About the program

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.

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 support students in starting their very own changemaking journeys in which they will learn how to 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.

The course is coordinated by Kristina Bogner (Assistant Professor Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development). It was designed by Jacco Farla (former Director of Education at Department SD), UU Educational Consultancy & Professional Development, and Frank van Rijnsoever (master coordinator of the department of SD and Senior Teaching Fellow at UU). The coaching sessions will be given by different colleagues from the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development.