Conceptualising the Learning Landscape for Impact-Driven Education at Erasmus University Rotterdam
The ‘Learning Landscape for Impact-Driven Education’ is an innovation framework and tool to design impact-driven education and to inspire, engage and connect university teachers and educational staff. Developed in collaboration with Studio Nadia Nena, the visual framework allows for a holistic approach to education, considering various influences that affect the learning process. The work is part of the Impact at the Core programme of the Erasmus University Rotterdam—a strategic initiative to realise the university's mission of creating positive societal impact. Almar conceptualised this when he was working for Impact at the Core, from 2021 until 2023.
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Concept
Erasmus University Rotterdam’s mission is to make positive societal impact. Almar worked for Impact at the Core, which is a centralized strategic program to operationalize this mission by developing impact-driven education across all faculties.
The objective of Impact at the Core is to develop education that encourages students to learn how to produce positive value for and with societal partners, in other words: transdisciplinary education. This implies that their work is concerned with changing higher education and its relation to society. To rethink the university's relationship with its surroundings and to explore opportunities to redesign our educational practices, the university needs to create new paths, patterns and languages.
With the development of Impact-driven Education we challenge the current educational and organisational system we work in. While trying to blur boundaries, build bridges and blend disciplines, we find ourselves operating in a liminal space that is characterized by question marks. How should we navigate these new unknowns, and which landmarks can we use to recognise and understand this emerging (educational) environment? With this project, we pose the question: what if we could use Rotterdam as a metaphor to visualise and make sense of this educational environment?
The City as Learning Environment
With the learning landscape we have tempered with Rotterdam’s dynamics, infrastructure, architecture and urban plan to show what we would like our educational system to look like. We transformed Rotterdam into a utopian city: a metaphor for the desired state of Impact-Driven Education. It is an open, inviting and interactive metropolis of the future, forever under construction. By using the buildings, social dimensions, functions and visual cues in the urban landscape, we can take a different perspective on how we are (organising) learning.
We bundled these eight principles in a framework that allows for a holistic approach to education, considering various influences that affect the learning process. This framework is inspired by the work of Backman et al. (2019), who propose using learning landscapes as a conceptual model through which students’ learning experiences can be examined. This concept emphasises that there is a diversity of influences that impact how students learn in the context of complex societal issues. Thus, one must consider the larger environment to identify the overlapping and dynamic ways different elements influence outcomes. The learning landscape for Impact-driven Education places the eight principles at the center, allowing for a non-linear methodology for exploring and designing education.
