Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education Programmes has been debated over a number of years. There are examples of successful projects implementing interdisciplinary learning but there are also many examples of when this fails. Often the failure is due to inadequate planning and/or agreement on what the focus of this should be and a lack of clarity of the value and need for this type of study (Davies and Devlin 2007).

Within our own institution a review of undergraduate education led to the identification of four core areas that would be used for interdisciplinary learning. Whilst these areas appeared appropriate and many staff supported these initially the uptake of these has been limited. There are a range of sound arguments for this ranging from not wanting to lose disciplinary content to professional bodies not permitting this.

As a Centre that support learning and teaching across the university our own MA Academic Practice Programme does have interdisciplinary learning with staff and PhD students from across the institution and this promotes many critical conversations between disciplines and enables a sharing of ideas. There are never issues raised about the diversity of disciplines indeed it is seen to be a valuable component of the programme and yet graduates from this programme do not take this back into their own curriculum design for programmes.

We will explore why this is successful and how we could use the lessons for this to promote interdisciplinarity across the institution through the students of this programme. We will also discuss how we are using these lessons to promote some interdisciplinary learning across the diverse PhD student body in the University by customising some on line research skills modules complimented by workshops.