STREAM 20: SOCIAL INNOVATION AS EDUCATIONAL FRAMEWORK (ASHOKA)

The 2022 International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) will be held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada from September 16-18, 2022. This conference theme will highlight research focused on ways in which social innovation may serve as an educational framework. We invite researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world to share research on this topic.

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Preparing students for a future where the only constant is change requires rethinking approaches to education. Globally, the higher education sector is reckoning with a loss of confidence in its centuries-old model whereby students learn through rote memorization, repetition, and academic models preparing them for a single, unified career. Demographic shifts are producing political, economic, and environmental changes. These changes are converging with technological innovations to produce dramatic changes in industries around the world. Education systems need to prepare students for the reality that many jobs of the future do not exist today, and that many jobs today are rapidly disappearing or transforming such that skills learned today may be obsolete by tomorrow.

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Students will need to have the competencies of changemakers: empathy, creative problem solving, systems thinking, and collaborative leadership (Ashoka U, 2019). Social innovation provides a framework to redesign educational models and experiences so that students develop these competencies and are better prepared for a future of constant change.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. Curricular and programmatic design

2. Social innovation and accreditation

3. Social innovation and workforce development

4. Relationships between social change methods and types of change impact

5. Social Innovation throughout student’s educational journey (course sequencing)

6. Evaluation strategies, principles, and frameworks

7. Strategies for developing student learning outcomes within a social innovation framework

8. Leveraging student learning outcomes for

   • Understanding student growth

   • Cultivating changemaker mindsets

   • Student agency, agility, and resilience

   • Social impact

   • Academic credit

9. Other topics relating to social innovation education as a framework are welcome.

 
 Information about deadlines and proposal submission procedures to follow.

Reference(s)

Ashoka U (2019) Evaluating Changemaker Education: A Practitioner’s Guide. Arlington, VA: Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.