I’ve just picked up my travel pack for the AshokaU. Wow, it’s a tome. Over 85 different sessions over 3 days. Some serious cloning is required to tackle even a small proportion of the lectures, events, masterclasses and visits that have been prepared for over 800 delegates from around the world. The agenda is so diverse that I ran a word cloud generator to make sense of the breadth and diversity of the programme. Naturally, Social Innovation and Best Practice are the most common words- this is, after all, the world’s largest gathering of academics and students involved in social innovation education. Education and community are the next most frequent. These illustrate a concern with the education community itself- asking questions about what we are doing as educationalists to address the skills gap of the 21st century. But it also reflects a concern with education in the community- how streets, districts, neighbourhoods and urban areas reflect their educational backgrounds. It is interesting to note that incubators and investing is beginning to recede in importance, as the social innovation offerings across campuses move out of the business school terminology. Emerging terms this year seem to be ‘aligned’ (as in learning outcomes), ‘bricolage’, ‘commons’ and even ceremony and meditation heralding a shift of the discourse into wellbeing, and more community-based initiatives. The newest word, which is totally a reflection on the venue, is ‘jazz’. I have spoken before about there needing to be more punk in social entrepreneurship, but perhaps jazz will be more to the taste of the delegates.
My first session will be the designation ceremony, welcoming Florida First, Miami Dade, Northeastern, Singapore Management and UPAEP universities into membership of AshokaU. Then Michael Fitts, President of Tulane University of New Orleans will talk about story-telling. This is a sociological shift, but also a deeper way of expressing ‘social impact’. Much has been debated about measures of social impact, but there also needs to be humans behind these statistics, data points and correlations. Social innovation is essentially about affecting humans, not impact- a term which strikes me as being more akin to a meteorite impact than effecting social change. Then I will be meeting with all the other Change Leaders from the different universities, exchanging news and ideas. We will also hear from Erin and Kim, founders of AshokaU, about the details of their forthcoming book on inspiring university and school campuses to transform lives. The first day ends in the French Quarter of New Orleans with some jazz. Day two seems to start with two best practice sessions- how the relatively neutral term of ‘social innovation’ is advancing social justice in higher education. My own experience in universities has shown that talking bluntly about social justice can be rejected as liberal socialism, merely ‘left wing thinking’ whereas ‘social innovation’ sounds more macho, more ‘solid’. Is this going to be a session about making campuses more socially and environmentally just without ‘scaring the horses’? The second session is about incorporating Changemaker skills into the curriculum, something I have been working on for a while. The challenge here is student oriented- I have had feedback from students asking why they are being ‘forced’ to do volunteering or the Changemaker module. The limited experience of many students suggests that a little mandatory voluntary action widens their experience and deepens their thinking at a level well beyond those without similar experience. The challenge still remains- how do you inspire students to do things they wouldn’t otherwise choose? The two other sessions I will be attending are about ‘design thinking’ and ‘solutions journalism’. Not enough is done to think about social and environmental problems as existing within systems that make the problems worse. Too often, in public policy, politics and in the innovations world, complex social problems are reduced to a few key factors and simplistic solutions invented. I’m hoping that we see more about systems thinking and design thinking across all university curricula. Solutions journalism is accessing news that is about solutions that work, rather than just raising awareness of problems. I’ve probably missed better sessions, and I hope my fellow attendees have made different choices- we will be sharing notes in the hotel to get as good coverage of all the events as possible. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the site visits yet. I may be too busy leading one of the many contemplation and prayer sessions in the wellbeing lounge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorAcademic, priest, family man and problem solver Archives
October 2023
Categories |