This blog is all about education in times of uncertainty. How can education work through financial crises, AI, conflict, the environmental polycrisis and more. It’s called wicked education following the idea of wicked problems, which was introduced by Rittel and Webber, initially as a way of talking about social policy problems. Since then, their framework has been developed and applied to a wide range of complex challenges. A simple way to think about a wicked problem is that it has three main characteristics:
- complexity of elements and interdependencies
- uncertainty in relation to risk and consequences
- divergence in viewpoints and values
I’m Vel McCune, Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh. All of the views expressed here are my own 🙂 I’ve been thinking, researching and teaching about education in times of uncertainty for many years.
Here are my most recent publications and also a full publication list.
Reflective Teaching in Higher Education
By Leaves We Live: Entanglements with the 30 × 30 Biodiversity Challenge on Veterinary Campuses.
Academic identities and teaching wicked problems: How to ‘shoot a fog’ in a complex landscape.
Teaching wicked problems in higher education: Ways of thinking and practicing.
Two relevant projects I’ve been involved in are the Wicked Problems Project and the Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education Project.
The image on the front page is by Bhuwan Bansal on Unsplash, edited by Vel McCune.
wickededucation.blog 