Dr. Felix Nobis is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University (our WINCan partner in Melbourne Australia), Work-Integrated Learning coordinator for the Faculty of Arts and a professional actor and playwright. Felix is the lead instructor on the pilot course unit for ATS2211 Understanding Workplace Innovation.
Dr. Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst at the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada and Executive-in-Residence for Teaching and Learning Innovation with the Monash Faculty of Arts. Tom is an associate lecturer, student innovation coach and research consultant for ATS2211.
Dr. Mathias Stevenson is a Lecturer (Education Focused) in the Monash University Faculty of Arts, where he coordinates a course unit on Leadership for Social Change and teaches in the Global Studies program. Mat is an associate lecturer in ATS2211 and co-author of a recent book on Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy.
Interdisciplinary Learning in a Faculty of Arts as an “On-Ramp” for Workplace Innovation
When you think of higher education programs which provide a strong foundation for Workplace Innovation, a Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences may not be the first place that comes into your mind. At Monash University, we’re building on past WINCan work with Arts Faculties to demonstrate that capability for workplace innovation – as an inherently human, creative and social process – has a natural home within Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
As the sidebar shows, Monash Arts has made capability to engage with innovation in the workplace one of the signature graduate attributes offered to all undergraduates.
A wonderful pilot group of keen students has been working with us this term to create an initial course unit providing both a conceptual overview and practical experience with Workplace Innovation. That initial unit, ATS2211 Understanding Workplace Innovation, is a prerequisite for the follow-up work-integrated learning course unit with a workplace innovation project team.
Each assigned task increases the level of project initiative, complexity and impact. This approach is designed to create a gentle “on-ramp” for students’ subsequent engagement with external workplace innovation project teams. Students work with innovation in a series of assignments to create what our European colleagues have characterized as Better Work – improving both quality of work life and organizational performance – in our own workplace for teaching and learning.
In this post, we’ll describe two initial elements of the course unit design which demonstrate how project work in the course unit addresses the key goal of our workplace partners: Every Employee Can Engage with Innovation in the Workplace. Those initial tasks are in Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation. In our next post, we’ll describe additional elements of the learning design which provide experience as representative users in Design Thinking projects.
Innovating at the Level of Individual Work: Job Crafting
All of the students in the course unit engaged in Job Crafting as the simplest form of Workplace Innovation: employees take initiative to craft aspects of their jobs to be more in line with their personal goals, values and passions – aiming to increase both job performance and job satisfaction. The assignment gave students the opportunity to propose strategies for redesigning their work as learners in the course unit – or another current course unit in which they were enrolled – to achieve these personal and organizational goals.
The resource materials included an introductory video, documentation from both classic and more recent job crafting research, and supplemental resources for those who might want to go beyond the specific assignment requirements. The task, submitted in the form of a personally crafted web site, unfolded in multiple stages during the term, starting with their analysis of personal values, passions and needs in the early weeks and culminating in the design of their own custom assessment task toward the end of term.
This introductory topic and assigned task illustrate a larger principle underlying our learning design: engaging with innovation in our own ‘workplace for learning’ can provide meaningful experiences that translate into workplace value. Employee Job Crafting is a growing trend in leading-edge workplaces, supported by Human Resource management expertise.
At the same time, these Job Crafting ideas are not new to learning designs in higher education – although the label and the framing for workplace relevance are! For example, we adapted existing higher education tools on Self-Directed Learning for both the guidance to students in reflecting on their Job Crafting work and for our baseline assessment rubric for that Job Crafting task. Some student work on Job Crafting could also be characterized as moving beyond Self-Directed into Self-Determined Learning.
Adapting External Workplace Innovations at the Team Level
Adapting exemplary practices and tools from other workplaces is one of the key activities in scaling up Better Work innovations. Within higher education, adaptation of innovative teaching and learning methods to new contexts is a widely-sought goal amongst innovators – and their sponsors – and the obstacles to doing so are a frequent research topic.
It may seem curious, then, that higher education has paid so little attention to developing graduate capability in Innovation Adaptation. Healthcare and Teacher Education are notable exceptions, driven by explicit professional requirements for that capability in entry-level positions. Previous small-scale pilot studies had provided us with promising evidence about how this capability might be developed more broadly, and the second student task in our Workplace Innovation course unit targeted this opportunity.
The Innovation Adaptation task in our course unit illustrates how the progressive growth in the initiative, complexity and impact of student projects shaped our learning design throughout:
In keeping with the logical sequence for innovation in the workplace, the focus of the adaptation task was a Design Challenge closely related to the team project assigned for the second half of the course unit for an on-campus client group (MUISE, the Monash University International Student Engagement office).
The primary user group for these challenges consisted of similar teams of 3-4 international and domestic students, so that students could collectively identify with the work setting and needs.
The teams analyzed a similar challenge and resulting solution from a related external context (Canadian universities) using an adapted version of a Design Thinking process, which could also be applied within the MUISE group challenge. The analysis required teams to consider both similarities and differences across geographical contexts, and to identify possible insights to apply in understanding the MUISE needs and opportunities.
The small team size provided an opportunity to develop capability in remote teamwork (necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic) incrementally; teams were later combined to more fully engage with the complexity of their local MUISE Design Challenge.
In addition to carrying forward the learning about the design challenge which emerged from this Innovation Adaptation task, some of the more perceptive student teams noted the need to consider the MUISE staff providing the services as another user group. We had identified resources on how such staff viewed their own roles and how Job Crafting had been used to improve their effectiveness and quality of work life.
We would like to have offered a wider range of opportunities for students to work on design challenges across sectors to gain a broader perspective. However, within the confines of a single 12-week term the incremental sequence within one context reduced the overhead of learning about each context so that more time and energy could be focused on capability development. (The learning materials for each module contained examples from multiple sectors: corporate, public sector, social and community groups, etc.)
The student work on Design Thinking teams in the latter half of the course built on what they had learned in these Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation assignments, and was designed to prepare them for roles as Representative Users in workplace innovation design projects. In our next post, we’ll explore how this on-ramp pattern of increasing project initiative, complexity and impact resulted in some backwards design on our part to more effectively frame a particular Design Thinking approach which students could apply throughout the unit.
We’ll also be posting later in this series on what we’ve learned about strengths and weaknesses in each of these student project elements and what we are planning to revise in the next offering of the course unit (with the help of the student partners on our Unit Innovators team).
Acknowledgements: we adapted our progression of initiative, complexity and impact from work by Steen Høyrup described in "Employee-driven innovation: A new phenomenon, concept and mode of innovation." Employee-driven innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012. 3-33. We have also benefited from the Innovation Adaptation learning resources created in a past pilot project in Canada by Anne Filion of the University of Waterloo’s Greenhouse Social Impact Incubator.