Are you interested in making a positive change in this world?

Then engage in developing your own Changemaking Journeys!

The world today is grappling with a myriad of crises – so-called global sustainability challenges (GSCs) – including the escalating climate crisis, heightened geopolitical tensions, and the potential disruptive impact of digital transformations. These multifaceted issues demand a reimagined educational approach, distinctly different from how we imagined education the decades before.

“Dealing with GSCs requires actors to have the values, knowledge, and skills to navigate and intervene in the complex, uncertain and value-laden landscape where these problems take place” (van Rijnsoever et al. 2023, p. 2) – for which you need to engage in and take responsibility for your very own changemaking journey. This requires that you develop key competencies for sustainability in higher education (Brundiers et al. 2021, Wiek et al. 2011) that are in line with UNESCO’s (2017) “Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives”, e.g. interpersonal and self-awareness or value-thinking competencies. This course focuses on letting students develop several of these core competencies.

Grand aims: The Changemaking Journey course aims to contribute to the education and empowerment of changemakers or change agents, that is, “actors who exert their individual agency to innovate and create sustainable, accepted change in the systems in which they operate” (Vervoort et al., 2012, p. na), e.g., by “taking creative action to solve a social problem” (Ashoka, n.d.). Such changemaking “involves empathy, thoughtfulness, creativity, taking action and collaborative leadership. But although these skills are essential to our thriving, they are almost entirely absent from the educational experience of most young people, with often a narrowing focus on reading, maths and the acquisition of academic grades.” (Ashoka, n.d.). We aim to educate changemakers who know how to and do create value for themselves and for the groups they are embedded in – by focusing explicitly on their personal development, i.e. in the sense of developing key competences for sustainability (Brundiers et al. 2021, Wiek et al. 2011).

Learning approaches: The course will complement the field experiences of students with reflective coaching sessions. We use the heads, hearts and hands as organising principles for this course to engage in cognitive, psychomotor and affective learning domains (Sipos et al. 2007). This means students shall, beyond the head engagements in their curricular education (i.e. readings, lecture, discussion; includes critical and systems thinking), be able to complement their education with more hearts (empowerment, place-based learning) and hands (collaborative, experiential learning) pedagogies. In particular, we engage in inter/transdisciplinary, place-based experiential learning that emphasizes personal competencies development in our own lived spaces and experiences.

For whom? Audiences, targets:

The main target audience for this course are all master students of the Department of Sustainable Development. This includes the masters Energy Science, Innovation Sciences, Sustainable Business and Innovation, Sustainable Development, and Water Science and Management. The reason is that master students are more aware of their career and impact than bachelor students. Participants indicated that they think the masters level is appropriate, as it matches their phase in life.  

Why? Learning objectives:

• Students learn to reflect on, assess and enhance their competencies with regards to interpersonal leadership, self-awareness, and psychological flexibility, transformational leadership, collaboration and prosocial behavior, transformative action, stakeholder engagement and community co-design.
• Students will use field experiences to gain authentic learning experiences help them to reflect on, assess and enhance their competencies with regards to interpersonal leadership, self-awareness, and psychological flexibility, transformational leadership, collaboration and prosocial behavior, transformative action, stakeholder engagement and community co-design.

This course is explicitly designed as an experimental space. Students shall develop the abilities to identify their own competencies and level of competencies and also identify themselves in which competencies they want to focus on developing further. In addition to this, they shall improve their ability to reflect on the learning process itself and how this process relates to their learning objectives.

What? Contents:

In this course, we will engage in three modules in three teaching periods with content around interpersonal leadership, self-awareness, and psychological flexibility (module 1), transformational leadership, collaboration and prosocial behavior (module 2), transformative action, stakeholder engagement and community co-design (module 3).

Module 1: Interpersonal leadership, self-awareness, and psychological flexibility which deals with personal qualities, values and behaviour, self-awareness and psychological flexibility. The module focuses on the individual within its own environment. In this module, students mostly engage with ‘who they are’ and how they act within their environment, i.e. contributing to their intrapersonal or self-awareness competencies as well as their values-thinking competencies. Students will reflect on and take responsibility for their own development by understanding their personality traits, core values, and desired areas for enhancement. In this module, students will develop the competencies on how to enhance the desired developments.  

Module 2: Transformational leadership, collaboration and prosocial behavior. The second module builds on module 1 by focusing on working sustainably and effectively in diverse teams. In this module, students mostly engage with how they are embedded in groups, how they work in groups and how groups collaborate with other groups to improve their ability to reach certain goals. Students will learn about taking a leading role by defining group purposes and group dynamics, building a shared vision, and enhancing fairness, intrinsic motivation and effectiveness within and beyond teams. Non-violent, culture-sensitive communication will also be part of this module.

Module 3: Transformative action, stakeholder engagement and community co-design. The third module focuses on engaging with stakeholders and in community co-design. In this module, students will learn how to navigate complex interactions with different societal groups with different knowledges, values and worldviews (interpersonal competencies). They will explicitly build their learning experiences on the insights and reflection from module 1 and 2

How? Methods, pedagogies:

In this course, students will engage in a variety of teaching methods. Throughout the whole course, students will continuously engage in discussion and (self-)reflection under the supervision of trained coaches. In addition, this course entails a strong flipped-classroom element, that is students will read or watch course materials to build a conceptual base that students can use in applied settings of their own group. Further, they will be asked to apply the insights from the materials and coaching sessions in daily life, in-house projects (e.g. when reflecting on prosocial behaviour in study groups), as well as in field-based projects (e.g. when collaborating with societal stakeholders to engage in community co-design).

For which results? Assessments, evaluations:

For this course, we use a competencies-based assessment, following the framework of key competencies in sustainability (Brundiers et al. 2021, Wiek et al. 2011). During the course, students will continuously collect evidence for their learning in a portfolio. In this portfolio, they can e.g. create their own dynamic learning agenda or audio-visual learning history and use feedback logs. In the assessment, we will then evaluate the written/recorded products in the portfolio and engage in dialogue-based assessment. The end results of the course is a pass/fail. This is also in line with similar courses at UU, such as those at the skills academy.

Sources:

Ashoka. (n.d.). Changemaker skills. Retrieved 15.01.2024, from https://www.ashoka.org/en-us/collection/changemaker-skills

Brundiers, K., Barth, M., Cebrián, G., Cohen, M., Diaz, L., Doucette-Remington, S., … & Zint, M. (2021). Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework. Sustainability Science, 16, 13-29.

van Rijnsoever, F. J., Sitzler, S., & Baggen, Y. (2023). The change agent teaching model: Educating entrepreneurial leaders to help solve grand societal challenges. The International Journal of Management Education, 21(3), 100893.

Vervoort, J. M., Rutting, L., Kok, K., Hermans, F. L. P., Veldkamp, T., Bregt, A. K., & van Lammeren, R. (2012). Exploring dimensions, scales, and cross-scale dynamics from the perspectives of change agents in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 17(4).

Wiek A, Withycombe L, Redman CL (2011) Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development. Sustain Sci 6(2):203–218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s1162 5‑011‑0132‑6

Interested?

The program is open to all master students of the Department of SD. This includes the masters Energy Science, Innovation Sciences, Sustainable Business and Innovation, Sustainable Development, and Water Science and Management. Participation is voluntary. The program is extracurricular, there are no EC points. Over the year we expect that you will spend about 28 hours on the program. This does not include time for activities that you undertake to develop specific skills, such as participating in workshops. Students that participated in a similar module last year, indicated that it was a very valuable addition to their personal development. 

When you participate in the program, we expect you to continue throughout the courses you decided on. Space might be limited, so we are looking for students who take program seriously.

If you are interested in this unique opportunity to broaden your own skillset, please send an e-mail to Kristina Bogner.

When?

In every period, there will be three meetings of 2 hours each. We schedule these meetings together with the students.