Integrative learning through student-led transdisciplinary investigation of Belgium’s COVID-19 pandemic preparedness

The COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a healthcare crisis and quickly evolved into a crisis for all levels of society. A systemic preparedness for the complexity of a pandemic is required that integrates knowledge from researchers and practitioners alike. However, countries such as Belgium were not prepared to handle the crisis in a systemic way. Here we show how an interdisciplinary group of students in the context of their honours degree designed, organised, and facilitated a transdisciplinary co-creation workshop to evaluate Belgium’s pandemic preparedness with stakeholders after the first year of the pandemic. We find that a lack of transdisciplinarity, pandemic illiteracy, insufficient involvement of human sciences in decision making processes, and fragmented authority are some of the most important gaps in pandemic preparedness according to the Belgian stakeholders. They identified important underlying causes which we have clustered in five emergent themes: principal agent problems (politicians taking decisions in their own interest instead of in the interest of the people they represent), distrust in authority, government incompetence, apathy, and lack of transdisciplinarity. Additional student reflections on the experience of guiding the workshop show that the students developed their understanding of the concept of transdisciplinarity, experienced difficulties in facilitating transdisciplinary knowledge integration, and developed critical career skills. More general, our results demonstrate how students in the context of transdisciplinary education designed an innovative method for co-creation which led to improved systems knowledge of Belgium’s pandemic preparedness and the development of important skills.