TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF 21ST CENTURY CAPABILITIES: A SCOPING REVIEW OF CRITICAL THINKING

Abstract The learning and teaching of so-called general capabilities – including critical and creative thinking, problem solving, and ethical reasoning – is widely considered as problematic because of their detachment from a particular context of application. At the same time, an increasing employer demand across industries for such 21st century capabilities, specifically critical thinking, seemingly belies the lack of clarity around what is critical thinking and its relevance to a wide range of contexts, while articulating how it might develop and be assessed in distinct contexts. This begs the question: how might educators recognise, in generative ways, the learning and development of 21st century capabilities in their practice? This paper reports on a scoping review exploring the nature, application and influences of critical thinking in diverse professional and disciplinary practices. Key characteristics of critical thinking in action were distilled and are discussed here in relation to how they shape the design of resources and research probes that both support teachers and students in developing critical thinking in a range of contexts, and enable them to investigate how that development might be recognised, understood and tracked over time. Here, we explore the implications for developing critical thinking capabilities as applied in complex problem-solving situations. To do that, we contextualise our discussion within an innovative school-university research partnership designing transdisciplinary challenge projects to pilot how these 21st century capabilities can be developed and actioned for future practical contexts

Transdisciplinary learning: Transformative collaborations between students, industry, academia and communities.

Background and objectives of the case An analogy: Imagine you are invited to a dinner party, but instead of a stuffy sit-down affair, your host asks you to bring your favourite ingredient, and together you prepare a delicious feast of unique and distinct flavours. UTS’s transdisciplinary initiatives are changing the shape of higher education and forging innovative partnerships by bringing together diverse professional fields. With a focus on practice-based and problem-focused learning, UTS educational programs combine the strengths of multiple disciplines, industries, public sector organisations, and the community to turn real-world problems into rewarding opportunities for education and also “learning for a lifetime”. In place of the limitations of artificial disciplinary boundaries, transdisciplinary learning practices create synergistic and innovative approaches to grappling with complex applied challenges. Students, researchers, practitioners, community members and other stakeholders combine their knowledge, tools, techniques, methods, theories, concepts, as well as cultural and personal perspectives. By understanding problems holistically, the solutions that emerge are bold, innovative, and creative, as well as mutually beneficial. We view this as the future of education: good to work with, and good to think with — problem solving for (and with) industry and society. The Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation is re-imagining how education, research, and professional practice can work together to navigate today’s complex problems, and create commercially attractive and socially responsible futures. We also practice what we preach: for example, staff professional development to enact these models in our own teaching; educational programs to provide experiential learning around problem solving within a rapidly-changing environment involving students from across different disciplines and cultural backgrounds; as well as policy development and research on today’s pressing “wicked problems” with industry and government. Primary objectives of this next practice concept of transdisciplinary learning, include: - To promote a shift in industry-university engagement from producing “knowledge for society” to co-generating “knowledge with society”; - To build a resilient ecosystem for co-learning; - To create and sustain future-oriented degree programs with collaboration between industry, government, and community at the centre, geared to prepare our graduates for the complex challenges of a networked world; - To create an agile and responsive industry-university lab environment for generating and testing new experimental models; - To enable industry – by collaborating with our students and academics – to see their problems from a fresh perspective, often through different and revealing lenses, and to notice opportunities and spot challenges that may have otherwise been overlooked; - To prepare students to lead innovation in a rapidly-changing and challenging world; and - To graduate students who are ‘complexity-fluent’, systems thinkers, creative problem-posers and -solvers, and imaginative, ethical citizens

The effect of hot days on occupational heat stress in the manufacturing industry: implications for workers' well-being and productivity

Climate change is expected to exacerbate heat stress at the workplace in temperate regions, such as Slovenia. It is therefore of paramount importance to study present and future summer heat conditions and analyze the impact of heat on workers. A set of climate indices based on summer mean (Tmean) and maximum (Tmax) air temperatures, such as the number of hot days (HD: Tmax above 30 °C), and Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) were used to account for heat conditions in Slovenia at six locations in the period 1981–2010. Observed trends (1961–2011) of Tmean and Tmax in July were positive, being larger in the eastern part of the country. Climate change projections showed an increase up to 4.5 °C for mean temperature and 35 days for HD by the end of the twenty-first century under the high emission scenario. The increase in WBGT was smaller, although sufficiently high to increase the frequency of days with a high risk of heat stress up to an average of a third of the summer days. A case study performed at a Slovenian automobile parts manufacturing plant revealed non-optimal working conditions during summer 2016 (WBGT mainly between 20 and 25 °C). A survey conducted on 400 workers revealed that 96% perceived the temperature conditions as unsuitable, and 56% experienced headaches and fatigue. Given these conditions and climate change projections, the escalating problem of heat is worrisome. The European Commission initiated a program of research within the Horizon 2020 program to develop a heat warning system for European workers and employers, which will incorporate case-specific solutions to mitigate heat stress.The work was supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action (Project number 668786: HEATSHIELD)

Designing for collective learning as a terra incognita for exploration and inquiry

A recent call for rethinking education as a collective social endeavor working toward a global common good recognizes the pressing interconnected challenges that we face in learning to live on a planet under social, economic, and environmental pressures. Educational institutions, educators, and researchers are tackling these complex, networked challenges by realizing initiatives designed on parameters privileging collective creativity and action, participatory engagement and inquiry, mutual learning, and system change. The study reported in this article reimagines undergraduate education as a transdisciplinary partnership between students, teachers, and researchers working alongside external collaborators from diverse industry sectors and communities. In this complex research-education-practice ecosystem, a creative (teaching and learning) practice appropriated from medical education was introduced into the studio learning experiences and the design of the first assessment task to investigate how and why students’ exploration of unknowns might enable insights about learning collectively, both for students and teachers. To make sense of the extensive dataset, three vignettes were constructed as collective learning accounts using the students’ own words to reveal the character of that exploration of unknowns over a three- week intensive Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII) Summer School. Findings indicate the educational power of introducing ignorance mapping and the inquiry-led exploration of unknowns. This reporting also provides insights into how students are active drivers of education by designing their investigations to explore, inquire into, and deal with inevitable uncertainties, ambiguities, complexities, and unknowns of practice. Findings suggest the timeliness of further investigations involving students-as-stakesharers in regenerating anachronistic notions of assessment and the need for further consideration of the ethical implications in rethinking and organizing education as a collective social endeavor

Developing a Complex Knowledge System for Architectural Design Education

Going beyond the confines of single disciplines is a hallmark of late C20th and C21st knowledge systems. Contemporary biological and ecological reconceptions of Architectural Design, as a complex dynamic system, illustrate such movement. However, this shift is not only of interest for the new transdisciplinary knowledge system it creates. Serendipitously, it might also make possible another fruitful synergy: between Education and Architectural Design - for Education, too, has recently explored a biological substrate to explain and understand learning. This paper arises from a doctoral study that set out to investigate this synergy, asking, in essence, whether Education is a designing discipline. Here, we lay out a potential basis for synergy between the two disciplines, from which the research design and methodology of this doctoral study was derived. We give some brief general insights into the study's preliminary findings insofar as they address the viability of this potential synergy and conclude by exploring the implications for architectural design education that could follow from such a synergy

Towards understanding the utility of designing for Education: A research approach

There has been a shift in recent times to thinking about learners as active drivers of educational processes despite centuries of vesting control with teachers. Perhaps in a bid to resolve such tension, a strengthening group of educational researchers has recently begun to develop an explicit scholarship around Education as a designing discipline: one in which teachers set up designs to hedge the possibility that students will learn. This paper describes the two-part research design of a doctoral investigation that examines the fruitfulness of designing for Education. In the first study, a learner-as- researcher distilled ideas about designing, by learning to design as a fully participating student in a mainstream undergraduate architectural design subject. Then, in the second study, she tested the educational utility of these insights into designing by working as an academic developer-as-researcher alongside an academic and students in a semester-long postgraduate digital architecture design subject. This investigation squarely addresses the matter of whether Education can be conceived, at core, as a designing discipline: if so, in what respects and if not, why not? Moreover, if its findings suggest this question can be settled in the affirmative, then this investigation will also be significant for its potential to refine an educationally powerful concept of designing, one in which both students and teachers might collaborate actively to enhance learning