How can we build a classroom environment that facilitates learning, unlearning and re-learning ?

This blog reflects on how TIPC systems mapping tools have been utilised to nurture new capabilities in the classroom, including the awareness necessary to navigate complex, interconnected challenges. The author notes that to advance sustainability transitions, there is a need to move beyond linear, mechanistic thinking to embrace systemic interdependencies, trade-offs, and long-term consequences. Moreover, fostering empathy and collaboration is essential in co-creating solutions that are socially just and contextually grounded. 

This semester cohort in our “wicked challenges accelerator” lead me to reflections around how to to use the class room to help students to think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. I am increasingly convinced that our role as professors is to help students to discover knowledge (not to dictate our knowledge to them), and to help them to develop higher sensitivity to the plurality of perspectives as well as to grasp the limits of different knowledge ontologies while keeping their critical thinking sharp and their mind open.

At work, at home and in the community, in the future students will need a deep understanding of our different social contexts with different cultures and traditions around the world, and how others think, whether as scientists or artists. And whatever tasks Artificial Intelligent machines may be taking in the future, I am convinced that human knowledge and skills are much needed for the construction of meaning in our social and civic life.

Hence, as in previous semesters, groups of students using a methodology based on “fishbowl” debates and workshops, and using tools developed by the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium — TIPC were asked to address complex wicked problems of their choice which came out to be:

• Energy poverty
• Fashion waste
• Cities waste management
• Homelessness
• Agri-food value chain
• Rural underdevelopment

Complex problems require complex solutions and therefore the need for in-class open-minded debates for reconciling diverse perspectives and interests. While in-class learning surely contributes to decontextualization of learning (and in most cases students are not direct stakeholders of the problems they wish to address) the debates and workshops are of great help to recontextualise. In addition students are asked to contact direct stakeholders implicated in the problem to validate their problem-assumptions.

What I have learned is that addressing societal challenges through this type of innovation accelerators:

(i) requires students to think in a more integrated way that recognises interconnections. This way they enhance their “systems thinking” skills, moving them away from the mechanistic linear thinking, which is so common in most economic and business models.

(ii) helps to develop empathy with other people’s problems and the ability to see problems at different levels. For example students become more adept in handling tensions, dilemmas and trade-offs. For example, debating the equilibrium between equity and freedom, individual autonomy and collective well-being, speed and efficiency of decision making and participatory decision processes, etc.

(iii) stimulates creativity in problem solving and the capacity to consider the future consequences of single actor’s actions on the whole system.

(iv) improves the capacity to evaluate risk and reward, as well as the a sense of accountability for the products of one’s work.

By the end of the semester I felt the students enhanced their sense of responsibility, and of moral and intellectual maturity. They now look better equipped to reflect upon and evaluate their (our) actions in the light of their experiences and in terms of their personal and societal goals.

I do not know if my students know how much I learn from them. I suspect they do and I can only whish them the best. In this more interdependent world we need great collaborators and orchestrators. Innovation is rarely the product of individuals working in isolation, but rather an outcome of how we manage to mobilise, share and integrate knowledge. Therefore the well-being of societies will increasingly depend on our capacity to collaborate and take collective action.