Creating Wicked Students

Designing Courses for a Complex World

Paul Hanstedt

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781620366998
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt argues that courses can and should be designed to present students with what are known as "wicked problems" because the skills of dealing with such knotty problems are what will best prepare them for life after college. As the author puts it, "this book begins with the assumption that what we all want for our students is that they be capable of changing the world….When a student leaves college, we want them to enter the world not as drones participating mindlessly in activities to which they've been appointed, but as thinking, deliberative beings who add something to society."There's a lot of talk in education these days about "wicked problems"—problems that defy traditional expectations or knowledge, problems that evolve over time: Zika, ISIS, political discourse in the era of social media. To prepare students for such wicked problems, they need to have wicked competencies, the ability to respond easily and on the fly to complex challenges. Unfortunately, a traditional education that focuses on content and skills often fails to achieve this sense of wickedness. Students memorize for the test, prepare for the paper, practice the various algorithms over and over again—but when the parameters or dynamics of the test or the paper or the equation change, students are often at a loss for how to adjust.This is a course design book centered on the idea that the goal in the college classroom—in all classrooms, all the time—is to develop students who are not just loaded with content, but capable of using that content in thoughtful, deliberate ways to make the world a better place. Achieving this goal requires a top-to-bottom reconsideration of courses, including student learning goals, text selection and course structure, day-to-day pedagogies, and assignment and project design. Creating Wicked Students takes readers through each step of the process, providing multiple examples at each stage, while always encouraging instructors to consider concepts and exercises in light of their own courses and students.

1

RETHINKING THE WHOLE STUDENT IN WICKED WAYS

This book begins with the assumption that what we all want for our students is for them to be capable of changing the world. The changes they make may be big, or they may be small. They may be political or spiritual or procedural or pedagogical. They may involve a chemical formula or a reading of Shakespeare, the evolution of Weber’s thinking, or a development of evolutionary theory. The point is, in the end, when students leave college, we want them to enter the world not as drones participating mindlessly in activities they’ve been assigned but as thinking, deliberative beings who add something to society.

Wholeness

Although my thinking on this topic is the culmination of a career’s worth of research, teaching, and learning, the ideas in this book really came into focus a few years ago when I heard a college president speak of the features that she said made up the whole student. Expanding on an Ignatian tradition that argues that we need to educate the mind, body, and spirit, this president included three additional elements: emotions, creativity, and . . . well, I have to admit I don’t remember what the sixth element was.

Although I understood where this scholar was coming from, my sense was that any construction of students as a culmination of parts vastly misses the mark. Let me put it another way: I do agree that when educating our students we must treat them as more than just names in a grade book. We must recognize that they are complex beings made up of interacting minds, bodies, spirits, emotions, and so on. On some level, we need to design universities that recognize, value, and account for these complexities.

I also believe we can design universities and university curricula that address all these characteristics—and whatever the heck that sixth component was—and nevertheless still send our students out into the world lacking a sense of wholeness, a sense of themselves as fully capable human beings who can have a meaningful impact—sometimes large, sometimes small, but always meaningful—on their surroundings. In fact, I think we do this all the time: Every year, colleges implement agendas intended to make sure students have contact time with curricular and extracurricular features designed to check off the various whole person boxes. And every year, we graduate students who enter the workforce desperate to get a job, desperate to earn a good paycheck, certain that all they need to do to be happy in life is be a good employee and play by the rules, and in short, go out into the world with a stunted sense of their capabilities and of what it means to live a rich and fulfilling life.

Of course, I recognize that academia produces plenty of graduates who have a strong sense of purpose and of their ability, even their right to pursue that purpose. Nonetheless, a lot of our graduates leave campuses with a degree and little else. Indeed, as Arum and Roksa (2011) so eloquently reveal, as far as most students are concerned, the certifying power of the degree is the sole purpose of going to college, besides, of course, the social life. Once they have that degree, they believe they can become part of the workforce, prosper, and be happy. In this context, then, educating the whole student means little more than creating a student who can slide easily into the workforce, participating in the status quo.

An Alternative Metaphor

In this book I’d like to offer an alternative metaphor for understanding what it means to be whole as well as an exploration of the consequences of that understanding for course and assignment design and pedagogical practice. This approach begins with an incident that took place a few years ago when I was attending a workshop. A department chair stood up and said, “Well obviously, we don’t want our students to be the line workers, we want them to be the line managers.”

Although many in the room nodded at this comment, some of us found ourselves pausing, wondering if this was indeed the case. Didn’t we, in fact, want our students to be the ones who walk into the room, look at the line managers and line workers, and ask, “I wonder if there’s a better way?” or walk into the political debate, look at the entrenched right and the entrenched left and ask, “I wonder if there’s a better way?” or walk into a nongovernmental organization and look at the employees and the clients and ask, “I wonder if there’s a better way?”

What’s more, in addition to asking if there’s a better way, I feel that someone who is whole would have an idea of how to go about exploring the current dynamics of the situation, whatever they are, and possible alternative approaches to the situation. And beyond that, this person would have an idea of his or her ability to engage in this process, a sense that the world and the workplace are fluid and ever changing, and all of us as citizens are allowed to participate in these changes in thoughtful ways.

In other words, if we’ve educated our students effectively, they move into the world as questioning, informed, thoughtful agents of positive change. This isn’t to say that they engage in change for change’s sake; doing so would erase the word thoughtful from the equation. The point here is that wholeness is not quantitative in nature—if you’ve been educated using X + Y + Z, you are now complete—but qualitative: You’re whole, you’re complete, you’ve reached a key level of your essential potential when you understand that you have the ability not just to watch the world but to participate in it, to shape it, to change it.

Thus, when we educate a literary scholar, we expect the scholar to understand the basic skills and methods of that field and to use them appropriately; but finally what we hope is for that scholar to come back to us not simply parroting established readings of texts but adding something meaningful to the conversation, revealing an insight that hadn’t previously been noticed. And when we educate a chemist, we expect that person to understand and be able to apply the methods and knowledge of that field; but in the end, our greatest hope is for that chemist to improve the field of chemistry or the work of chemists by discovering, say, a means of developing biodegradable plastic or an environmentally friendly form of motor oil.

Similarly, when we educate a social worker or accountant or psychologist, although we recognize our responsibility to graduate someone who is proficient in the basic tasks of those fields, we are not adverse to the idea that somehow that social worker might find a better protocol for dealing with clients, that the accountant would have the wherewithal to go to a superior if he or she noticed systematic failures in corporate applications, that the counseling psychologist would be capable of transcending known practices to help a client whose symptoms don’t necessarily conform to those in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

It is worth noting the way the issues described here reflect the changing nature of life today. The late Edmond Ko, a key thinker in the field of general education, liked to talk about how his engineering students often faced wicked problems, that is, situations where the parameters of the problem and the means available for solving them were changing constantly. “If they’re going to face wicked problems,” Ko used to say, “we need to give them wicked competencies” (E. Ko, personal communication, May 4, 2010).

Of course, this applies not just to engineering students and engineers but to all students and all workers in all walks of life. 10 years ago, few people anticipated the opening of Myanmar to the rest of the world, the rise of the Islamic State, face-to-face chat on cell phones, legalization of gay marriage across the United States, fake news, or the Zika virus. The parameters are changing. The tools and technologies are changing. We live in a wicked world, an unpredictable world. We need wicked graduates with wicked competencies.

This is an ambitious goal, one that some might see as problematic. After all, is it really our job as academics to engineer social, political, and economic change? And what if a student’s goal is simply to get ahead, get a good salary, and fit into corporate (or nonprofit, governmental, or academic) culture?

With regard to the question about engineering change: Perhaps this is not our job. But neither is it our job to create mindless individuals who simply do as they are told. Our world faces complicated problems with the natural environment, the political climate, education, poverty, and technology. We need educated citizens who have a sense of the world around them and of their ability to interact in that world in meaningful ways.

With regard to the question of a student’s choosing to assimilate into the status quo, this is also fair enough to ask. But the key here is choice; choices can only be made when people are fully aware they have other options. If a graduate truly chooses to participate in existing structures, that’s perfectly fine, but he or she must make this decision with eyes wide open, cognizant that placing self-interest above public need is only one of several available options.

In summary, when we in the academy state that we desire our students to be whole, I believe we mean that we want them to leave college capable of achieving their full human potential to shape and reshape the world—and themselves. Indeed, I would go further and say this is our sole hope for our students: We want them to enter the world knowing they have the ability to participate in thoughtful and constructive ways. To hope for anything less would be, I believe, to acknowledge an essential meaninglessness in our work.

Authority

All this is a very nice vision, of course; very few would argue with the idea that students should leave college with the capacity to engage in positive change. But how do we achieve it? Almost reflexively, most institutions and academic programs respond to this question with the following simple equation:

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE + SKILL KNOWLEDGE = THOUGHTFUL CHANGE

Although the acquisition of content knowledge and skills is crucial in arriving at the goal of thoughtful change, the kinds of complex challenges we’re discussing here require more than that. Simply put, if content and skills were enough, education would already have achieved this goal, particularly after the rise in standardized testing that the United States has experienced over the past two decades.

In the end, content and skill knowledge must be augmented by an attitude, a disposition, a sense of one’s ability to enter the world not as a mere cog in the machine but as a thoughtful, competent individual who, when the situation calls for it, is able to step forward to ask questions and propose solutions that may lead to a reinvention of the machine. We might illustrate this idea along the following lines:

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE + SKILL KNOWLEDGE + ATTITUDE = THOUGHTFUL CHANGE

To a generation of faculty wary of a culture of entitled students, this may seem like a risky venture. It’s important to note that the attitude we are after here is more than confidence or agency. After all, one can be confident without necessarily being correct or even informed. Similarly, agency, the ability to act on the world and reshape it, does not necessarily require wisdom or forethought. A 16-year-old driving a car the wrong way down a 1-way street has agency. But certainly we hope for more than that in our students.

Instead, I would like to suggest the term authority. Using this word has its problems, so let me get a few things out of the way immediately: When I use the word authority, I do not mean anything related to authoritarianism, arrogance, bullying, bossing others about, or dominating people. Authority in this context is not a word about being at the top of the food chain, being in charge or feeling superior.

Rather, I’m using the word in a way that looks both forward and backward. Authority in this context implies authorship, the ability to write and rewrite, shape, and create. At the same time, this ability comes from something or someone. Authority is granted, given, earned. The content and skills students acquire during their years in college are crucial; they are part of what creates a sense of authority in students. What we teach them matters. As my friend Eric Amsel has put it, in this context authority means mastery of these content and skills. Perhaps, then, we’re not looking for a single equation but two simultaneous, even contradictory, equations such as the following:

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE + SKILL KNOWLEDGE = SENSE OF AUTHORITY

and

CONTENT KNOWLEDGE + SKILL KNOWLEDGE + SENSE OF AUTHORITY = THOUGHTFUL CHANGE

How we teach our students is also crucial in the development of authority. If what we’re talking about is a kind of authorship of the world, it follows that the learning process that prepares students for this kind of active, thoughtful response to the problems we face must allow them to practice these skills. In other words, the only way to truly develop authority is to practice it, consistently, from the start, in ways at first small, then increasingly large. We need to develop authority in ways that are perhaps less complex (although never simple), then increasingly more complex, that allow students to fail, fall down, and pick themselves back up again. Authority should allow students to learn how problems are solved with deliberation, creativity, resilience, and collaboration that allow them to understand that they are capable of solving problems and that solving these problems leads to a rewarding relationship with the world and with themselves.

In short, we need to develop authority in ways that allow students to understand that engaging in this way in a messy world is what it means to live to their fullest capacity as a human being.

The Nuts and Bolts

So how do we construct curricula and courses and assignments that provide our students not just with the content and skill knowledge they need to perform in our fields but also with the authority that gives them the ability to respond to a complex world?

My experience is that some students arrive at college with this sense already firmly entrenched in their psyche. Some arrive fresh from the military, where they’re often forced to accept responsibilities whether they want them or not. Others come from families that seem to throw them into the deep end, essentially telling them, “Here’s a problem, you handle it.” Still others have involved themselves in cocurricular activities that have pushed their levels of maturity, such as 4-H, or working in inner-city organizations that pair them with older members of the community.

It is worth noting that in all these cases, authority is earned through experience, practice, trial and error, and continued effort that eventually leads to some level of success. It seems safe to say that the best way to create an environment conducive to developing authority in our students is to place them in situations where the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Rethinking the Whole Student in Wicked Ways
• 2 Setting Goals for our Courses
• 3 Structuring Wicked Courses
• 4 Creating Wicked Assignments
• 5 Creating Authoritative Exams
• 6 Day-to-Day Teaching Methods
• 7 Assessing Wickedness
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Poster Project for English 322: Composition Theory and Practice
• Appendix B: Travel Film Assignment for First-Year Seminar on Travel Literature
• Appendix C: Research Poster Assignment for Occupational Therapy
• Appendix D: Final Exam Take-Home Question on what Matters
• Appendix E: Mini-Group Essay Assignment for English 338: Victorian Literature
• Appendix F: Group Log for Mini-Group Essays
• References
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover