STE(A)M+: Transforming Higher Education through Collaborative Play

Our world is facing various wicked problems, such as climate change and extinction. These complex problems require an in-depth understanding. STEM disciplines in higher education play a crucial role in preparing students to solve such problems in their career. Yet it can be questioned whether STEM in higher education offers all the elements required to prepare students for a sustainable future. Additionally, a sole focus on STEM fields may not contribute to finding solutions to these problems. With STE(A)M in higher education, we explore what the missing element in higher education is and how higher education can be improved. We addressed this question within the Honours Programme Transdisciplinary Insights of the Institute for the Future at KU Leuven. Within this programme, a team of students, PhD researchers and coaches from various disciplines examined the educational system and explored how students can be better prepared to co-create a more sustainable future. This learning path was supported by reading books about systems thinking, watching documentaries, following co-creative workshops, and engaging in team discussions. In this process, we found that the following four key elements could be given a greater emphasis in education: transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, co-creation, and critical thinking. To promote this, we created a board game that aims to make learning about the importance of these elements engaging. While playing this game, we learned that we can bring students from different dis ciplines together and foster critical thinking and reflec tions. These insights illustrate how creative tools (e.g. board games) can be used in higher education to foster important skills that can prepare students for a sustainable future. Since this game, developed by students for students, is entirely learner-driven, it departs from the current educational system in which knowledge is mainly transferred by professors. An important advantage of such initiatives is that they foster co-creation and learning between students. Our findings have been summarised in a small video.

Uprooting Deeper Causes of Belgium's Lack of Pandemic Preparedness in the Covid-19 Crisis

The challenge of the Coronavirus Pandemic Preparedness project was to explore gaps in the way Belgium addressed the COVID-19 pandemic as a path forward for learning how to be better prepared in the probable event of a future pandemic. A pandemic is more than just a health crisis; well-intentioned efforts to contain an epidemic resulted in mental health problems, an economic downturn and the impairment of learning, among other issues. To understand a complex or "wicked" problem, such as a pandemic, we deployed a transdisciplinary approach, engaging experts and stakeholders from a variety of fields. At the end of March 2021, we organised an online co-creation workshop on behalf of the transdisciplinary research team at the Institute for the Future (1), inviting societal actors to participate in a multilevel brainstorming discussion. The purpose of the workshop was to identify deeper causes underlying the gaps in Belgian pandemic preparedness, building upon earlier work of the research team. We engaged stakeholders from different sectors of society in interactive exercises to verify and challenge the work of the research team. As a result, our team unearthed plausible missing elements within the deeper causes underlying the Belgian lack of preparedness for the pandemic. The majority of gaps identified by the stake holders could be traced to deeper causes interwoven in our society's fabric. Some key areas where improvement was suggested were greater political willingness to tackle more complex problems, an expansion of transdisciplinary knowledge and education across our institutions and trust-building among citizens, government and the scientific community. Our findings are summarised and presented in a short video output. These findings can be taken up to formulate future objectives for pandemic preparedness in Belgium. This can in turn serve to create a more resilient and sustain- able society.

Conceptualising Open Science in the 21st Century

Open Science that is adaptive to the complexity of the 21st century is emerging in transdisciplinary institutions outside of academia. Despite its growing popularity and plurality as a movement, the scope in which Open Science is practiced and discussed inside academia is still mostly restricted to the scientific community and fragmented between disciplinary silos. Researchers and policymakers promoting Open Science often focus on knowledge translation and still recognise experts and academia as the main producers of knowledge, essentially closing the research process to non-researchers and preventing other perspectives from being integrated into knowledge production. Our aim with this project was to adopt a systems perspective to understand how Open Science can address the challenges in the current knowledge production system. Open discussions among the team members revealed distinct understandings of what constitutes Open Science. Thus, during our process we collated these many defi nitions of Open Science and extracted the dimensions that underlie such definitions and mapped how these dimensions could be interconnected in a more comprehensive conceptualisation of Open Science. Future iterations of the challenge could build on our reflections and explore how these Open Science dimensions translate into scientific practice and how researchers can be encouraged to reflect on Open Science in a more systems-oriented way. Our findings have been summarised in a small video.

InclusiVaart: (Re)defining shared neighbourhood spaces

Cities and dense urban areas are dynamic environments, always adapting to changing circumstances and shocks, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Vaartkom, a neighbourhood in Leuven, provides an interesting case-study, having undergone a drastic transformation in the past two decades, from dilapidated industrial zone to residential quarter and cultural hot-spot. This has introduced a demographic shift, which inevitably influences the use of public and private space in the neighbourhood, creating new areas for inclusion and exclusion. Our research focuses on how the use of public space has changed under COVID-19, and how community members envision their neighbourhood in a post-COVID context. We employed various methods – such as interviews, site visits, stakeholder and physical mapping exercises – and worked with the community to identify the different areas of in-and exclusivity. Some findings relate to the conflicting expectations about the use and future of public space and the link between the location of public engagement and the level of inclusiveness. This illustrates the magnitude and consciousness of the effort required to be truly inclusive. Above all, our own understanding of inclusivity broadened significantly over the duration of the project, illustrating the clear advantage of using a transdisciplinary approach in research. Our findings have been summarised in a small video.

Towards a Resilient and Equitable Society: A Transdisciplinary Perspective

Recurring crises have exposed time and again the inherent inequalities of our societies and their ill-equipped adjustment to an ever-changing environment. This paper attempts to address the challenge of creating a more resilient and equitable society by developing a feasible blueprint for it through a bottom-up, transdisciplinary approach and the use of activity models methodology. The starting point of our analysis consisted of the identification of five cross-field societal issues, tack ling which would create a more equitable and resilient future for society: dangers of private data extractions, carbon emission taxing, climate migration, public health affordability, and the crisis of representative democracy. By jointly engaging in transdisciplinary discussions and accommodating insights from diverse stakeholders we analyzed ways of dealing with each of the issues, resulting in the creation of six activity models pertaining to them. The last step consisted in their integration into a single blueprint, achieved by devising a learning cycle running through the core of our societal model. The learning cycle organizes decision-making by identifying the social needs of the citizens, prioritizing them, deciding on key investments, executing these and monitoring their results. It ensures, through the contribution of each activity model, an equitable and resilient development for society.

A Transdisciplinary Approach to Get a Deeper Insight in the Context of Ebola Virus Outbreaks in War-torn Regions: A Comprehensive Guide for NGOs

Ebola virus disease is a deadly disease with mortality rates ranging from 25% to 90%. The previous outbreak in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) posed extra challenges since it took place in a war-torn region. The roots of this conflict can be traced back to the beginning of colonization (at the end of the 19th century) and have led to struggles concerning land tenure and local identity. The political and socioeconomic situation further complicated an adequate Ebola virus outbreak response. Early efforts and control strategies taken by the DRC Ministry of Health, supported by the WHO, UN peacekeepers and a number of humanitarian aid organizations eventually resulted in the tenth Congolese outbreak being controlled. However, medical NGOs encountered many obstacles, ranging from mistrust by the local population, to an unsafe working environment, lack of infrastructure, etc. This paper identifies building trust as one of the key ele ments for NGOs to optimize cooperation with the local population. Our data, gathered from semi-structured interviews, showed that establishing a relationship of trust with affected people and their communities is a crucial step in the Ebola virus outbreak response. This includes building a better comprehension by medical care workers of the local dynamics and cultural affinities. Therefore, we created a questionnaire to be used by medical aid organizations to increase their understanding of the local situation from an anthropological perspective. Such an understanding will contribute to building trust between the local community and medical aid organizations working in the field. This will hopefully enable them to anticipate future problems, and do their job in a more profound and comprehensive way, incorporating the local community as a partner for success. We have summarized our conclusions in a small 10-minute video.

Training Non-Directiveness? A Transdisciplinary Survey of Medical Students' Perspective Towards Prenatal Counseling and Down Syndrome

The non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) is a highly sensitive blood analysis tool that allows for the early detection of multiple chromosomal abnormalities, including Down syndrome. Prenatal testing in general and a positive test outcome in particular leave pregnant parents facing difficult ethical decisions and life-changing dilemmas. The language used by medical practitioners in this context has the potential to exert a strong influence on parents in their decision-making process. During counseling, health care professionals (HCPs) are expected to encourage parents to make an informed yet autonomous decision, which hinges on maximally unbiased, clear and consistent communication from the HCP. It is still unclear whether medical students are aware of this importance of unbiased communication, how they perceive the role of HCPs in the prenatal counseling process, and what perspectives they have regarding the disabilities screened for. Our research project aims to address this gap, presenting the results of a transdisciplinary survey completed by 245 medical students at KU Leuven. In particular, the survey investigates: (1) the students' view on the ideal prenatal counseling process; (2) their knowledge of NIPT and Down syndrome (the most prevalent disability NIPT screens for); and (3) their general attitudes towards disabilities. Results reveal that more than 50% of medical students do not feel prepared for genetic counseling. The survey further shows a lack of knowledge and some clearly negative attitudes towards life with disability; 20% of medical students agree that a life with Down syndrome should be avoided. Overall, results indicate fairly heterogeneous distribution of knowledge and fairly diverse attitudes of the students, suggesting revisions in the current curriculum might be needed to increase the homogeneity towards counseling and disabilities in the medical student population.

Co-creating a Young Persons' Guide to a Sustainable Future: Analysis of Learning Steps in a Transdisciplinary Honours Course

The Covid-19 crisis reveals that our expanding human population and globalised economic system create unprecedented risks, such as massive new health threats that impact our social and economic wellbeing. In the current era, called the Anthropocene, human activity disturbs life-supporting planetary processes. Surviving the Anthropocene, therefore, requires 'unlearning' the model that brought us here. This model treats nature as a mere resource for humans to exploit with a view to technological progress and economic growth, and serves unrestrained human population increase. This has disturbed the human–nature balance to such a degree that we now have the potential to eliminate all human life. Current crises make us understand we need a regenerative vision of the future, building on new kinds of knowledge, values, skills, and attitudes.<br/> Universities are still grounded in a linear model of research and education, with disciplines studying separate domains of reality without grasping how new, more complex system behaviour emerges from the interaction among those fields. In response to this changing context, the Institute for the Future at KU Leuven runs an Honours Programme Transdisciplinary Insights, offering group learning through real societal challenges and innovative teaching practices. The challenge we present and discuss here tackled the question of how to prepare young people, the leaders of tomorrow, for this complex world (Supplement 1). What are the potential building blocks of an educational trajectory towards a more sustainable future? The challenge was inspired by a theoretical analysis of increasing complexity and its implications for research and education (Snick, 2020). During one academic year (2019–2020) the authors all took part in this challenge, as students and as a coach. In this article we evaluate our learning experiences. The hypothesis underlying our challenge was that co-creating a vision of a possible future, inspired by emerging regenerative social and economic initiatives, allows students to develop new skills and capacities that the traditional educational approach does not offer. Our learning path involved boot camps with a series of workshops, reading scientific books, watching a documen tary, (walking) meetings, field visits, design exercises, co-creative workshops, and group discussions. In this article, we evaluate how these helped us foster our response-ability for co-creating a life-sustaining civilisation. Our findings show that unlearning the old paradigm takes time and that empowering young persons to contribute to a sustainable society requires learning with the head, heart, hands, and hope. These insights can be inspirational to all societal actors who understand that we urgently need to move towards a 'new normal' and that the university has a vital role in this transition.

Fostering Transdisciplinary Collaboration Through Transdisciplinary Literature Reviews: Investigating the Accessibility of mHealth Technologies

Transdisciplinary research aims to investigate complex problems by integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines through knowledge co-creation. Initiating and planning transdisciplinary research requires a thorough review of the literature within many disciplines, demanding that researchers conciliate meanings of concepts from different disciplines, define the boundaries of each discipline within the topic and identify synergies between disciplines. Thus, conducting a transdisciplinary literature review can pose a challenge to researchers, and little guidance is available on how to approach this challenge in a systematic way. To address this, we develop a protocol for transdisciplinary literature reviews, extending the heuristics proposed by Leavy (2011). We describe how researchers can determine the relevant bodies of knowledge for the issue investigated, how they can locate and summarise relevant literature from all relevant disciplines, how they can determine the scope of each discipline within the project and how they can visualise the interaction between disciplines in regards to the topic researched. We also suggest methods for researchers to create new interactions between disciplines and propose new conceptual frameworks on the basis of the literature synthesis performed in the transdisciplinary literature review. To demonstrate how our framework can be employed to review literature on complex issues while integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, we use the issue of accessibility of mHealth technologies as a case study and apply our guidelines to conduct a transdisciplinary literature review on the topic. We integrate findings from the social sciences, ethics, economics, law, psychology, medicine and engineering, among other disciplines to examine the accessibility of mHealth and propose promising areas for future transdisciplinary projects. The findings from this case study suggest the proposed transdisciplinary review guidelines can be used as a sole research methodology for initial transdisciplinary research projects, as well as an auxiliary tool for larger transdisciplinary projects.