teaching about wicked problems in higher education

On the 7th of March the project team will be running a workshop for the University of Edinburgh on teaching about wicked problems. Update – The workshop is now full but we will soon be advertising another workshop which will take place in May.

In that workshop we will be sharing some of the great ideas our participants had about teaching about tough topics like food poverty, sustainability, and the challenges of being a professional vet. Our participants often used strategies such as getting students to work in diverse groups to do authentic problem solving around wicked problems. Teaching students to value diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives was important to them.

I’ve also been looking in the literature for ideas to inspire teaching about wicked problems and I came across this interesting paper by Heila Lotz-Sisitka and her colleagues  about transformative and transgressive learning. The paper is full of rich ideas about how we can support our students to transgress boundaries to solve wicked problems. Whether these are the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines, the boundaries between our inner and outer worlds, or the boundaries between the roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. It’s well worth a read!