Collaboration, Commitment and Creativity in Education
Introducing RASL Compositions
In addition to being the title of our collection of essays, RASL Compositions is also the name of the lab’s current education-focused research project. RASL Compositions: Collaboration, Commitment and Creativity in Education is an innovative, transdisciplinary approach to education, designed to break through and move beyond disciplinary boundaries, to facilitate new ways of knowledge production and to encourage collaborative thinking between academia, art and society. The project consists of a student education programme (in the form of a minor planned for 2019, currently being developed), a teacher training programme and an accompanying research school. Through these programmes, education becomes a space where knowledge is not only absorbed, but also produced. The educational sphere is no longer a mere extension of research, where knowledge developed in research practices is “simply” transferred to educational practices (Nicolescu, 1997). Instead, educational practices become research practices themselves. And in this case, they will become transdisciplinary research practices.
Envisioning educational practices as research practices has consequences for the content as well as the organization of the education system. Students are given responsibility for the content of their own education: they can choose the topics they want to explore (accompanied by an elaborate justification). This development also has consequences for the role of the teacher. Educators do not only need to possess knowledge, they also need to be familiar with other forms of knowledge, and they must be able to relate different forms of knowledge to each other. The (inter)disciplinary expertise of the transdisciplinary teacher is part of a larger collection or composition of different knowledges, supplied by other teachers, the students themselves and societal partners. Within these practices, societal partners will also function as research partners. It is important to mention that the relationship with outside partners is not an instrumental one in which they (as clients) have a question and students (as consultants) provide an answer. For us, a research partner is neither consultant nor client.
The process of knowledge production within transdisciplinary education requires a close collaboration between students and teachers, who work together (with societal partners) as true partners in their journey to solve complex problems. RASL Compositions offers students an educational practice where they can directly engage with the possibilities and limits of artistic and academic knowledge in addressing societal issues.
An urgent need for transdisciplinary education: wicked problems
Why do we want to offer transdisciplinary education? Society is increasingly facing ‘wicked problems’; issues at stake include the waste problem, the climate crisis, shifting political landscapes, changing economic models, migration and intensifying inequalities. A growing number of scholars are stressing that research universities and universities of applied sciences should address and “solve” these issues, that as an act of noblesse oblige, knowledge institutes should pro-actively develop research and education to deal with these societal issues (Jensen & Krogh, 2017; Van der Zwaan, 2016; Ministerie OCW, 2015). However, these issues are complex and cannot be resolved overnight.
Taking a closer look, we find that existing disciplinary frameworks fall short when attempting to properly define and solve the extremely complex problems of the 21st century. We are confronted with forms of displacement (of communities, power relations, climate effects) that produce new regimes of rationality and visuality that require new narratives and new modes of knowledge generation. An example is the ‘climate change–conflict’ interaction, which (among other reasons) fuels the refugee crisis in Europe. Briefly put, the rise of the Islamic State (due in part to the effects of climate change [e.g., failing harvests]) led to the civil war in Syria and its citizens fleeing the country, which in turn accelerated the refugee crisis and increased the presence of Syrian refugees in the European Union (UNHCR, 2016). While the refugees are currently trying to participate in society, they are alienated within the social narrative. Having knowledge of this interrelatedness (of alternative perspectives, people, nature/animals, objects) is imperative when approaching societal challenges and re-imagining visual and social narratives. The complex character of the refugee crisis is typical for a wicked problem: difficult to define, “malignant” and seemingly unsolvable (Brown, Harris, & Russell, 2010; Ritter & Webber, 1973).
While we are increasingly affected by the symptoms of wicked problems, our ability to address them within the currently prevailing frameworks of higher education is decreasing (McGregor, 2015). At RASL, we believe it is the combination of arts and sciences that can provide new forms of knowledge production and solutions (Bernstein, 2015)—what we refer to as transdisciplinary compositions—that enable the necessary learning, gained in and from society, to imagine and visualize alternative futures.
Giving students a voice: the call for transdisciplinarity
Although it is a cliché that the youth are the future, it is a cliché that should not be disregarded. When it comes to addressing these issues, it is also important to give students a voice. The annual Global Shapers Survey of the World Economic Forum (2017) provides the millennial generation with such a voice, by presenting their views on how they perceive the world and what they want to do about it. The results show a strong engagement with societal issues: young people consider climate change the largest problem, followed by large scale conflicts and inequality. Additionally, they consider these problems as their (and other individuals’) responsibility to solve. Although the government has a responsibility as well, it does not release individuals from the obligation to do whatever they can to tackle these issues. When it comes to their position on the job market, they make clear that lack of experience is considered to be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. We want to address these concerns in a number of ways. We want to give students the room to set their own agenda—letting them choose a topic that they find to be of crucial importance—so they can be heard. We also want to create opportunities for students to connect with the appropriate societal partners who are knowledgeable on these issues. And in this way, they will become familiar with the stakeholders who operate in their labour market.
By seeing educational practices as research practices, a synergy arises between addressing societal issues, giving students a voice and understanding labour market perspectives. In this setting, students will experience the need for collaboration if they want to be heard. As Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum expresses it: “By definition these issues cannot be tackled by any stakeholder acting alone, they must be addressed by several stakeholders working together and, increasingly, working beyond national borders” (World Economic Forum, 2017, p. 4). On a more local scale, within our RASL Double Degree programme, we also hear the call for disciplinary collaboration from the students themselves. The programme offers students the opportunity to combine a bachelor in arts with a bachelor in science, allowing them to make a link between arts and sciences on a personal basis. However, they are increasingly asking for transdisciplinary courses where this link is elaborated upon and explored by fellow students, teachers and other parties. By developing and offering these courses, we can enlarge the transdisciplinary knowledge of the students and teachers and ensure that working in a transdisciplinary way is not only limited to the personal interest of the student or teacher. We can also start to build up a repertoire of transdisciplinary methods, since each issue will ask for a different approach.
Transdisciplinary education: international precedents
Finally, we are encouraged (and alerted) to take the step of combining art and science perspectives when we look at international educational partners, of which a small but growing number offer this kind of education. The d.school at Stanford University works with project-based classes that “bring together students, faculty and practitioners from all disciplines and backgrounds to collaboratively tackle real-world challenges” (Stanford d.school, 2017). The New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York City has a Transdisciplinary Design programme “created for designers interested in developing ideas, tools, and working methods to address pressing social issues and the complex challenges of a global culture” (Parsons, 2017). The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon is “a unique place where design, arts, sciences and humanities converge” (Carnegie Mellon Design, n.d.). And the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an “antidisciplinary” research community equipped to address societal concerns, “leveraging the best that technology has to offer, and connecting technology back to the social and the human” (MIT Media Lab, n.d.).
Examples in Europe include the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and the Zurich University of the Arts (Zdhk). The Transdisciplinary Studies programme at Zdhk “links various practices in arts, design and everyday life. It enables students to work in cooperative constellations and address various questions and problems using critical and reflective approaches based on new and interdisciplinary methods and formats that students develop themselves” (Zurich University of the Arts, n.d.). These examples are not exhaustive, but they make clear that the momentum is growing and the time to catch up is now. RASL offers a unique breeding ground to join these initiatives and make coalitions inside and outside the Netherlands.
Transdisciplinary education: theoretical foundation
We have opted for a transdisciplinary approach since it is a tried and tested way to combine different kinds of knowledges (Pohl, Truffer & Hirsch Hadorn 2017; Nowotny, Scott & Gibbons, 2001; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 1997). Similar to the aforementioned institutes, we are adding the arts to scientific and social knowledges, emphasizing the radical collaboration that the d.school also endorses: “To inspire creative thinking, we bring together students, faculty, and practitioners from all disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds—when we say radical, we mean it!” (Stanford d.school, n.d.). A transdisciplinary approach, in which academic, artistic and societal knowledges are integrated, is the way to educate students for the future.
In further exploring transdisciplinarity, we want to take the definition from Julie Thompson Klein and Roderick Macdonald as a starting point. They define it as “creating different futures by way of improving choices, heightening reflexivity and inclusivity, generating new languages, designing new structures, and devising new pluralistic and more complex knowledge structures” (Klein & Macdonald, 2000, p. 217). Within this approach, disciplines and fields are recomposed to develop a space for viewing a problem and, thereby, its solutions in a completely new way (McGregor & Volckmann, 2013; Wilcox & Kueffer, 2008; Aboelela et al., 2007; Nicolescu, 2002). It is within this recomposing that the arts and sciences come together, and where the knowledge and skills of both artists and scientists are required (Giroux, 2013; Marshall, 2014; D’Agnese, 2016). Diego Galafassi (2018) specifies this further when it comes to the role of various knowledges in climate transformations research: “art in climate transformations is best seen as an open inquiry process, unconstrained by standard scientific methods, and involving not just artists and scientists but also communities and change agents across multiple domains of action” (p.77). In a transdisciplinary approach, the imaginative and the transferrable, the sensory and the non-sensory, co-inhabit, collaborate and compose new perspectives and futures by using scientific knowledge, as well as visual and embodied experiences (Escobar, 2018).
More concretely, transdisciplinarity can be specified in two ways. First, it can be seen as a way of knowledge development that goes beyond (transcends) the disciplines. This implies that to address societal issues, artistic, scientific and societal knowledge are combined to transcend their typically segregated disciplines. Knowledge is not superimposed but developed from the bottom up, within small scale activities. The knowledge is developed by what Latour (2004) calls critics (as opposed to academics). The critic is not the traditional academic that debunks but “the one who assembles, . . . the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” (Latour, 2004, p. 246). Secondly, ‘trans’ can be seen as moving through, implying that concepts are developed that transverse the disciplines and reposition the disciplinary knowledge related to the specific concept. An example is BlueCity Lab, situated in Rotterdam. Entrepreneurs, scientists and designers participating in BlueCity Lab share the basic assumption that “waste does not exist”. Based on the ideas of the Blue Economy (Pauli, 2010), they redefine waste as a resource for another and new product. And thereby, they relate the different scientific and artistic knowledges in new ways to each other. We also find this way of working at Waag (https://waag.org), a Dutch foundation acting at the intersection of arts, technology and society, and at Mediametic (https://www.mediamatic.net), an Amsterdam-based cultural institution and ‘network hub’ where arts, biotechnology and nature are combined.
To conclude: three guiding principles
In the previous sections we have discussed the conditions for a hybrid arts and sciences educational perspective: (1) an interest in tackling societal issues, (2) the acknowledgment that these issues cannot be sufficiently addressed by an individual and therefore, recognizing the importance of interdependencies on different levels, and (3) the realization that new forms of knowledge and accompanying methods need to be developed to address these and future challenges. From these conditions, we can arrive at three pedagogical/didactical principles that function as guidelines for developing educational practices: commitment, collaboration and creativity. These principles have also been supported by various literature on educational research (Hazelkorn, 2005; Lyall, Bruce, Tait & Meagher, 2011; Schoon, 2015). These principles not only will drive the minor developed by RASL but also will serve as the foundations of other forms of education.
Commitment implies, among other things, an awareness that students are a part of society, and its issues do and will not leave them (and their educators) unaffected. To really show commitment, students should be encouraged to come up with the issues to investigate themselves, to demonstrate that they are aware that education extends beyond individual development, that it always takes place within a specific context and that it is necessary to take this context into account. After all, they are the ones who must be able to identify and address future problems, and higher education should equip them with the appropriate repertoire of skills and knowledges to face this long term endeavour.
Commitment to societal issues requires collaboration. As previously stated by Klaus Schwab, societal issues are too big to be solved by individuals and too complex to be solved within single disciplines. Students and educators must acknowledge that individuals and disciplines are interdependent. Therefore, collaboration is needed; to make a difference, others are needed. A different skillset from our educators and a revision of our educational programmes is required. Students should be trained to work with fellow students and different disciplines, and they should become familiar with the structures to do this professionally.
That is where creativity comes in. Creativity in higher education is about linking different knowledges to each other in yet unexplored ways. Currently, most students are trained within one discipline which means they address societal issues from a singular disciplinary framework. But a growing number of studies are interdisciplinary, and students within these studies are able to connect multiple disciplinary frames. A problem and its solution do not need to fit the same frame. For example, a political problem might be solved using economics (‘public choice theory’). However, we think we should go even further by making education transdisciplinary: disciplinary frames—grounded in scientific, visual and embodied knowledge—are reframed in the interactions that occur in how the societal problem is defined (see Klein & Macdonald, 2000). To phrase it in the terms of Joseph Schumpeter (1943), one of the intellectual fathers of economic innovation and entrepreneurship: transdisciplinarity is the process of “creative destruction”. Students and educators should take “what can be” and not “what is” as a starting point for education.
Dr. Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens
Tamara de Groot, Lecturer and Arts & Culture Programme Coordinator, Erasmus University College
Roger Teeuwen, Head of School of Design & Social Practices, Willem de Kooning Academy
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