What is T-Shaped Individuals

The future of higher educational institutions is in need of innovators, creative thinkers, problem solvers, and people who can envision transcending across disciplines into a transdiciplinarity environment that by its nature requires institutions of learning to identify the challenges that affect humanity and investigate and implement solutions throughout the life of those challenges, working continuously to iteratively improve upon yesterday's solutions. Allowing the coexistence of old and new, being able to deal with change and disorder while explaining persistence and order requires practices that connect contextually things, people, and events that are distant and only partially congruent. Transdisciplinarity as a construct or framework can guide institutions of higher learning to break from outdated models and structures to form new ways of being that are fluid, heuristic, and holistic. Transperformative education can serve as a model to operationalize transdisciplinarity at the curricula, instructional, operational, and strategic level.