Completing the CiCLE: long-term assessment of community-involved collaborative learning ecosystems for social innovation in higher education

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to highlight the benefits and challenges of immersive, design thinking and community-engaged pedagogies for supporting social innovation within higher education; assess the impact of such approaches across stakeholder groups through long-term retrospective analysis of transdisciplinary and cross-stakeholder work; offer an approach to ecosystems design and analysis that accounts for complex system dynamics in higher education partnerships. Design/methodology/approach This study uses constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz and Belgrave, 2012) to create a long-term systemic analysis of university innovation efforts. Researchers analysed 37 semi-structured interviews across key stakeholders involved in the design and implementation of the Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation. Interview subjects include alumni (students), faculty, community partners and administrators. Interviews were coded using constant comparative coding (Mills et al., 2006) to develop and analyse themes. This study includes situated perspectives from the authors who offer their subjective relationship to the Studio’s development. Findings This paper assesses the outcomes and design of a transdisciplinary cross-stakeholder social innovation program and extends prior research on the potential and challenges of design thinking and immersive pedagogies for supporting service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) practices within higher education. Qualitative interview results reveal how time, resources and other structural and systemic factors operate across stakeholder groups. The findings address a gap in SLCE and social innovation literature by situating community learning within pedagogical interventions constructed not only for the benefit of students but for community members. The authors conclude that the research on social innovation in higher education could benefit from a more intentional examination of longitudinal effects of innovative pedagogical environments across a broad range of stakeholder perspectives and contexts. Social implications This paper identifies how innovative higher education programs are forced to navigate structural, epistemological and ethical quandaries when engaging in community-involved work. Sustainable innovation requires such programs to work within institutional structures while simultaneously disrupting entrenched structures, practices, and processes within the system. Originality/value Social innovation in higher education could benefit from harnessing lessons from collective impact and ecosystem design frameworks. In addition, the authors argue higher education institutions should commit to studying longitudinal effects of innovative pedagogical environments across multiple stakeholder perspectives and contexts. This study closes these gaps by advancing an ecosystems model for long-term and longitudinal assessment that captures the impact of such approaches across stakeholder groups and developing an approach to designing and assessing community-involved collaborative learning ecosystems (CiCLE).