ABSTRACT

“Wicked problems” are complex to understand and challenging to teach. Our experience of teaching about environmental concerns in Aotearoa New Zealand suggests how these concepts are taught is more important for student learning than the nature of wicked problems themselves. By offering opportunities for students to co-develop their own situated knowledges about wicked problems, they can conceptualise and tackle them more effectively at their own pace and in their own experiential contexts. Here we identify and discuss approaches to teaching and learning that can be effectively applied to any wicked problem. We demonstrate a hopeful way to teach and learn about unwieldy and overwhelming issues that many of today’s undergraduates will inevitably be expected to confront in the future. This paper provides aframework to engage students in acourse, and tools for engendering active participation insituated and tangible learning experiences when teaching wicked problems. As lecturers teaching in aSchool of Environment in the disciplinary areas of geography, environmental science, science communication, and sustainability, we discuss the value and applications of these ideas across three levels of undergraduate teaching. We identify challenges that we have experienced and show how it is possible to turn these challenges into opportunities.

摘要

“邪恶的问题”很难理解，也很难教。我们在奥特亚罗瓦新西兰环境安全方面的教学经验表明如何教授这些概念对学生的学习比问题本身的性质更重要。通过为学生提供机会共同发展他们自己关于棘手问题的情境知识，他们可以按照自己的节奏和经验更有效地概念化和解决这些问题。在这里，我们确定并讨论了可以有效应用于任何棘手问题的教学方法。我们展示了一种充满希望的方式来教授和学习当今许多本科生在未来将不可避免地面临的棘手和压倒性的问题。本文提供了一个让学生参与课程的框架，以及在教授棘手问题时产生积极参与的情境和有形学习体验的工具。作为环境学院地理、环境科学、科学传播和可持续性等学科领域的讲师，我们讨论了这些思想在本科教学的三个层次上的价值和应用。我们确定我们经历过的挑战，并展示如何将这些挑战转化为机遇。