I needed two posts to explore my thinking about what’s most important in teaching about wicked problems.

Exploring complexity is really important. I did some research with experienced teachers of wicked problems and they often emphasised helping students see that wicked problems are not simple and don’t have tidy answers. That really matters in a world where social media rewards simplistic, binary and divisive ‘solutions’ to issues such as poverty, crime or conflict. We need to work with our learners to understand that these problems have multiple drivers which interact in such complex ways that we often cannot predict what will emerge in a given situation. People, languages, genres, cultures, technologies, institutions and social structures all act in this complexity. So we don’t really ever ‘solve’ wicked problems, we just make our best judgments about what might shift things in a better direction and then stand ready to be surprised. We want our learners to look a social media posts that claim to have easy answers and to see beyond that to the nuance. Things we can do to achieve this include:

• exploring texts with contrasting perspectives together
• picking a case study and looking at it from the perspectives of disparate disciplines
• asking students from different backgrounds and cultures to bring examples of how a wicked problem plays out in their context
• tracing all the different actors within an instance of a wicked problem, technologies, people, non-human animals and more …

I’ll allow myself one more most important thing 🙂 That’s about working with emotion and wicked problems. I sometimes meet colleagues who say they don’t want to teach about topics such as the ecological polycrisis because that will frighten students. But here’s the thing … no one gets to avoid knowing about wicked problems. They affect all our lives. We also need to bear in mind that people who can temporarily avoid thinking about wicked problems are hugely privileged in a way that most people are not. You can’t avoid thinking about racism if you’re Black. So while students may well be frightened by some of what we teach, or angry, or despairing … much better they take that journey with us than on their own. Making a start on working with emotions might look like:

• collaborating with students to develop ground rules that make it safer to share
• using pedagogies that give everyone a turn to share but make it completely fine to say ‘pass’
• being sensitive that feeling safe to share is a lot about power
• being open about our own anger and fear about wicked problems
• drawing on contemplative or arts-based pedagogies
• collaborating with students to take positive action to be part of a response to a wicked problem

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash edited by Vel McCune