Learning for Change: A call for academics to get out of their comfort zones and transform the knowle

About the author: Tim Strasser is a PhD Researcher at ICIS, Maastricht; TRANSIT researcher and session co-host at the Learning 4 Change conference. Social innovator at rootAbility, empowering student-led change for sustainability in higher education.

Are you frustrated about how the knowledge production system confines the possibility for research and education to be truly meaningful and transformative in practice? Here’s a call to action to do something about it, based on various discussions at the L4C conference (in particular the session on Humanizing the Economy and the Critical Talks session).

What moved me most deeply during the L4C conference was the topic of how the science system itself is called to evolve, being a core part of a society undergoing transformation as a whole. Academia has a vital role to play not just in studying and (at best) contributing to the transformative efforts of social innovators. Academia also needs to address its own systemic barriers that are inherent to the institutions of research and education. Also on a more personal level, as academics we need to go beyond our comfort zone and get more active in challenging those institutions, and challenging ourselves in our personal commitment to change.

What we saw largely missing is a sense of courage and vulnerability to acknowledge our co-responsibility in re-enacting patterns that are in fact part of the larger problem, part of our collective irresponsibility. Some examples of this are how the pressure to produce publications and citations enacts an inherent growth logic of the knowledge production system that is similar to how production in the market economy is oriented towards growth in GDP. That is, the system of production is structurally disembedded from the societal value it is intended to serve.

Knowledge production could be much more transformative in many ways. Some suggestions that surfaced in our discussions at L4C included:

1. Possibilities for real co-design and co-production of research in non-hierarchical ways, with practitioners who are properly co-funded to act as co-researchers. Too often research on social innovation is still „extractive“ as social innovators working with little payment are expected to offer their scarce and valuable time for interviews, while receiving little benefit of the research outcomes. This requires changes in funding regulations and research contracts.

2. Quality of research being evaluated by actual learning outcomes among social innovators, not just by paper outputs and citation impact. More holistic evaluation mechanisms and impact indicators are needed that take societal relevance into account.

3. Embracing emergent processes and unpredictable outcomes in the way research is designed and funded could allow for deeper learning. This is seldom possible, as the research outcomes already need to be known at the start of the project and the research processes hardly allow for deeper reflexivity and flexibility to re-frame the underlying questions and approaches along the way.

4. Research, teaching and societal-engagement being more integrated in a way that synergies between knowledge production, education and real-world practice could be realized. The disciplinary fragmentation and the seperation between theoretical and practical realities is structurally embedded in how universities are organized.

Now what could be the role of academics to realize these possibilities?

We see many academics and students frustrated by the dehumanizing pressures of how we research and learn. So let’s take this frustration as a resource for motivated action. Let’s go beyond our comfort zones as „observers from the outside“ and actually take a stand: let’s identify as social innovators within the systems of knowledge production and education.

Why don’t we apply more of what we learn from our studies of social innovators to ourselves? Maybe because it’s scary to acknowledge our co-responsibility in re-producing the rules of the game instead of challenging them? Because we fear a loss of status, security and legitimacy? Maybe also because we don’t realize how deeply we have internalized those rules of the game in our own sense of identity?

Here are some concrete pathways for action...

1. Nurture the capacities of students to become transformative researchers: through exploring non-conventional ways of teaching and embedd transformative learning in curricula... even if this challenges the expectations of evaluators, or even of the students themselves.

2. Develop your own capacities to practice transformative research: learn how to effectively co-design and facilitate collaborative research, integrating diverse ways of knowing and fields of practice... even if this requires more time and dedication than granted by the project funds and if it may feel risky to engage with practice more deeply than „observing from the outside“.

3. Challenge dominant academic institutions of research: such as funding and partnership legislations, publication pressures, citation indexes, quality standards and evaluation mechanisms. Be more pro-active in challenging how universities are organized... even if this may involve conflicts and backlashes.

4. Reinvent conferences and the way we learn as academics: go beyond top-down knowledge transfer and engage in spaces for real dialogue and deep listening. Embrace the personal and emotional aspects of ourselves in addition to the abstract and rational ways of knowing that constitute our masks as “experts”... Even if this makes you feel uneasy and vulnerable.

Conferences like Learning for Change and the Transformations conference could be seen as niche examples of transformative academic conferences: that co-design engaging learning events together with practitioners, that allow spaces for the arts and ritual, that provide opportunities for real co-creation and that support academics in their efforts to challenge institutions of academia as much as they support social innovators in other fields. Let’s start re-envisioning and re-designing conferences more as part of a wider ecology of learning and action among academics and practitioners equally engaged in social innovation for transformative change.