Education Commons^™

The following webinar featuring Dr. Danielle Lake from Grand Valley State University – Engaging Students in Wicked Problems: Strategies for inspiring and preparing students to tackle messy, place-based challenges.How can we prepare students to tackle wicked problems? What pedagogical methods can be used to address interdependent, high-stakes systemic problems in our communities?This webinar will suggest we need to pursue an experiential, collaborative learning model: working across networks, disciplines, and institutions in order to tackle our social messes. Participants will discover strategies and explore possible methods for better preparing students to collaboratively tackle the wicked problems within their field.

In contrast to static, disciplinary problems, many of the issues we face in the world today can be characterized as “wicked,” dynamically complex, interdependent, high stakes issues with no simple or obvious definition (let alone any simple or obvious solution). These wicked problems confront us with high levels of uncertainty in situations where both action and inaction carry serious long-term consequences. Current top-down, siloed, and abstract pedagogical strategies do not provide students with the tools for collaboratively managing such problems.

How can we prepare students within our own fields to tackle large-scale wicked problems?

What pedagogical methods can be used …

The new course is the first step in the initiative to incorporate design thinking into an explicit and credentialed experience for students at Grand Valley.

Danielle Lake, assistant professor of liberal studies, and Linda Chamberlain of Grand Valley’s Technology Commercialization Office will teach the course. Lake said students will receive the opportunity to address complex problems in the West Michigan community by working with local organizations and community partners.

“This course will help students develop the skill sets and tools that are essential for tackling our large-scale public problems, including empathetic listeners, effective collaborators, adaptive innovators, capable organizers, fair facilitators, …

This presentation provides a number of strategies for instructors interested in a more participatory, transdisciplinary, and experiential educational model in order to foster real-world change around our high-stakes, complex public problems. By utilizing soft system’s thinking in addition to a feminist pragmatist methodology students can successfully collaborate with community partners and integrate across their disciplinary expertise in order to co-develop and implement action-plans with community stakeholders. Given the value of this work, but also the challenges, this session also highlights the potential pitfalls of working to prepare students for a messy, iterative process of collaboratively learning-by-doing in a “wicked” world.

Life-long healthy eating habits linked with sustainable local agricultural practices, as “wicked problems” in the United States, are intractable, on-going, and high-stakes issues. An interdisciplinary university course was developed to engage students in participatory research and fieldwork on the inextricably linked dimensions of food, health, and sustainability. Students worked with community partners, stakeholders, and experts to address the specific interdisciplinary issues of diet and promotion of healthy eating habits in American school children. Using a “bottom-up” approach, students co-developed projects with stakeholders (including school children) to empower movement for change. This interactive research process created an iterative feedback loop which …

Traditional, theoretical pedagogical practices based in disciplinary expertise generally fail to prepare students for high-stakes, public problems. In contrast, “Wicked Problems of Sustainability” is an undergraduate course designed to provide students with the opportunity to redress complex, local problems through an experiential, community-engaged model. By implementing pedagogy developed through the integration of a feminist pragmatist framework with the literature on wicked problems, this course offers opportunities to impact real problems, develop skills, and foster virtues necessary for tackling public problems. Given the value of this work, but also the difficulties, this article highlights the potential pitfalls of community work on …

GVSU Faculty Spotlight