This Special Focus highlights the potential of transdisciplinary research and learning to confront the complexity of the challenges facing society today. By serving as a bridge between science, practice and society, transdisciplinarity can be a means to help foster collaboration between diverse actors, question existing paradigms of knowledge co-production and build pathways towards transformation@en

In this communication, we present the background and core elements of the 2021 edition of the International Transdisciplinarity Conference. Beginning with a brief history of how the event was initiated and the role played by saguf in supporting its development, we then detail the main features of the conference and its relevance for transdisciplinary sustainability research and education. @en

In the new Bachelor-level course Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems), a part of ETH Zurich’s Environmental Sciences Bachelor’s programme, we teach students to zoom in on elements of practice (design thinking) and to zoom out on the whole system (systems thinking). Participants take stakeholders’ interests and needs into account and prepare possible measures, thus developing transformation knowledge and anticipating their future role as transdisciplinary sustainability scientists. Umweltproblemlösen (Tackling environmental problems) is a Bachelor-level course that carries on a long tradition of transdisciplinary (td) case studies in the Environ mental Sciences curriculum at ETH Zurich. Td case studies introduce students to key features of transdisciplinarity. Two corres ponding learning goals of the case studies are 1. to not only analyse problems, but to also suggest solutions, and 2. to take the complexity of the tackled socio-ecological system into account. In the new course we address both learning goals by integrating systems and design thinking. We present this approach in detail to show how features of transdisciplinarity are transferred to learning contexts. We compare it to the approaches of other td case studies by asking how each interprets and addresses the two learning goals. The comparison shows that the case study approaches implicitly impart different ideas about how a td environmental scientist should support societal problem solving. A key difference to previous approach es is that the new course asks students to enter deeply into the world of practice and the stakeholders’ divergent needs. @en

This chapter discusses how complex, real-world topics related to sustainable development are tackled through a curriculum that fosters transdisciplinary skills and thinking for students at an environmental sciences department at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland (ETH Zurich). We describe a process through which university students at all levels learn how to handle complex, real-world problems. We argue that the ability to frame complex problems and the ability to empathize with diverse points-of-view are key skills for transdisciplinary learning and research. Competence fields are identified by reflecting on the actual skills needed for conducting a transdisciplinary research process and by identifying elements from past teaching experiences that have proven to be effective. We then develop a framework which shows how these competence fields link different learning domains, so that students develop not only cognitive, but also affective and psychomotor abilities. This framework may serve as a starting point for the design of other courses aimed at training transdisciplinarians.@en