How to enable collaborative reflexive learning in remote education for sustainability

By Hayley Ho and Kateryna Pereverza

This story belongs to the series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”. This is the second video story in the series, and written around a talk we made for the Transformations conference in June 2021. We share elements of the design of a university course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” run digitally in January-March 2021, and zoom in on specific facilitation techniques developed for fostering collaborative, reflexive and exploratory learning. We reflect on the topic and discussions we had during the two conference sessions where we had the chance to discuss our work with other conference participants. Each session took on somewhat different angles.

While in our previous video we compared physical and digital editions of the course, in this story we zoom in on how we approached designing a university course digitally to enable collaborative, reflexive and exploratory learning.

To create this video story we were for the second time using an approach of developing a flow with illustrations in Miro that the two of us then narrated over. This approach provides an opportunity to present visual materials and deliver key messages in a concise way. Preparation of every video story advanced our thinking on the topic, helped to refine key messages, and allowed us to highlight different aspects of our work.

This talk was developed for the Transformations conference which was organised as an online event in June 2021. The conference gathered a community of researchers and practitioners that explores processes of radical changes in social-ecological systems and how those can be steered towards sustainability. Transdisciplinary collaborations and reflexive approaches are necessary for steering sustainability transformations. While universities can be seen as places for tipping interventions towards transformative science and knowledge systems. In our talk we share our experience of designing a university course aimed at fostering such transformative capabilities and mindset among its students. We summarised our talk in a short abstract that was submitted to the conference beforehand.

Conference abstract

Transformations towards sustainability would require capabilities on different levels (individuals, groups and organisations) to build upon the diversity of perspectives and problem framings, engagement in cross-silo collaborations, and reflexivity to continuously learn from practice. Over the last year, the need to learn and collaborate remotely added to the challenge of developing these capabilities. Universities are places for tipping interventions with great potential to enable the next generations of practitioners to be better equipped for bringing positive changes in society.

Our contribution presents the experimental design of a university course with focus on collaborative and reflexive learning among a diverse group of students. We will use timeline mapping to present our approach, and facilitation techniques and exercises we developed within the course “Transdisciplinary approaches for system innovations’’ in KTH Royal Institute of Technology. In our approach to the course design, we aimed at a balance between guiding and enabling creativity among students so they can develop their own approaches for structuring, visualising and organising their thoughts and findings. We used a responsive design based on various feedback mechanisms during the course.

Reflections from the conference sessions

The Transformations 2021 conference was organised on a platform that allowed participants to publish their pre-crafted contributions as video presentations a couple of weeks before the conference started. The videos were available on the platform during the conference and for a month after.

From previous online conference experiences we knew that videos alone rarely initiated interactions between attendees and presenters for in-depth discussion or feedback about the content. Perhaps, recognising this challenge, conference organisers created a possibility to discuss each pre-crafted contribution during a scheduled session. By chance, our talk was part of two different sessions, one ran early morning our local time, and another in the late evening. Both sessions turned out to be interesting experiences of interaction and learning from other participants located in different geographical locations and timezones.

The two conference sessions involved different conference participants and facilitation, which resulted in contrasting discussion dynamics as well as topic focus. Our first session consisted of mainly practitioners with design and participatory method backgrounds from different fields. With good facilitation from the organisers, we kicked off with a brief round of introductions that enabled us as participants to find our initial “red thread” related to design. Thus we launched into extremely lively discussions that bounced between different subjects and contexts, and that ultimately kept returning to a shared passion related to process. Self-moderating, the group was very aware of other participants and tried to make space for others to speak.

The second session included presentations with a focus on evaluation of learning in participatory processes and courses. Our talk connected as through our approach to the course design, we had to deal with the tension between the established way of grading in university courses versus facilitation of reflexive learning and attitude to learning as exploration. One of our insights from the session was the realisation that with increasing attention to learning in monitoring and evaluation of real-life transition initiatives, a similar tension can arise. During the session, there was also interest in our approach to facilitation of learning in digital spaces, which resulted in the follow up we are currently working on with one of our fellow participants — an upcoming in October 2021 webinar “Facilitating transformative learning online” (as part of a webinar series initiated by the Learning Community).

Conclusions

We enjoyed the format of discussions with a small group of various presenters, although this may have been the reason that there was only limited contribution from those who were not presenters. Without clear guidance on what type of interaction would take place during the sessions, it very much depended on the moderator and participants present. In the conference overall, this worked better in some sessions compared to others.

Sharing our experiences during the conference, engaging in various sessions and listening to plenary speakers was enriching and thought-provoking. However, the conference highlighted that networking possibilities are challenging to provide in such online formats. For established communities, online conferences can provide the opportunity to reconnect and synchronise with those you already know. For newcomers it can be more challenging to integrate and build meaningful connections. This seems to be an important direction for further advancing the online conferencing experience, so it can provide spaces for a deeper interactions and setting up new collaborations.