Abstract:

Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments challenge educational institutions to educate future-ready graduates skilled at handling uncertainty and excel in unpredictable environments. The situation implies new pedagogical and learning issues. Preparedness for uncertainty requires exposure to authentic assignments that students often find stressful, uncomfortable, and frustrating. It is less clear, though, how teachers can design adequate designs that support students through unsafe learning journeys. We argue that learning to acknowledge the inherent uncertainty of complex real-world problems is necessary to cope with unforeseen and unpredictable conditions. In this article we examine how students perceive metaphors introduced to help students understand the uncertain nature of such problems. The study is part of a research project aimed at exploring how metaphors may help students tolerate, and even embrace, living and working in uncertainty.

Our methodological approach is a case study of a training design run as part of an interdisciplinary master’s degree course at a Norwegian university. In this course, teams of students from diverse study programs learn teamwork skills by solving real-world problems for civic and working life. The training design is based on the idea of using The Foggy Field as a metaphor for uncertainty associated with complex real-world problems. The Foggy Field is presented as a term for situations in which neither the problem nor the path to solution is known. In addition, The Foggy Field is framed as the natural initial (and often recurring) state of an innovation process. To gain better insight into student experiences, we collected data through qualitative questionaries, a focus group interview, talks with student teams, and narratives from student team reports.

The findings show that most students perceived The Foggy Field in line with the intended purpose. Students associate the metaphor with unfamiliar, uncomfortable uncertainty. Furthermore, The Foggy Field is portrayed as a temporary phase related to the initial course period. Students describe it as the directionless, abstract, and inefficient phase in which they were “just” discussing, talking, asking questions, and buzzing around. Regarding this, students seem to consider The Foggy Field as the phase preceding the actual start of the project work.

We conclude that The Foggy Field appears as a useful metaphor for helping students acknowledge the inherent uncertainty of real-world problems. As such, our study may contribute to better insight into how metaphors may be usefully applied in teaching and learning environments for uncertainty. Moreover, by providing better insight into how students perceive uncertainty, the study may also help teachers create adequate teaching and learning designs that support learning through unfamiliar uncomfortable uncertainty.

Keywords:

Uncertainty, higher education, teaching and learning, real-world problems, metaphors.