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.

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.