Canada where undergraduate education tends to be highly specialized and siloed.) As a result, students who graduate with a KI degree are adept at working across disciplinary boundaries, leading diverse teams, and facilitating integration. While not all universities will be able to create a full undergraduate degree devoted to knowledge integration, they can draw from KI’s design to develop courses, certificates, or minors that will enable students to seek out and bring together diverse perspectives.

Core courses in KI cover topics such as the nature of scientific knowledge, the benefits of diversity for creative thinking and complex problem-solving, and the differences between multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity. Students are equipped with methodologies and skills for collaborative problem-solving, such as design thinking, and have ample opportunities to practice translating complex information into language that can be understood by individuals from diverse backgrounds. KI students also develop particular mindsets and characteristics. They develop intellectual humility and empathy alongside lessons about how diversity enhances creativity and leads to more robust solutions; they learn to be open-minded and flexible in their ideas, becoming creative risk-takers who can make novel connections across disciplines; they develop comfort with the uncertainty inherent in the non-linear process of complex problem-solving; and they learn to be patient and perseverant through the challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

These capabilities, mindsets, and characteristics frequently come up in the literature on integration, demonstrating that the Knowledge Integration program is equipping students with the toolkit to be facilitators of cross-disciplinary integrative processes. Although the Knowledge Integration program does not train students to become experts in integration—because developing expertise in this field would require education at the graduate level or above—I argue that it is still important to teach undergraduate students the skills to be facilitators of cross-disciplinary integration early in their academic career, before they become encultured in the paradigm of a specialized discipline.