Preparing for wickedness in higher education Towards design principles and teacher strategies

In today’s rapidly changing world, professionals face challenges that transcend disciplinary, organisational, and sectorial boundaries. They must develop attributes to deal with the inherent complexity, uncertainty, and value divergence of problems with wicked tendencies and find ways to connect and mobilise across different practices in joint problem-solving efforts.
This dissertation explored the multi-faceted challenge of fostering students’ boundary-crossing learning when addressing problems with wicked tendencies in higher education. The central research question was: What design principles and teacher strategies foster students’ boundary-crossing expertise in the context of addressing problems with wicked tendencies in higher professional education?
Wickedness, characterised by uncertainty, complexity, and value divergence, was examined from a situated perspective, focusing on how students experience problems and their inherent boundaries, and pay attention to different problem dimensions. When these dimensions are well-aligned in the educational setting, they are manifested in the problems, the problem-solving processes, and their outcomes. Students’ deliberate crossing of the boundaries in the problems at stake enhanced the adaptive, transdisciplinary, and participatory qualities of the problem-solving process.
Nine design principles and thirteen teacher strategies were identified. The study demonstrated how developing boundary awareness can contribute to students’ understanding of wickedness and how engaging in boundary work is vital in (inter)action strategies for addressing wickedness. For an aligned problem-solving approach and optimal use of the learning potential of boundaries, it is important to let boundary awareness inform boundary work and vice versa, and benefit from the successive refinement of boundary work and boundary awareness.