Grand Challenge Learning Leadership Committee Charge
Appendix A
Spring 2015 Charge Questions
How does one teach grand challenge topics such as sustainability, inequality, and health
“experientially”?
How does one make use of a diverse “cohort,” drawn from undergraduates campus-wide, in
devising a first-year experience course?
What modes of “experiential” learning might be suitable for such a course (including but not
limited to designed-based or project-based learning, community-engaged scholarship, service
learning, and social practice art)
What other “best practices” or approaches might be useful in planning and teaching such
courses?
What are the requirements that all such courses should have?
What features of our campus and community are especially conducive to the teaching of such
courses? (e.g., interdisciplinary institutes, student residences, student groups, community
groups, Chicago-area possibilities, field trips)
How might Student Affairs help instructors to design and execute such courses?
What learning outcomes do we expect all students who complete a first-year experience course
(I-FYE)—one that also functions as the first rung in a track of courses to devoted to a particular
grand challenge learning theme—to achieve?
Can we provide a template that will help instructors to plan an I-FYE suitable for each grand
challenge topic?
In addition to ICES forms, how can we evaluate the success of our Fall 2015 proto-pilot courses?
Who should be eligible to teach I-FYEs during the pilot period and how should we recruit them?
What agenda items should we set for the 2-day symposium in May (in particular, the parts that
will be attended by all instructors for the Fall 2015 proto-pilot I-FYEs?)
How should I-FYE instructors incorporate an e-portfolio component that complements the
experiential learning goals for the course and helps to enhance students’ critical thinking,
communication skills, and professional development?
Grand Challenge Learning Leadership Committee Charge
Appendix B
Fall 2015 Charge Questions
What design requirements will help the Critical Framings module to succeed as an
interdisciplinary form of campus learning that enables students recognize and
negotiate the structural, systemic, and intellectual complexities that make
problems such as inequality and environmental sustainability “grand challenges.”
In answering these (and other questions), the GCLLC may wish to consider the
relevant cultural, economic, geographic, and technological features of each grand
challenge them at scales of analysis ranging from the local to the global.
What learning outcomes do we expect all students who complete the Critical Framings Module
to achieve?
Who should be eligible to teach in the Critical Framings Module and how should we recruit
them?
What are the requirements that all Critical Framings Modules should have, irrespective of the
particular grand challenge theme around which they are organized?
What “best practices” or approaches might be useful in planning and conducting the lecture
component of the module? The seminar component? The assignment component?
In addition to ICES forms, how can we evaluate the success of our Fall 2016 Critical Framings
Modules?
How should Critical Framings instructors incorporate an e-portfolio component that
complements the interdisciplinary learning goals for the course and helps to enhance students’
critical thinking, communication skills, and professional development?
Education for Society’s Grand Challenges:
Working Group Report on Charge Questions
Spring 2014
1. What should our campus goals be for all students’ learning and engagement around societal grand
challenge issues? Specifically, what should all students know about sustainability, the environment, social
equality, diversity, and US minority populations?
Overview: General education curricula should be redesigned to the extent that all students have
the opportunity, incentive, and—when it becomes feasible—the requirement to undertake
meaningful and transformative learning and engagement around specific societal grand
challenge themes. We recommend a focus on three such themes: 1) environmental
sustainability, 2) social inequality and cultural understanding, and 3) health and wellness.
A. Although sustainability, the environment, social equality, diversity, and US minority
populations were the focal points most frequently singled out in the First-Round
Campus Conversation, we recommend that Health and Wellness be added as an
additional multi-disciplinary theme for “grand challenge” pilots at this stage.
(Additional Visioning Future Excellence themes such as Economic Development,
Education, and Information and Technology can at this stage be integrated as features of
and complements to grand challenge learning rather than organizing focal points or
themes. In the future, however, other working groups might wish to consider one or more
of these additional themes as a basis for supplementary initiatives).
B. The opportunity for learning and engagement around sustainability, the
environment, social equality, diversity, US minority populations, and health and
wellness should be made part of the campus’s learning goals for all students. As an
initial set of steps toward achieving this objective, we recommend the following goals: the
campus should
1) increase opportunities for students to engage in grand challenge learning
(including as set forth in #3 below);
2) assess the extent to which existing general education courses are
implementing such learning and engagement;
3) assess the extent to which existing courses, in doing so, are able to
implement “high impact” practices including (but not limited to) team teaching
across disciplines;
4) identify and remove the obstacles (including IU allotment and other
institutional structures) which make it difficult for faculty and others to work across
departments, campus units, and disciplinary boundaries.
5) charge future working groups to evaluate the quality and accessibility of
grand challenge learning and engagement as new programs develop. Such
assessment should include newly implemented pilot programs as well as already existing
options or alternatives. The trend toward many students’ fulfilling their general
education requirements off-campus may be inhibiting high-quality and transformative learning
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Education for Society’s Grand Challenges Working Group – Fall 2014
around select grand challenge focal points. Due to the need for an integrated curriculum
around these topics, we recommend that courses designated as part of a grand challenge
curriculum should be taken on campus.
C. We endorse the “Vision of the Illinois Student” that emerged from the First-Round Campus
Conversation on Undergraduate Education. In furtherance of the aspects of that vision which
most concern grand challenge learning, we recommend that campus educational objectives be set
forth which build on the full range of “Bloom’s Taxonomy.” That is to say, we recommend that
all students
1) know and comprehend specific concepts, principles, or theories
surrounding particular grand challenge issues.
In addition, we recommend that all students have access to the kind of
transformative learning that will help them to
2) apply such knowledge in order to grapple with new situations and seize
problem-solving opportunities;
3) analyze the relevant frameworks by developing the capacity to identify and
critically assess organizational structures, relationships, and underlying logics and
principles;
4) synthesize this learning by cultivating the ability to integrate, propose
action plans, create, innovate, and formulate principles, practices, and modes of
critical understanding; as well as
5) evaluate existing principles, practices, structures, and modes of
understanding (students should be able to critically judge the extent to which existing
models adequately grasp the scale and complexity of grand challenge issues and the
extent to which they present useful forms of thinking, address, redress, and change.
2. If some students were to focus their education on any one grand challenge as an integrating theme, to what
extent could they meet the learning goals we expect of all students?
A. The forms of grand challenge learning we identified and discussed provide strong
integrating themes for high-quality learning. In answer to Question 3 (below) we explore
how particular grand challenge focal points can provide the basis for a vitalizing set of
general education “tracks.” Such tracks could provide a launching point for students who
wish to extend their study beyond the general education track courses by pursuing a
minor in one of the three identified grand challenge themes.
B. The campus already has some programs that offer students a minor or certificate in
sustainability, environment, or other grand challenge topics. Our concern is that such
existing programs have not necessarily been designed to provide capstone courses or
other experiences that help students to take a systems view of the problem or synthesize
their learning. We recommend that the campus form future working groups to
formulate learning objectives for grand challenge minors. The campus should
provide existing programs with the opportunity and resources to improve their quality so
as to meet these objectives. We particularly recommend that any “grand challenge”
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minor or certificate, whether existing or new, work to provide students with the kind of
interdisciplinary learning and critical engagement that we describe in the pilot programs
detailed below.
3. What pilot program or programs—organized either around sustainability, energy and the environment, or
around social equality and cultural understanding—could we develop to explore the effectiveness of
education based on grand challenges? How could these programs include active engagement with the
challenge?
Overview: Our main recommendation is for a parallel set of three general education “tracks”
one devoted to a) environmental sustainability, another to b) social inequality and cultural
understanding, and a third to c) health and wellness. Each of the three tracks would be
composed of the following four types of high-impact courses.
I. A first-year (or foundational) experience that entails project-based, collaborative,
and experiential learning under the supervision of one or more faculty members.
Projects may involve interaction with local, campus, or state communities (so long as the
project is designed through robust coordination with the involved off-campus partner)
and/or build on existing campus initiatives (so long as the project requires ground-up
thinking and practice from students). Such project-based, interactive, and teamoriented learning should be structured so as to provide a foundational experience
with the grand challenge that launches a student’s ability to
a) acquire and apply knowledge;
b) experiment, create, and innovate;
c) draw on multiple resources across disciplines and institutional locations
(on or off campus)
d) constructively contend with unexpected problems, the possibility of
setbacks or even failure and the rich learning opportunities they can provide;
e) recognize the potential tensions between theory and practice;
f) develop a project-level sense of what “interdisciplinarity” is and requires.
g) mobilize student communication skills and hone capacity for analysis,
synthesis, and critical judgment by requiring students to provide a written
and/or web-based account of their project that includes self-assessment.
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II.
A second course developed and co-taught by a multidisciplinary team of faculty
devoted to CRITICAL FRAMINGS of the grand challenge and organized in the
form of a “module.”
a) Structure: depending on the number of students taking part in the grand challenge
“track” in question, the number of participating faculty can be between 6 and 13.
Seed money should be provided for these faculty to spend several weeks co-designing
a CRITICAL FRAMINGS “module” applicable to the grand challenge in question.
The module will consist of two meetings per week which operate at different
scales: each week will contain one meeting that collects all students and coparticipants into one space as well as a second weekly meeting that subdivides the
enrolled students into a seminar led by one of the faculty co-participants (ideally
to consist of no more than 20 students per seminar). As co-participants in the course
“module,” each faculty member will contribute i) 1-2 presentations to be delivered
at 1-2 of the large weekly meetings ii) a selection of suitable reading materials,
viewing materials, invited presentations, and/or practical assignments assigned
for specific weeks in the course and designed to work in conjunction with the faculty
member’s presentation(s); iii) responsibility for a weekly seminar with one’s
assigned students which is devoted to discussion of and reflection on the materials,
presentations, and assignments contributed that week by the relevant faculty coorganizer(s); iv) substantial office hours to offer advice and support to students
enrolled in one’s seminar as well as any student in the module who is interested in the
individual faculty member’s presentations, materials, and/or scholarly or research
expertise overall; v) responsibility for grade assessment and other kinds of
evaluation based on the criteria established and agreed to by all faculty coparticipants.
b) Student Learning Objectives: the key learning objective of the CRITICAL
FRAMINGS module is to enable students, in the context of a particular grand
challenge “track,” to recognize and negotiate the structural, systemic, and intellectual
challenges relevant to the grand challenge in question. These may be economic,
political, cultural, geographic, technological, and/or disciplinary in nature. Enabling
students to critically frame grand challenge issues in this way, and to understand
and interrogate how the knowledge bearing on such issues is produced, is crucial
to developing graduates with “strong critical thinking skills,” who have a deep
“understanding of major social and global issues,” as well as an ability to
innovate, create, and “think outside the box.” It is also necessary to growing a
generation of youth equipped to find solutions to society’s grand challenges.
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Education for Society’s Grand Challenges Working Group – Fall 2014
c) Faculty Learning Objectives: although faculty co-participants in the CRITICAL
FRAMINGS module should demonstrate interest in and knowledge of the grand
challenge topic, they should be drawn from different disciplines across multiple
departments and colleges. They should be ready to recognize that the goal of the
module is not to instill particular disciplinary knowledges but, rather, to equip
students with the means of framing grand challenges at multiple levels and from
different perspectives. Faculty co-participants must be willing to devote the same
time commitment to studying the presentations and materials of their fellow faculty
co-participants as are students themselves. In leading seminar meetings devoted to
the discussion of such relatively unfamiliar material, they may wish to think of
themselves as learners rather than (first and foremost) experts. Faculty may wish to
think of participation in the CRITICAL FRAMINGS module as a resource for their
own intellectual development: a potential catalyst to interdisciplinary research as well
as an opportunity to collaborate with faculty members and undergraduate students
from across campus. In this way the module will help import the benefits of a
smaller campus culture into the fabric of a large public research university.
d) Campus Objectives: along with other features of the grand-challenge general
education “tracks,” and for the reasons detailed above, the CRITICAL FRAMINGS
module can became a signature of the University of Illinois as a land-grant
campus on which undergraduate pedagogy and learning aspires to the same
world-class standards as does faculty research.
III.
A third component to each grand challenge track is envisioned in order to provide all
campus faculty members with an opportunity to help shape this new initiative. We
recommend inviting faculty members, individually or in teams, to design proposals
for courses with a clearly specified relation to the grand challenge track in question.
(To do so, this “call for proposals” should not be implemented until the other pieces of
the pilot track in question are ready to run on a trial basis or have begun to do so).
Faculty members or faculty teams who put forward such courses may, if they wish, work
in conjunction with particular departments, centers, institutes, and/or research initiatives
either on campus or in the community. They may, if they wish, collaborate with
academic professionals, graduate students, and others whose work has bearing on the
proposed course and its learning objectives. These courses should be envisioned as 200or 300-level courses that offer specific rationales and objectives that complement the
grand challenge track in question in concrete and measurable ways. They may entail
high-impact practices such as undergraduate research, service-learning, internship-based
learning, and community-based learning though that is not a requirement of the design.
They may focus on particular configurations of learning in relation to the grand challenge
in question (e.g., the connection between the grand challenge and select applications of
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the performing or visual arts; information and technology; social media; literary,
philosophic, social-scientific and/or historical modes of inquiry and analysis;
entrepreneurial or business-oriented practices, projects, or approaches to learning).
Although the structure and scale of the proposed courses can be left open, they should not
replicate the other features of the track: that is, they should take care not to closely
replicate the first-year/foundation experience for the track in question (though they can
be project-based), not to replicate the CRITICAL FRAMINGS module (though they can
involve interdisciplinary learning and critical thinking around the grand challenge), and
not to replicate the capstone experience that each track devises.
The “call for proposals” should be publicized campus-wide and should be supported
with campus funds for development and implementation. Such proposals should be
evaluated by an interdisciplinary committee of faculty and others drawn from across
campus that consists primarily of individuals working close to the grand challenge track
but includes at least some committee members who are not already part of that
administrative framework (so as to ensure the cycling in of new perspectives). Such
proposals might include the adaptation of existing gen ed courses for this purpose so long
as such courses clearly connect to the grand challenge issues in question.
IV.
The fourth component of each grand challenge “track” is the capstone requirement.
Although the design of such capstones can vary according to the grand challenge in
question and the participating faculty members, we envision it to entail a capstone
project, thesis, internship, or other form of undergraduate research, which
demonstrates students’ ability to analyze, synthesize, and apply critical judgment. We
are especially keen to ensure that the capstone enable students to demonstrate their
understanding of the modes of inquiry which govern the production of knowledge
relevant to the grand challenge in question including the strengths and weaknesses
particular to methodologies in the social sciences, natural sciences, applied sciences,
humanities, and arts.
As discussed in Question #2, we also recommend that pilot programs be developed around
minors in one or more grand challenges; such minors may function as extensions of the 4part gen ed tracks described above or as independent programs. Such pilot minors should be
explored by working groups that bring together 10-12 faculty, academic professionals, and
students whose interests and expertise draw on different disciplines and campus locations while
matching the grand challenge in question.
4. How could a grand-challenge educational initiative select a meaningful range of issues for students to
choose from, both now and over time?
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Our recommendations deliberately focus on developing “high-impact” teaching practices that
build students’ ability to understand, apply, synthesize, analyze, and critically assess the
knowledge, methods, and practices they acquire through grand challenge learning. We
believe that this approach ensures a “meaningful range of issues.”
We also recommend continuing assessment of the quality and accessibility of these programs.
Such programs must reach beyond those Illinois undergraduates who are already adept at
making excellent use of campus resources: they must be inclusive and welcoming to a diverse
student body including first-generation students, low-income students, and under-represented
minorities.
Assessment will also help to ensure that programs implemented to respond to today’s grand
challenges stay up-to-date.
Looking toward the future, one key concern is that new “interdisciplinary” programs be
implemented and assessed in ways that genuinely enable students to benefit from multiple
disciplinary perspectives. Interdisciplinary pedagogy requires collaboration, discussion, and
debate between faculty working in the natural and applied sciences and those working in the
social sciences, humanities, and arts. Our wish is for undergraduate programs that help to
improve a campus culture that too often pays lip service to interdisciplinarity without ensuring
its true flourishing.
In order to improve this campus culture in ways that make Illinois a center for world-class
undergraduate learning around grand challenge themes we offer two further
recommendations.
A. We recommend that cluster hiring (and cluster thinking more generally) take
undergraduate pedagogy as well as research into account. In particular, we recommend
that all faculty be encouraged to think about grand challenge gen ed “tracks” and/or
minors as a step toward a creative rethinking of the place of undergraduate teaching in
their professional development.
B. We further recommend that the campus consider a series of symposia, conferences, and
informal discussions for faculty and other campus educators who wish to help make
interdisciplinary teaching and learning a more integral feature of the University of
Illinois’ excellence as a world-class university with a land-grant mission and global
impact.
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Education for Society’s Grand Challenges Working Group – Fall 2014
Submitted by Working Group 5:
Stephen Altaner, Geology
Ron Bailey, African American Studies
Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko, Kinesiology
Megan Dino, Business Career Services
Minh Do, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Daniel Gilbert, Labor & Employment
Lauren Goodlad, English/Criticism (Provost Fellow)
Christopher Steppig, Agriculture & Consumer Economics (Undergrad)
Madhu Khanna, Agriculture & Consumer Economics
Liang Liu, Civil & Environmental Engineering (Co-Chair)
Johnathan Moor, Civil & Environmental Engineering (Grad Student)
Gigi Secuban, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
Mercedes Ramirez Fernandez, Director, New Student Advising, LAS
Jesse Ribot, Geography (Co-Chair)
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Education for Society’s Grand Challenges Working Group – Fall 2014