Designing the Future of Learning
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"Civilization is the race between education and catastrophe"
- HG Wells
As a new year – and decade – emerge from the devastation of a country on fire, it’s time to pause and address the largely parasitic relationship between humanity and our planet.
While in the growth-obsessed 2000s we blindly hurled ourselves into an uncertain future, the 2010s became an ode to post-growth: to unlearning and redefining the meaning of ‘progress’ in the face of a climate emergency. Never before have we experienced such accelerated change across so many areas that are vital to our wellbeing. We now know that our materialistic ways of living, along with rapid population growth, have given rise to an era of exponential global warming, known as the age of the Anthropocene. We know that human civilisation is on a path to extinction without decisive and radical rethinking of how we live. We also know that human activity is the most important factor in determining our future.
So, in a decade regarded by many as the make-or-break era for human civilisation, how can we unlearn the ideas that have driven us here? How can we benefit from a refreshed way of thinking? What steps can we take towards a future that doesn’t include the extinction of entire ecosystems?
Writing in the fifth century BCE, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said: “change is the only constant”.
As we dive headfirst into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, these words ring all the more true. With rapid upscaling of automation through AI, the explosion of the gig economy and rapidly growing and ageing populations, the only certainty in how we live and work is change. This rapid change is also sparking anxieties of a near-future dystopia in which many humans find themselves obsolete – replaced in the workforce by robots and automated systems.
However, where there are threats, there are also opportunities. Education once more emerges as the solution to problems of our own making. Learning can equip students with the skills to tackle global problems empathetically and creatively, and empower them with leadership in the face of adversity.
For the past year, Local Peoples has conducted new research into the future of work, education and learning, and what meaningful work will look like in 2020 and beyond, both for people and for the planet.
Students, we found, are anxious about their prospects for employment after study. Despite investing tens of thousands into their education, many worry their qualifications won’t be relevant or deliver meaningful work. A study of 500 students from nine leading Australian universities revealed that the majority of students feel their education is not adequately preparing them for the rapid changes underway in modern workplaces. In our research, we found that while 91 percent of students were seeking university education in order to differentiate themselves in the job market, only 51 percent felt confident in their ability to stand out. The gap in these responses reveals the divide between expectations and reality when it comes to the tangible, real-world outcomes higher learning institutions are preparing students for.
Students are not merely concerned with money and job security; they are looking to their educational institutions to help facilitate meaningful, socially impactful work. Over 90 percent of the students we surveyed wanted experience with purpose-driven organisations. Meaning, contentment and helping to improve society are emerging as core goals for students. They are also central to new sustainable business practices. This shift is of paramount importance if we are to transition from a ‘growth at any cost’ mindset to a sustainable and equitable economic (and employment) landscape – a transition that is crucial to our survival as a species.
There is still a major gap between industrial and educational practices. But there is also huge potential for tertiary institutions to address these gaps by refocusing education on human-centred approaches to learning.
“We cannot teach our kids to compete with the machines who are smarter,” said Alibaba founder Jack Ma, speaking at the 2018 World Economic Forum.
Instead, he argued, “we have to teach our kids something unique. In this way, 30 years later, kids will have a chance.”
A huge opportunity lies right before us: to radically refocus our learning institutions to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Creative thinking and design could help learning institutions better support students by working backwards from problems. In human-centred design, we start with the end in mind, imagine an outcome and then look for pathways to deliver it. We ask questions like: What problem are we looking to solve? How do we design a pathway to get there? Perspectives like creativity, empathy and leadership – what the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) describes as ‘enterprise’ skills – are used to tackle problems from the ground-up. By placing human interests at the centre of educational development, we can see some exciting potentials for global problem-solving.
The most obvious and practical mechanism for building leadership and empathy is through interdisciplinary collaboration. Connection is one of the most important elements of human happiness; it is also crucial to unlocking creativity and meaningfully engaging people. Collaboration across disciplines not only builds empathy and compassion by increasing students’ experiences with a broader range of people and interests, but it also buttresses their sense of purpose and personal development through socially effective problem-solving.
So how can human-centred design help? We can use it to support collaborative problem-solving in our education and work, helping to deliver the cross-disciplinary enterprise skills needed to tackle ambiguous and complex problems. When recruiters describe ‘T-shaped’ skill sets, these are the skills that make up the horizontal part of the T.
T-shaped people have a range of transferable skills such as empathy, creativity, values literacy, communication, complex problem-solving and collaboration. They also have specialised knowledge, represented by the vertical part of the T. Universities have typically taught the specialised knowledge very well, but have not prioritised transferable skills.
Focusing on collaboration can also develop leadership. While human-centred design promotes collaboration, it also relies on good leadership and respectful communication so that groups can experiment without fear of failure. In this way, collaboration serves as a valuable microcosm for leadership and empathy building, as well as communication practices and productive thinking around how best to tackle future problems.
Education could nurture resilient, transferable and employable graduates by focusing on three key goals informed by human-centred design: building communication skills; nurturing empathy; and focusing on positive social impact.
Communication skills are becoming increasingly valuable as transferable assets that help future-proof young people’s careers. As highlighted by the FYA in their 2017 report, The New Basics, employers demanding creativity from young job applicants increased by 65 percent between 2012 and 2015. Effective communication is an important enterprising tool that unlocks a host of other advantages: employability, charisma, strong leadership and empathy; as well as collaborative and interpersonal skills. Important, ground-breaking ideas are meaningless if they cannot be communicated effectively and coherently.
Meanwhile, building the kinds of societies that will sustainably survive requires a refocus from profit to empathy – the ability to place ourselves in other people’s shoes. Empathy is a human condition that will only become more crucial in the workplace as robotics and automation begins to make vast segments of the labour market obsolete. What we do with technology and how we manage people emotionally and materially relies on a strong sense of empathy in order to avoid the increasing fragmentation of society. Empathy improves communication, provides insight into human behaviour and helps develop solutions with positive social impact.
Finally, millennials and gen Z graduates are increasingly pursuing purpose-driven work. In this case, human-centred design can help students to consider the outcome of their work and use multidisciplinary skills to create positive impact. In 2018, 91 percent of students agreed that their place of study should actively incorporate and promote sustainable development (UNESCO), and 70 percent wanted to see sustainable developments incorporated and promoted through all courses (National Union of Students of the United Kingdom).
Students want to apply themselves to worthy causes. They want to understand the values behind financial, social and environmental causes. They want to contribute to a society free from the tired old bonds of exploitation, social inequality and environmental devastation.
The opportunities students are demanding for themselves lead to the outcomes we need in order to transition to a sustainable way of life. Our traditional education institutions present a mutually beneficial opportunity to help tackle the complex problems besetting our world. These challenges will take centre stage over the coming decade, as innovations in these areas will have the potential to reshape entire industries overnight. From our research, it seems clear there needs to be a shift in what we teach students to ensure they’re ready for jobs that, as yet, do not exist.
Education has a clear and pivotal role in equipping people to tackle the problems we’ve created. While seemingly insurmountable at times, these challenges present Australian learning institutions with an enormous opportunity. By refocusing education practices to ready students for cross-disciplinary and human-centred problem solving, we can ensure not only that Australia will retain its mantle as a world leader in education, but that it will foster students ready to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.
There is no doubt that we are at a crossroads as a species. We’re increasingly beset by economic, political and environmental disasters that threaten our very survival. How we approach these catastrophes and build sustainable societies is the great task of the new decade, and this century.
