Teaching and Learning in Multi-stakeholder Learning Environments

Project introduction and background information

Current professional planners work in multi-stakeholder settings to collaboratively face complex, “wicked” societal problems. This requires them to “cross boundaries” in the sense of active interaction across practices and learning from these interactions. To prepare planning students for their “boundary crossing” profession, planning education needs effective learning environments that support students’ boundary crossing competence. This PhD project focuses on the effectivity and further development of a new authentic, boundary crossing learning environment as used in planning education called the Regional Learning Environment (RLE).

In the RLE students work in groups on real world, transdisciplinary issues initiated by actors in the field. Solving those problems involves co-creation of new knowledge between students and various external stakeholders. This requires students to “cross boundaries” between multiple disciplines, perspectives and interests. The PhD project aims at (1) finding evidence for students’ competence development in the RLE related to various boundary crossing characteristics of the RLE, (2) investigating the effect of the support of student-stakeholder collaboration on students’ competence development, and (3) the identification of teacher roles, tasks and competencies needed to perform in the new RLE.

Results and learnings

Results in the sense of evidence for the effectiveness of the RLE will contribute to the further development of the RLE, and of similar authentic learning environments aiming at boosting students’ boundary crossing competence. This is useful for planning education, but also for other education programmes in which multi-stakeholder collaboration should be practiced. From a theoretical point of view the project will provide further insights in the functioning of boundary crossing learning mechanisms in education.

Practical outcomes

PhD Thesis (see downloads on the right).