(Image courtesty of CQUniversity)
Imagine if every single graduate—from engineering management and physiotherapy to primary school education and digital media—was equipped with a practical skill set to innovate and drive social change. In a time when students are seeking careers with impact—and employers are demanding graduates with core skills of problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and teamwork—how does a university equip every student with the changemaking skills to tackle complex social issues and future challenges not yet imagined?
CQUniversity is five years into a long-term process to embed social innovation education and practice across the breadth of our curriculum, exponentially growing social change leadership and capability across all of Australian society. By embedding the social innovation attributes of resilience, creativity, empathy, curiosity, collaboration and systems-thinking into each discipline—and core social innovation content at each stage of a degree—we have committed to training every student to graduate with the confidence and competence to create positive social change.
Overlaying a social impact lens on every CQUniversity degree begins with the choice to do so: “There is a growing recognition that organizations want staff with social innovation skills, particularly the ability to understand issues within complex systems, demonstrate a user-centered approach to problem-solving and bring resilience and empathy to dealing with change,” as Professor Klomp, vice-chancellor and president notes. “For students the benefits are clear: we create global citizens who take their place in the world and make a difference, but it also makes them more employable, since many governments and organizations recognize that these are the future-of-work skills.”
This commitment stems from the University’s nearly 50-year history of focusing on accessible vocational education as an anchor institution in regional communities. We are Australia’s most geographically-dispersed university, and our 35,000 students are supported by a network of more than 20 campuses and study centers spread across Australia’s five mainland states, including physical hubs in many small regional towns. As the University has grown, its focus on blending face-to-face teaching with distance education and online learning delivery helps to ensure opportunities for many Australian students who would otherwise have little or no access to post-secondary education. And through this model, we have attracted a significant proportion of regional and remote, low-socioeconomic, first-in-family, and Indigenous students, necessitating innovative approaches to education pathways and to retention.
The University’s reputation for community engagement can be seen in the way regional centers across Australia “invite in” CQUniversity to find creative solutions to meet local educational needs, as when the small Victorian town of Hamilton required nurse education delivered locally in order to guarantee a long-term local hospital workforce or the remote West Australian towns and businesses who partner with the University to establish shop-front study hubs providing local support to students who otherwise live a day away from the nearest University campus. In each case, rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach, CQUniversity adapts its business model to meet the needs of its partners, local employers, and students.
Why Social Innovation?
With both Australian and international studies showing that the majority of Millennials were determined to pursue careers making a positive contribution to society, CQUniversity leaders recognized that our unique history of community engagement could combine with an increased focus on social innovation in order to equip students for lifetimes of impact. Building on its commitment to be Australia’s most engaged university, the University began implementing strategies to incorporate social innovation across curriculum and programming, extra-curricular activities, research, community engagement, and University operations and became an Ashoka U Changemaker Campus in 2016, currently the only such in Australia.
The vision is brought to life through a culture of sustainability and impact, aligned with the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and recognized through our listing in The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. The University’s commitment to the SDGs provides an opportunity to link social impact initiatives to every discipline, and to ensure whole-of-organization responsibility for bringing this vision to life.
More than that, staff have a collective responsibility to work towards social impact through clear key performance indicators: social procurement targets, giving time and expertise to community organizations through use of “engaged service leave,” or focusing on applied research that delivers positive impact for our communities. Academic staff also have a KPI to embed social innovation teaching into curriculum, ensuring that every undergraduate student across 100 programs has exposure to changemaking skills, and can choose to extend and deepen their skills in further for-credit or co-curricular initiatives.
Co-Curricular Foundations
At the point of admission to the University, CQUniversity students are encouraged to begin their learning journey with social innovation: in consultation with students, CQUniversity developed an online social innovation orientation program, iChange©. This optional program is provided free to every student and staff member and has kickstarted more than 3,000 changemaker journeys since 2018. From 2020, iChange will also be embedded into a foundational interdisciplinary unit, available to all undergraduate courses and as a core requirement within specific first year units (such as psychology and engineering). iChange explores a range of social innovation approaches and introduces students to four levels of impact: Direct Service; Scaled Direct Service; Systems Change; and Framework Change. Senior academic staff describe research projects in conservation biology, public transport access for people with physical disabilities and the history of Indigenous people, while the program is presented by students in order to encourage student participation in a range of co-curricular activities, including: The Big Idea national social enterprise competition, the annual Festival of Change, and hands-on volunteering and community-building activities led by the University’s Change Champ student ambassadors.
Providing opportunities for students to practice hands-on learning is central to the work we do. A range of community programs allow students to work with industry in immersive design processes to develop foundational skills in action research and design-led approaches to problem-solving. CQUniversity has developed a Social Innovation Workshop model featuring an intensive multi-day residential experience that connects students with not-for-profit organizations and supports them to work on real-life social problems. Designed in consultation with community partners in regional Queensland, this process identified challenges for small regional organizations in allocating time and resources to planning and innovation, and in accessing support for future-proofing their products.
The University has connected many organizations with national leaders in social enterprise over the last five years, while giving more than 100 student participants a role in human-centered design processes that are fit-for-purpose and that influence ongoing operations for the organizations. Most recently, outcomes have included a user-centred housing design to meet future youth homelessness needs, and processes for Indigenous land care leaders to knowledge-share with agricultural industries. Through these hands-on, extra-curricular engagements, students experience the benefits of multi-disciplinary collaboration, apprenticing with a problem, and the power of empathy and self-awareness, taking their learnings and community networks into future careers.
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the University continues to connect with staff, community members and students through designing virtual professional development and networking opportunities for regionally-based social entrepreneurs; gerontology research exploring the use of technology to reduce social isolation in elderly people; and pop-up food banks and welfare checks at campus hubs to support international students facing income loss and food insecurity due to economic downturn.
Learnings From the Journey
As we move along this ongoing transformation journey, the following are some of key stepping stones guiding us, deliberatively and iteratively, from strategy to practice:
1. An early roadmap: The Social Innovation Strategy 2016-2021 outlines a tactical plan for the University, guiding the development of social innovation activities across the University through six pillars of activity: Teaching and Curriculum, Community and Culture, Research, Leadership, Applied Learning, Strategy and Resources. The Strategy identifies the required governance structure and staffing to ensure that social innovation activities are supported. An advisory committee comprising external leaders in social enterprise, community development, and social procurement guides and informs the University’s work.
2. A commitment to clear goals, widely communicated: In 2019, launching the University’s three-year strategic plan, Our Future Is You, the University made clear its long-term vision “to be Australia’s most accessible, supportive and engaged university, recognized globally for innovative teaching and research excellence.” Aligning the University strategy to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the strategy commits to “Embed the philosophy of social innovation within all aspects of our operations to support the communities we serve,” ensuring that social impact is everyone’s business and that our stakeholders, students, and the University sector understand the clarity of our focus.
3. Standardized learning outcomes: Guided by a graduate attribute to “develop a social innovation mindset” common to all undergraduate degrees, our extensive project of curriculum change (due for completion in 2021) will result in 100 undergraduate degrees that include opportunities to learn interdisciplinary social innovation and practice across a three-year curriculum. This target and the associated KPI, overseen by the University Council, involves a comprehensive process to test and iterate models of pedagogy design resulting in a series of best-practice case studies. Courses including business, engineering, psychology, and criminology are embedding social innovation in ways that ensure they adhere to the relevant disciplinary focus as well as industry accreditation requirements where required. Social innovation concepts are scaffolded through an interdisciplinary foundational unit in year one, into project-based learning in year two or three. Through the development of common approaches to teaching social impact skills we can reach most of the undergraduate student body throughout their studies.
4. Sustained support for staff development: Supporting academic staff to embed changemaking in curriculum and understand social innovation methodologies within their disciplinary speciality requires a multi-pronged approach. The early development of A Guide to Embedding Social Innovation in Curriculum introduced a preliminary toolkit of language, skills, and approaches. Later, professional development sessions involving video presentations, in-person workshops, interactive media resources, and case studies have and will enable staff to design learning opportunities that develop students’ core social innovation skills and attributes, including creativity, empathy, and systems thinking.
5. Capture and celebrate early wins: The development of case studies of relevant curriculum changes and research outcomes; promotion of CQUniversity’s success in THE Impact Rankings; celebrating new social procurement contracts and focusing on positive graduate employment outcomes has contributed to normalizing activity that focuses on social good. With staff and students spread widely across the country we believe that regular communication of our progress informs and unites all parts of the University under the social purpose vision and reinforces everyone’s opportunity in, and responsibility to achieving success.
6. Long-term commitment to resourcing: Delivering organizational culture and skills change of this magnitude requires a sustained financial and human resource commitment. Successive years of Executive support and operational funding has ensured that the Office of Social Innovation team—comprising practitioners, academic staff, and student ambassadors—is able to focus full-time on developing and delivering programs nationally, bringing in external experts to augment program design and provide travel scholarships for students from across Australia to participate in residential programs with community partners. Committing the University to an increase of 50 percent in social and Indigenous procurement spending in the next three years focuses the University’s purchasing power on supporting local “for-purpose” businesses, and focuses the non-academic operations of the University on creating increased social benefit.
In the opening article of this series, Marina Kim and Angie Fuessel reflect on the democratization of knowledge and the opportunity for everyone to be a changemaker. At CQUniversity, we believe through making social innovation education available to all staff and community partners, and through embedding fundamental skills in every degree that we will fast-track the pace of understanding, interest and adoption across Australia.
Now, more than ever, students need to move beyond traditional disciplines, taught in traditional ways to rapidly develop skills and adopt new ways of thinking. The opportunity in a post-COVID-19 world is to continue to turn towards communities as part of economic and social rebuilding initiatives, and to ensure that graduates have the passion and confidence to lean-in to complex problem-solving challenges as global citizens.
Support SSIR’s coverage of cross-sector solutions to global challenges.
Help us further the reach of innovative ideas. Donate today.
Read more stories by Lara Carton & Tobias Andreasson.