The event “Building the University of the Future” was developed by BA Emprende on November 26 in Buenos Aires, ...
The event “Building the University of the Future” was developed by BA Emprende on November 26 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The event gathered top level speakers and an audience eager to listen to and suggest ideas to re-think the University of the Future. The main issues discussed were the challenges the university faces, the opportunities it has and concepts such as creativity, entrepreneurship and employability.
The future of creative education
The first conference was developed by Kerstin Scheuch, Director of Centro, an institution created in 2004 and located in Mexico. This organization seeks to professionalize creativity and use it to solve problems. The Director points out that Centro represent a new model of educational that has understood that the creative economy and design thinking are the driving force of Mexico.
Centro is a case of success: it has turned around the structure, focusing on innovation, education, teachers’ expert and professional knowledge instead of putting the emphasis on administrative aspects. The directors of the institution, who come from different places, training and careers, are successful professionals in their fields of expertise. They are completely free to design their currícula, hire teachers and interview applicants. The model is characterized by its flexibility, diversity, freedom, collaboration, better practices and the huge commitment and passion of those who work and study there.
Speculative design in the VUCA world
The philosopher and professor Alejandro Piscitelli invited the audience to think about technology and pedagogy in a VUCA –volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous- world. The university, as we know it cannot deal with the disruptions that happen in this world. This disruptions are occurring more and more quickly and that are beyond everyone’s imagination. This world needs new forms of education and learning, strongly connected to the new technologies.
Piscitelli promoted 5 very interesting projects under the idea “This is not…” The first project, called “This is not a class”, was developed within his own classroom in the University of Buenos Aires. He encouraged his students to become teachers using the “Facebook project”. In 2011 he leaded a project a project called “This is not a classroom 1 to 1”, an experiment carried out in a public school in Buenos Aires that summoned students from every course to develop self-managed projects within a friendly environment that was focused on multisensory learning. The following project was “This is not a Lab”, which questioned the culture of Broca –a kind of culture where individuals are consumers of information-, seeking to develop the Maker Culture –individuals a makers, creators- and Bi training, to develop both hemispheres of the brain.
The following project was “This is not a School”, planned under the idea of re-inventing a school. The project is being carried out in a Mexican school and suggests going back to the kinder, introducing learning based on circular and dynamic groups.
Finally, “This is not a University” is a collaboration project with Minerva Schools, a university that has no campus, transhumant but with local projects that aims to achieve active learning and the development of four key skills: critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication and effective interaction.
This VUCA world forces us to re-think every category of every single aspect of life, to learn new ways to analyse reality. The key, says Piscitelli, is curiosity, as it what moves us to make innovations, question the state of thing and generate new paths.
The Wonder Wall
The third speaker was Peter Gamwell, an expert on organizational creativity, learning and leadership. He began his presentation by asking a question: what are the conditions that make creative individuals and organizations flourish? Gamwell talked about The Wonder Wall. The idea emerged from a kinder garden in Canada where he went to observe the dynamic between children and teachers. A group of kids and a teacher were sitting at a small table, and the image, he said, resembled that of a board of directors. They were having a meeting to discuss an issue that had arisen from the children´s interests. The children had a board in their classroom called the Wonder Wall where they could write down their questions and interests. The teachers would read those questions, study the issue and design the curricula based on the children’s interests.
According to Gamwell, uncertainty is the concept around which we must build the concept of education. Acknowledging value and creative capacity are key actions to promote creative spaces.
Dynamic talks that generate ideas and concepts
Ignacio Peña, founder and CEO of Surfing Tsunamis, said that the university of the future will be a creative source. He pointed out that there will 200 million youngsters in Latin America in the near future and that real inclusion is vital. The core concepts for the university of the future must be:
The university of the future must focus on educating the person in an integrative way, combining humanism and science, innovation and ethics.
Alejandro Artopoulos, sociologist and professor at the University of San Andrés (UdeSA), gave a brief lecture on the different phases that the university has gone through. He pointed out that the university of the 1950’s, which used to educate workers for the industrial economy has been left behind.
He called the new university model as 3.0, with focus on Blended Learning –combination between classroom teaching and virtual environments-. Blended Learning is flexible learning that combines technology and creativity as neither of the two is good enough on its own.
Education 3.0 seeks to develop institutional entrepreneurship. The role of the university is to generate the skills and capacities to put the knowledge society to work.
Martín Bonadeo, PhD in Communications Sciences and founder and director of CIFRA at Austral University, questioned the current model that presents teachers as know-it-all and students as beings who are there just to listen to and repeat.
This scheme, says Bonadeo, is caused by a vertical structure that rules the education world. The structure must become flatter and roles must become exchangeable. He suggested promoting education self-management, where teachers become guides for students who are aware they are moving towards an uncertain future.
Estela Cammarota, Industrial Engineer and coordinator of the activities of the School of Economics in university centres in Prison, invited the audience to put the university back in the territory, including those who, for different reasons, cannot get inside the classrooms. She stated that knowledge is a source of freedom and that we must never forget that “we are persons if we are with the other”.
Finally, Agustín Batto, founder and director of Eidos, asked the audience who agreed with the following statement: the current university does not need to be changed. Those who agreed with the statement, had to remain seated. Everybody stood up. Then Batto explained the importance of thinking the education but from the students’ perspective. It is vital to think of students as active beings of knowledge, who co-build knowledge and work committedly when they find something that wakes up their interests and passions.
Once the dynamic talks were finished, the speakers answered questions from the audience. A core question was: how can we change the rules from the inside of an extremely rigid system. Estela Cammarota explained that on multiple occasions the answer lies in “infiltrating” the system and teaching things that are useful for a person’s life.
Peña pointed out that a combination of healthy rebellion and empathy is needed and that the focus must be always set on the student and not on the manual.
Artopoulos, highlighted the importance of learning through projects that are suggested by the students themselves. Gamwell claimed that listening is very important, as it enables us to understand what the other person is looking for and to stimulate their curiosity. Bonadeo suggested helping people to find out who they really are and what skills they can develop.
Piscitelli made it clear that in order to avoid having scattered projects and to achieve a real convergence among these initiatives and produce a real transformation in education, there has to be scalability generated by the State. There has to be a political decision to expand these processes to the whole of society.
Guesss
By the ends of the event, universities were invited to take part in an international project called Global University Entrepreneurial Students’ Spirit Survey (GUESSS), organized in Argentina by the Austral University Business School.
The conference came to an end with a dynamic in which participants had to discuss the core topics of four major issues: university and entrepreneurship; university and employability; university and social impact; and the no-university. The debate led to the collective construction of a draft of the Manifesto of the University of the Future.
