I’ve been research and teaching about wicked problems for some years now, so I thought I’d start this first post by reflecting on what I would prioritise in modules or courses focused on wicked problems. In a recent paper I and some lovely colleagues wrote about a capability that’s crucial for working on wicked problems – boundary crossing. We and our learners need to be able to communicate and collaborate across academic disciplines and with groups outside universities, like policy makers and businesses. That means being open to working with collaborators who use language differently, who have different habitual ways of doing things and who have different values. Anyone who has tried marking assessments with an academic from another discipline will know how difficult it can be to find common ground about something as seemingly simple as what makes for a good essay. The communication challenge is multiplied many times over for complex problems like biodiversity loss.

Some ways of working on boundary crossing include:

• Developing shared boundary objects as a way of building shared understandings. That might be shared terminology, diagrams or processes
• Reflecting explicitly with our students on how our subject area decides what is legitimate knowledge and how we can value the knowledge and practices of other communities
• Gradually building up our students’ experiences of boundary crossing group work in situations where it’s safe to fail and reflection on the group process is part of the work

Another crucial capability for working with wicked problems is having awareness of our own power and privilege. Take the climate emergency, for example, the people contributing most to the problem are mostly rich and white. The people who are dying in this emergency are mostly from minoritised groups. I think we start on this by looking at ourselves – why do academics in the Global North still complain about only getting funding to fly to two conferences a year while the people who are dying in heat or flooding will most likely never fly or drive a car? In our teaching we can think about:

• Valuing authors and forms of knowledge that are typically excluded
• Reflect aloud on our own privilege to model this for students
• Thinking about who gets to participate fully in studying in our institutions, who is missing, and how our institutions need to change to include them
• Realising we won’t develop good approaches to wicked problems unless we have diverse contributors
• Data visualisations that make patterns of privilege clearly apparent

OK that’s long enough for one blog post so I’ll need to run this topic over into the next post. I’ve got more to say 🙂

Photo by USGS on Unsplash edited by Vel McCune