Meaningful collaborations for transformative systems change: Design for collaborative, active and reflexive learning
By Hayley Ho and Kateryna Pereverza
This story is the fourth in the series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”. It continues the discussion of the facilitation techniques we developed for the course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” . This time focusing on those introduced to foster collaborative, active and reflexive learning among students. We also touch upon the specificity of facilitation in a multi-actor environment and conclude the story with reflections about a need to move beyond the traditional design thinking and participatory backcasting towards a more suitable for systems transformations integrated framework.
Meaningful collaborations for transformative systems change require learning by, with, and across all involved participants and disciplines. We find facilitation of such learning to be key in setting up meaningful collaborations. In the course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for System Innovations” we were engaged with promoting collaborative learning as a way to explore the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds in the class, the possibility to get feedback from peers and increase reflexivity on personal perceptions of the given transition challenge, and a way to address it.
Facilitation techniques for collaborative learning and reflexivity
A prerequisite of collaborative learning is to shift competitive mindsets with individually owned ideas to one of shared reflexivity and shared outcomes. One example of a technique we developed for the course, was to invite students to walk around an exhibition to explore and input into the work of other groups. In another, the entire class crowdsourced inspirational ideas together. The exercise took 15 minutes and resulted in the creation of a shared presentation with more than 40 slides visualising ideas of technologies, business models and innovative social structures for the future mobility system.
Peer feedback become one of the central techniques we embedded in the course. It not only included suggestions, comments and questions but also reflections and discussions of learnings from each other. We intentionally included short reflection sessions into every second seminar to promote the importance of questioning progress on the way and actively extracting important learning and insights before moving forward.
To ensure inclusivity and encourage equal participation in collaborations, we intentionally worked with different layers of student interactions; class, group, individual. Brainstorming sessions always began on the individual level when everyone got a chance to think by him or herself before communicating and discussing ideas with others. This was often followed by clustering of individual ideas and discussions that lead to consensus building in project groups.
Active learning with the use of physical spaces
We found the use of physical spaces to be an important enabler of active learning and creativity. Thus, we began each seminar by inviting students to help us change the standard layout of rows of tables and chairs facing a board at the front of the room. Altering the physical space facilitated and enabled for different types of interactions and collaborations. Depending on the activities and materials used, tables and chairs took different constellations, and walls and boards became activated for different purposes. We saw that as students experienced and became more confident in establishing their own personal space and presence, they began to choose their own arrangements without prompting. Student groups would gather materials, stand up and move to whiteboards as they saw necessary.
The interim and final presentations followed similar but slightly different formats and physical layouts, illustrating well how this can influence the interactions. For the interim presentation we had Q&As directly after each presentation, with the presenting group sitting in front of the audience. This resulted in an interview type interaction, where the presenting group answered each question in turn before the following question. In the Final presentations, we had Q&As after half of the presentations of 4 groups, and the presenting groups were all sitting in the audience. This resulted in questions becoming discussion starting points that not only the presenting group answered, but also other groups participated to build on together.
The physical layouts were introduced along with techniques to encourage students to actively contribute and learn from each other. Each project group was assigned another project group to lead the Q&As, feedback from every audience participant in the form of questions and learnings on post-it notes was attached to posters for each group. All these components worked well to foster a creative atmosphere and high level of engagement among the participants. Compared to a more conventional setting where the interaction consists of the audience, often mainly the tutors, probing the presenting group at the end of their presentation, we noticed a more supportive environment as every group’s progress became the shared responsibility of the entire class. The formats we experimented with in the course proved to be helpful for activating the audience and fostering collaborative learning across the groups.
Facilitation in a multi-actor environment
Transdisciplinary courses like the one we designed involve a need to facilitate learning in a rather complex environment. Complexity emerges from numerous interactions happening in the course: between teachers and students; students and their peers; in groups and outside groups; with societal partners. The task of addressing a sustainability transition challenge comes with the absence of a “single truth” and “right” answers, a need to manage a non-linear process of problem-solving, thinking “outside the box”, adopting uncommon roles, and an attitude to learning as exploration.
To acknowledge these specificities, the design of such courses/collaborative processes should be flexible and responsive to the needs of students/their participants. Co-creation approaches with constant feedback from individual participants and project groups could contribute to the relevance of the context and pace of facilitation techniques. Another practical tool to inform process design and increase the relevance of facilitators’ feedback would be by introducing process documentation. For this, we would need to better understand what information about internal processes the project groups feel comfortable to share.
Moving beyond Design thinking and Participatory backcasting for transformative systems change
Our attempt to combine the modular Participatory backcasting, mPB and Design thinking made clear a need for further advancing processes and frameworks for supporting transformative systems changes. While Design thinking is concerned with individual human needs, mPB includes methods for system innovations and is largely focused on “whole systems”. Both approaches examine the world from the socio-technical system lens and do not integrate the needs of non-human species. We find building upon the practices and methods developed in mPB and Design thinking, but expanding and compensating for their deficiencies could be a fruitful direction for developing systems transformation approaches.
This story is the forth in the publication series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”. Check the introductory story by which we launch the series and introduce included stories. Read our next and final story Responsive design for meaningful collaborations: feedback loops and emerging alignments.
