The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Core (ICC) curriculum at NTU provides a holistic education that equips students with transferable skills, ethical grounding, and interdisciplinary perspectives for the future workforce. It comprises a suite of core courses designed to help students integrate knowledge across disciplines, think critically about real-world challenges, and communicate effectively in diverse contexts. The curriculum includes six foundational core courses – Inquiry and Communication in an Interdisciplinary World; Ethics and Civics in a Multicultural World; Health and Wellbeing; Sustainability: Society, Economy, and Environment; Science and Technology for Humanity; along with a career readiness module, Career Design and Workplace Readiness in the V.U.C.A. World. Together, these courses foster self-directed learning, social responsibility, and problem-solving through collaborative projects and experiential learning. The ICC complements the disciplinary majors in NTU by cultivating global awareness, civic-mindedness, and lifelong learning skills that prepare students to navigate complex societal and technological issues with adaptability and empathy.

Using Bruner’s (1960) concept of spiral curriculum, this workshop explores how the spiral approach of intentional revisiting can be applied to interdisciplinary teaching. By incrementally increasing complexity with each repetition, this method enables students to develop robust insights and connections of key concepts. For an interdisciplinary course, a spiral approach allows students to explore complex issues from multiple disciplinary perspectives, helping them integrate diverse knowledge for holistic understanding.
The workshop will draw upon the NUS interdisciplinary course HS2904 Driving Towards the Future: Battery Electric Vehicles. Since this elective course has no disciplinary prerequisites and is taken by students from both Faculty of Science (FoS) and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), the spiral approach is essential for levelling diverse backgrounds and subsequently developing higher-order skills. Participants will engage in discussion and hands-on practice of utilizing the spiral approach for teaching both disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses with minimal prerequisites.

The use of the Tableau (actors forming a still dramatic picture) is a signature pedagogy devised for HS2913-Representing Lives. HS2913 is a CHS (NUS College of Humanities & Sciences) Interdisciplinary Course that promotes learner collaboration through interdisciplinary discussions and interrogations. The use of tableau positions learners as performers and audience – mobilising the immediacy and commitment that liveness affords to invited critiques, rewriting and negotiations. This workshop will share the techniques, execution and pedagogical implications of using the tableau as a means to introducing embodied learning into the classroom. This will be a hands-on workshop and will involve participants constructing and responding to tableaux.

This workshop explores the way care and relationality shapes who we are as educators, as well as the communities we are embedded in. Designed based on insights and experiences from an interdisciplinary learning community of educators, we will work together to clarify and articulate a range of views, emotions and practices associated with care and relationality in the University. In smaller groups, we will have the opportunity to share and learn from our fellow educators about their approach to care and relationality, and explore ideas and potential collaborations for educators to support each other in their work.

Based on our book “Coaching Students in Higher Education: A Solution-Focused Approach to Retention, Performance and Wellbeing”, this introductory workshop explores the positive impact of coaching in higher education settings. Participants will learn key principles and techniques of solution-focused coaching and identify “coachable moments” to engage in transformational coaching conversations with learners. Educators can guide students on actionable, forward-looking goals toward their envisioned futures, steering them away from past setbacks or future anxieties. Through interactive discussions, attendees will gain insights into practical solution-focused techniques tailored for common educator concerns and student coaching contexts. Ethics and boundaries in coaching will be addressed, emphasising the importance for educators to recognise when to refer students for specialised professional support. The session will wrap up with the role of success coaches and how they complement educators in helping adult learners thrive.

Through this hands-on, interactive workshop, participants will experience cohort-based learning implemented at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), which engages students in interdisciplinary learning and human-centric pedagogy with a focus on design and technology. Participants will experience a modified hands-on activity to develop a paper-based glucose sensor adapted from a Biology and Healthcare course at SUTD. This activity discusses the challenges of glucose detection and diabetes for patients and the healthcare sector. The real-world sociocultural implications of such a product are then reflected upon through the use of personas and empathy mapping, challenging participants to reconsider the design of their product in light of the different user characteristics.

The Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) has advanced a comprehensive ecosystem of personalised adult learning grounded in pedagogical innovation and empirical research. This presentation synthesises four major initiatives that collectively enhance adult learner success. The SUSS Adaptive Learning System (AdLeS) delivers personalised pathways by modelling learner performance and readiness, while academic coaching—enhanced by virtual coaching modalities—provides timely, human-centred guidance on learning-to-learn strategies. Complementing these is an institution-wide study on adult learner engagement and retention, which generates actionable insights into motivation and persistence, and by extension translates into nudging strategies. Additionally, the Student Evaluation Analytics (SEA) Dashboard equips educators with real-time analytics to refine teaching approaches and proactively engage diverse learners. Together, these projects exemplify SUSS’s holistic, data-informed approach to meeting adult learners’ complex needs and contribute robust research and empirical evidence to the broader field of adult learning and lifelong education.