Abstract:

This paper describes an international collaborative experience of developing and piloting an online training course targeted to Professors of Latin America Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), on the topics of Social Innovation and active learning methods.

Social innovation is a topic that has been gaining considerable attention in academic and practitioner debates as a viable approach for addressing societal challenges. Social Innovation is materialized into collaborative initiatives that rely on the active participation of citizens and other local stakeholders to address a social need (e.g. ageing, environmental awareness, youth unemployment, social exclusion, etc.) while promoting social change.

The popularity of social innovation has motivated a number of calls for the development of education and training approaches that allow for a more up-to-date and adequate qualification of individuals for collaborative action, notably for the development of capabilities for setting up new organizational models that can address social needs in a sustainable manner. In this vein, the call for engagement in Social Innovation has reached the scope of HEIs in several ways, and is leading to important changes in curriculum and fostering the adoption of new approaches in teaching, learning and research methods. On this regard, HEIs are increasingly experimenting with active learning approaches, to promote the involvement of students in innovative projects and community development processes with local stakeholders.

In order to address the demands for the adoption of active learning approaches, and for the qualification of students with Social Innovation competences, HEIs face important challenges for the qualification of the academic staff in order to equip them with the capabilities to adjust curricula and methods in an adequate and timely manner. On this regard, HEIs can benefit from sharing their experience with curricula changes as well as with the adoption of active teaching and learning methods. To this end, a Teacher´s Training Course (TTC), targeted to Higher Education professors of Latin America was designed as a capacity building strategy towards the redesign of academic curriculum in Latin American universities. The course aimed at facilitating the transfer of knowledge about Social Innovation concepts and practices and about adequate active teaching and learning approaches. The TTC was developed and piloted in 2018, as a joint effort of European and 10 Latin America HEIs, under the scope of the Erasmus+ project “ Students4Change”, therefore enabling the sharing of knowledge about different aspects and experiences of Social Innovation across different countries. The course development was followed by a pilot edition of the TTC that included 8 online webinars and a face-to-face workshop, engaging 51 professors from 10 Latin America HEIs.

This paper presents the international collaboration experience and the methodological process of development of the TTC, offering several contributions for the advancement of curricula innovation for education in Social Innovation. The paper presents a discussion about the nature of the challenges associated with education for Social Innovation in Higher Education, while presenting process of joint international development of the TTC, and a discussion about the course contents, methods and pilot results.

Keywords:

Social Innovation, active learning methods, higher Education, competences for Social Innovation, social change.