Abstract:

A relatively new challenge for Higher Education (HE) is how to facilitate and deliver the skills and competencies required for graduates to engage in an effective manner with design for social change and innovation. This learning and teaching challenge stems predominantly from a trend in recent years to address diverse and large-scale social challenges through design thinking and associated strategies geared towards social interventions. HE approaches in this area remain mostly fragmented, piecemeal and inconsistent, comprising mostly of isolated initiatives. No benchmark guidelines exist to provide standards. This paper reports on one initiative in this area, and more specifically on how students undertaking a specifically developed unit of study, responded to both the content and the instructional approach. A phenomenographic approach to student perceptions on the delivery of the unit was considered appropriate to capture the complete spectrum of student views as well as the reasons behind them. The fundamental assumption of phenomenography is that there is a finite number of qualitatively different ways of perceiving a particular phenomenon. By capturing the ‘structural’ aspect (what) of the varied perceptions and the ‘referential’ (how) dimension, it is possible to develop an overview of the phenomenon under investigation. This paper provides a description of the learning unit in terms of content and instructional approach, and an overview of how the students considered the specific learning experience. The objective is to make albeit in a small manner a useful contribution towards the relatively new challenge for HE on how to facilitate and deliver the skills and competencies required to promote in curricula design for social change and innovation.

Keywords:

Design for social change, competencies, skills, curriculum design.