Building a Multinational Transdisciplinary Integrity Project: Insights from the BRIDGE Project

Abstract

The fields of academic integrity, research ethics, business ethics, and citizen science ethics are typically taught as separate and disconnected subjects, without a clear connection between these different educational efforts. Such a lack of connection can leave gaps in students’ education and a missed opportunity to highlight transferable ethical skills. Master and doctoral students seem to be particularly vulnerable, as they often do not receive adequate ethical training. Within the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project “Bridging Integrity in Higher Education, Business and Society,” we try to establish connections between academia, business, and society to enhance the understanding of integrity across these fields. The focus is on academic and research integrity, business ethics, and citizen science ethics and on the everyday practice and development of guidelines, checklists, and educational resources for master and doctoral students and their supervisors. In this chapter, we describe the process of how the project was developed, the rationale of creating such a transdisciplinary project, and lessons learned with a focus on internal and external challenges and our responses to them.