Background <p>Innovation often transcends the bounds of individual disciplines, yet undergraduate teaching is still largely organized today within single disciplines and respective academic units. Convergence education offers a promising organizational approach to bring transdisciplinary teaching and learning into undergraduate education by aligning institutional structures, pedagogy, and partnerships around meaningful, innovation experiences to address contemporary problems. However, longstanding academic silos in higher education hinder the adoption of convergence-focused pedagogies. Therefore, this study examined the three-year implementation of a novel convergence education initiative developed to foster design and innovation capabilities across multiple academic disciplines. By integrating faculty from the university’s engineering technology, liberal arts, and business disciplines, this initiative promotes a transdisciplinary teaching and learning environment where differing perspectives, knowledge, and skillsets converge. Guided by a <i>Communities of Transformation</i> framework for institutional change, the study ethnographically examines how cross-college partnerships formed, how a shared philosophy that ‘every student can be an innovator’ developed, and how stakeholders experienced cross-college co-teaching and co-learning. Data sources included extended participant observations and semi-structured interviews with faculty, administrators, academic advisors, students, and alumni.</p> Results <p>The findings show how a compelling convergence education philosophy emerged over time as faculty and administrators experimented with cross-college co-teaching and as students sought more authentic, purpose-driven learning experiences. Stakeholders described how the convergence education program strengthened participants’ innovation and design capabilities, expanded experiences working in cross-functional teams, and helped to develop new transdisciplinary teaching and learning practices. At the same time, the study surfaces persistent tensions: misaligned advising and scheduling systems, inadequate funding and incentive structures, uneven buy-in across departments, and the difficulty of sustaining co-teaching partnerships amid administrative turnover and competing institutional priorities.</p> Conclusions <p>This convergence education example illustrates both the promise and delicateness of transdisciplinary undergraduate teaching and learning. Using the <i>Communities of Transformation</i> framework helps explain how a shared philosophy, new teaching practices, and emerging networks can begin to shift some local practices, while also highlighting why such efforts often remain ‘islands of innovation’ within the broader institution. The study offers conceptual grounding and practical guidance for institutions seeking to implement, scale, and sustain convergence education in undergraduate STEM learning, emphasizing the need to align structures, incentives, and advising practices with cross-college co-teaching and co-learning.</p>