Abstract:

Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments call for a new era in higher education in which pedagogies of uncertainty play a vital role in developing graduates with critical 21st century work force skills. Preparedness for uncertainty requires designs that put students in authentic and challenging learning situations which can entail discomfort, stress, and fear of failure. Teachers must demonstrate that they can tolerate learner confusion and “hold” their students through unavoidable uncertainty. However, it is less clear how teachers can create such environments.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to better insight into teaching and learning designs that may facilitate learning through uncertainty. We argue that the ideas of threshold concepts and liminality may provide us with more in-depth knowledge of how students can be assisted through troublesome unsafe learning journeys. The threshold concepts theory posits that learning challenging knowledge (threshold concepts) happens through navigating uncomfortable liminal spaces associated with rites of passages. Thus, understanding what students find difficulty to cope with, represents a way of thinking about curricula that may enhance proper teaching and learning environments.
We claim that curriculum designs for uncertainty may benefit from emphasizing three overarching threshold concepts: liminality, living with and thriving from uncertainty, and confidence to challenge. In line with this, we propose a training design for a master’s degree course in innovation competence at a Norwegian university. In this course, interdisciplinary teams of students from diverse study programs learn teamwork skills by solving real-world problems for civic and working life. Most of these students have no previous experience with complex open-ended problems in a teaching setting.
The training design, called The Foggy Field, includes three entangled elements: Naming, framing, and staging liminality. Naming liminality reflects the idea of using metaphors (the foggy field; the innovation journey) to accentuate the inherent uncertainty of open-ended problems, the course-specific term for liminality. Framing liminality means conceptualizing “the foggy field” as a natural part of “the innovation journey”. Finally, staging liminality refers to conditions enabling a safe teaching and learning environment that may assist students during confusion and “stuckness”. Altogether, naming, framing, and staging liminality may help students acknowledge uncertainty and troublesome feelings as completely normal emotions when facing real-world problems. In addition, the design elements may enable students to learn that mastering to persist in the face of trouble, increases the likelihood of innovative solutions. Finally, they may assist students in trusting the process and having faith in their ability to learn to cope with uncertainty.
The Foggy Field training design provides an idea of how students can be prepared for uncertainty and serves as the basis for further empirical studies. As such, it may contribute to a better understanding of how teachers can delelop future-ready candidates mastering working under uncertainty.

Keywords:

Pedagogies of uncertainty, higher education, metaphors, liminality, threshold concepts, open-ended problems.