I thought I was going to be blogging diligently every evening throughout the AshokaU Social Innovation Exchange. Each evening I would sit down and explain my thoughts about the meetings, the workshops and the people I have met. I didn’t. Instead, I was at dinners and also overwhelmed by the detail of the conference that my brain just couldn’t keep up. So now is the time to make amends. The best thing about the Exchange, for someone who has been in the field of social innovation education for a long time, was the lunch-time ‘curated’ meetings. AshokaU staff are very careful to notice connections or challenges that different campuses share and to connect us up in different configurations to enable us to move forward on those issues. One of the key ‘issues’ we have, as a UK campus, is the quite different ethos and strategic visions between the UK and America. Most US universities in the AshokaU campus network are liberal arts or research intensive universities. Liberal arts universities are usually training grounds for very privileged young people who have a lot of time on their hands and are not entirely focussed on getting a job, just yet. Research intensive universities are also not as focussed on the student experience as we might be. This leads to a certain disconnect for US campuses as they focus on service learning- students going out and helping people less privileged than themselves (often overseas) and on researching and inventing solutions. At UN our primary focus is to constantly innovate around the student experience, working on the primary issues of retention of students through to second year and on graduate employability. AshokaU has noticed this and connected us to universities like Miami Dade College and Arizona State University and who have 165,000 and 83,000 (respectively) students like ours, or Central Queensland University with 22 campuses all over Australia to look after- all with students like ours. This opened up a very interesting conversation around the role and contribution of social innovation and Changemaker skills for students who are the less privileged ones, who are the first generation to go to university, who work throughout their studies in order to live, who have to cope with complex family lives and responsibilities throughout their time at university and still are expected to contribute positively to society. No tidy solutions were presented at the lunch-time, but at least there is now a group of similar universities collaborating to tackle these challenges. The other thing AshokaU do at the Exchange is mix their networks up. The Exchange isn’t just about educators- founders of huge philanthropic ventures rub shoulders with students, and academics from all round the world bump into senior leaders of universities. Our own Student Union leader David Lewis was introduced to David Bornstein, New York Times columnist and author, and in the meantime Phyllis Taylor was quietly sitting at the back of a workshop on design thinking in the very same building that she donated $15million to Tulane University to build. When asked who she was, she just said ‘oh, I’m just a community member’. Serendipity only works if you are there, and open to it. All the people at the Exchange are really friendly and open to new contacts. I met with colleagues from Poland, Italy and Ireland, all open to developing a European centre for social innovation in education, that’s if we remain part of the EU!
0 Comments
|
AuthorAcademic, priest, family man and problem solver Archives
October 2023
Categories |