The Austin, Texas conference provided an opportunity for Elon to share about its Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation, a 16-credit immersive semester program.
The Elon faculty members who initiated the Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation presented the results of their experimental pedagogical model to a crowd of more than 100 people at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas, on March 6, 2018.
The panel-based presentation featured faculty members Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Phillip Motley as respondents with William Moner serving as the moderator. Joel Hollingsworth, a contributor to the Design Thinking Studio, was unable to attend.
The presentation reached an audience that traveled from as far away as Brazil and to educators at all levels of K-12 and higher education. The conference focuses on innovative practices in education that lead to productive student outcomes.
In their SXSW EDU presentation, these faculty members emphasized that the Design Thinking Studio semester provides a unique multidisciplinary core capstone experience and reflects several key practices that the AAC&U defines as essential learning outcomes for liberal education, including engagement with big questions, critical and creative thinking, personal and social responsibility, and active involvement in challenges that synthesize across disciplines.
The faculty members reported that students derived the most value from their full immersion in a service-learning project that allowed them to concentrate on one course rather than dividing their attention between four or more individual courses in a semester. The Studio requires students to fully invest their time, truly work as a team across disciplines, and commit to the use of creative and collaborative practices such as Agile project management and design thinking processes that are valued by employers. The Studio maintains a blog at http://bhive.elondesignthinking.org.
The Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation is a 16-credit immersive semester program that requires students to dedicate their entire semester course load to a singular course experience addressing a “wicked problem” in the local community. The Studio teaches students how to practice design thinking techniques in a dedicated space where they are asked to find problems they are capable of addressing, generate ideas for how to approach those problems, and prototype and test potential solutions in coordination with local community partners.
Students have been tasked to address the goal of wellness in the local community in conjunction with two community partners, the Alamance County Wellness Collaborative and the Alamance County Food Collaborative. Students participating in the course receive a service learning experiential learning requirement (ELR), a Core Capstone credit, independent study credits, and research credits.
The values espoused in the Studio correspond to the values that guide design thinking: empathy and human-centered design research, problem finding and focused problem definition, and the time to create multiple iterations of prototypes that are tested with the local community.
Pope-Ruark, associate professor of English, served as lead faculty, while Motley, associate professor of communications, and Hollingsworth, senior lecturer and chair of the Department of Computing Sciences, each taught during the semester. Moner, assistant professor of communications, contributes in a supporting role and conducts research on the pedagogical outcomes of the program.
For details on the course structures and the methodologies used in the studio, visit http://blogs.elon.edu/innovationstudio.