Impact-driven education

Impact at the Core places learners, teachers, and the broader community at the heart of education. At Impact at the Core, we develop education that encourages students to learn how to produce positive value for and with societal partners. Along these lines, Carl and Menter (2021) argue that recent societal challenges call on universities to consider social questions and to stay relevant to society. With the community of stakeholders, teachers, researchers and students, we identify the knowledge, skills and attributes that learners need to acquire to influence the complex societal concerns of today and tomorrow. We argue that the impact of higher education lies in the ability to teach students how to deal with wicked problems by utilising resources and knowledge with which they can contribute to society. We call that competence: Impact Capacity. To achieve this goal, how we teach in higher education settings needs to be reassessed; we should aim to bridge the gap between the real world and the university classrooms. Impact-driven Education provides the arena to grow while addressing authentic problems experientially, integrating ‘knowing how’ with ‘knowing what’.

Rethinking the value and functions of higher education

Within Impact-driven Education, students are called on to become active agents in the learning process, much more than in a traditional learning environment where the focus is for students to consume information rather passively. This means that teachers need to adjust as well. They will not be solely responsible for transferring knowledge to the new generation but also for creating the appropriate learning experiences and challenges, with experiential learning at the core. In this sense, the value of teaching is re-established as a craft, including abilities to coach, guide, support, and redirect the students as required by the circumstances. We aim to create (open) learning environments to produce more fluid and elaborate collaborations between producers of scholarly work, practitioners and students at the center. To bridge the gap between academia and real-world challenges, students need to not only reflect on the value of academic knowledge and methods but also need to translate this into practical insights, interventions and ideas.