News Archive

Around the world, there is increasing recognition that certain problems – such as social disadvantage or climate change – are complex or ‘wicked’ (a term originally used by urban planners H.W.J. Rittel and M.M. Webber). Typically, a complex or wicked problem is difficult to define, multi-causal, changeable, socially multifaceted, situation-specific and implicates many different organisations and individuals. Such problems cannot be solved using a linear approach or single discipline, are often characterised by chronic policy failure, and feature disagreement about the most appropriate mitigation strategies.

Professor Carolyn Oldham (from Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering) and I coordinate SVLG5003 Wicked Problems, an interdisciplinary service learning unit  that seeks to prepare postgraduate students for such complex problem-solving challenges. Kick-started by an Alumni Fund grant, it featured a collaboration with the Wheatbelt Development Commission from 2014 to 2016. When I commenced a new role as Academic Coordinator of the McCusker Centre for Citizenship , the unit continued in 2017 as a service learning partnership between the McCusker Centre and the City of Stirling, with a focus on employability challenges for residents of Mirrabooka. Participating students work in interdisciplinary teams to consult with diverse community stakeholders, and to present specific recommendations.

The unit emphasises action research methodologies (iterative or cyclic approaches that involve prototyping), an experiential approach (the importance of walking in the shoes of multiple stakeholders), systems thinking (grasping the whole), transdisciplinarity (which differs from interdisciplinarity in that it canvasses the values and experiences of all stakeholders, not just ‘experts’), and collaboration (bringing together diverse stakeholder groups including government departments, not-for-profit agencies, and community members).

Because it involves cross-faculty collaborations within UWA as well as multiple community stakeholders, the unit is immensely complex. In fact, with each iteration of the unit, Professor Oldham and I have increasingly seen the unit itself as a complex problem, mirroring some of the complexities that the students navigate in our partner communities.

In particular, we have found ourselves renegotiating many institutional customs to create and sustain the unit. For instance, faculty control of staff workloads and teaching budgets is not geared towards cross-faculty offerings, and team teaching is typically viewed as inefficient, even though the modelling of interdisciplinary dialogue is vital for a unit of this type. Existing academic workload and service-delivery models geared towards in-house teaching also do not account for the extensive project-management and relational work demanded of the unit coordinators. Further, options for students are often tightly controlled along strictly disciplinary lines, so that many are told they have no room in their degree for the unit, even though they are keen to take it. (However, it is worth noting that when the unit was put to Engineers Australia, the national accreditation body for engineers, it was praised for its exemplary approach to developing the design and leadership capabilities of future engineers).

As these challenges collectively demonstrate, the traditional structures and systems of higher education are constrained with regards to accommodating a unit of this type. Such challenges are in fact typical of complex problems, so the unit has unfolded as an ongoing action research project that implicates UWA itself as part of the systems change work that it undertakes. Following the 2017 iteration of the unit, the City of Stirling has been similarly challenged, with the scope for the next cohort of students including questions about the relationship between its central and satellite offices.

By urging such systems change, the unit is thus so much more than a learning experience for students; it is also a learning experience for the institutions that support it. Further, it is a catalyst for community collaboration and planning, as evidenced by the planning workshop held at Mirrabooka in February this year, at which 21 stakeholders from all levels of government, not-for-profits, community members and UWA collaborated to define the scopes for the next cohort of students. At that meeting, in addition to the scoping work, five action plans were initiated that are now being undertaken independently of UWA. For me, this was the most rewarding moment I’ve experienced in my five-year journey with this unit, because the process we’d set in motion had prompted initiatives that would not have occurred without our intervention. In keeping with the vision of the McCusker Centre for Citizenship and UWA more broadly, UWA had, in that moment, demonstrated its capacity to make a difference.

Dr Chantal Bourgault du Coudray
Academic Coordinator,
McCusker Centre for Citizenship