Deanne Gannaway is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation at the University of Queensland, where she is Academic Lead for Professional Learning.
Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst (Academic Partnerships) with the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, and a former Professor and Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo. Tom was also a Visiting Scholar at UQ’s Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (2016-19)
Our course units in Faculties of Arts demonstrate the feasibility of enhancing B.A. programs to develop student capability for workplace innovation, extending other generic capabilities for employability currently being developed in those programs [Causevic 2022]. In this post, we address two issues about such B.A. program enhancements, as raised with us by postsecondary academic staff in B.A. programs which do not have a specialist vocational or professional focus (e.g., those labelled in Australia as a “generalist B.A.” [Gannaway & Sheppard 2019] and in North America as “Liberal Arts” programs).
These educators have expressed concerns about (i) the rationale for such offerings in their B.A. programs and (ii) their alignment with traditional B.A. program values. We focused on these issues in a 2017-19 collaboration between our Workplace Innovation Network for Canada team and a National Teaching Fellowship in Australia on The Future of the B.A.
We first summarize the rationale for programs in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) as a natural home for the study of employee-led workplace innovation. We then provide some examples of ‘big picture’ insights which emerged from the Future of the B.A. Fellowship and how those insights can be embedded in learning resources and activities for developing capability for workplace innovation. Finally, we demonstrate the potential for B. A. graduates to add distinctive value in employee-led workplace innovation through the distinctive ways of knowing from their various HASS disciplines.
Why are B.A. programs a natural home for study of Workplace Innovation?
A full description of the Future of the B.A. is available in the final report by the co-author who led the project [Gannaway 2020]. We will use excerpts – indicated below by italic font – from that final report to indicate how the wider issues emerging in The Future of the B.A project can be addresses in developing capability for workplace innovation.
These insights have already been applied in practice:
leaders from the Monash University Faculty of Arts were amongst the first to raise the issues above during the consultations in the Future of the B.A. project with Deans of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences from across Australia.
the analysis below developed in our collaboration) led to the pioneering innovative workplace innovation program in the Monash Arts Strategic Plan.
our subsequent innovative course units in the Monash Arts Faculty were a direct result of this collaboration with the Fellowship project.
One of the Key goals of the Future of the B.A. Fellowship plan was to support institutions in strengthening the value proposition for B.A. programs:
An innovative economy requires workers who can demonstrate logical thinking and argument, emotional intelligence and capacity to adapt to new ideas…educational outcomes arguably intrinsic to Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) disciplines…Yet, the B.A. degree is increasingly perceived to be under duress, with declining student enrolments and increasing questions of its place in contemporary society…This makes it challenging to articulate a value proposition that speaks to prospective students and their families, government agencies and future employers. [from the prelude section of Gannaway 2020].
The rationale we developed for engaging HASS students in the study of workplace innovation is based on the nature of innovation activity:
as an inherently human, creative and social process, Workplace Innovation finds a natural home in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
This natural fit has been confirmed in the Monash Arts experience, both in terms of engagement for students and faculty and in terms of growth from a pilot cohort of 40 students in 2020 to the latest offering in 2022 with 340 students.
In terms of addressing the Employability of B.A. graduates as explored in the mandate of the Future of the B.A. Fellowship, the following points underscore the appeal and alignment of workplace innovation as an application area for professional skills of B.A. graduates:
Workplace Innovation capability is an acknowledged capability gap for workplaces, with growing demand for qualified graduates from higher education.
Many workplaces are at the early stages of encouraging workplace innovation and most lack any formal background or knowledge of relevant research. Graduates can thus bring fresh perspectives and research-informed practices.
Workplace Innovation is needed in all sectors – corporate, public, social, NonProfit, etc.) – and by organizations of all sizes. Developing graduate capability in workplace innovation holds true to the Liberal Arts tradition of developing transferable capabilities and preparing graduates for multiple future career paths – and their other roles as community members and global citizens – rather than for an entry position in a specific work domain.
As outlined further below, B.A. graduates who understand Workplace Innovation contexts, processes and functions, etc. and have developed the requisite skills, knowledge and mindsets can potentially apply their distinctive disciplinary ways of knowing to add value to innovation project teams.
Applying insights on the Future of the B.A. in curricula for Workplace Innovation
Through the collaboration of many academic institutions, the Future of the B.A. Fellowship work developed new insights that shifted the dominant discussion of attributes for B.A. graduates: from a focus on critical thinking and an understanding of the human condition, towards attributes that are crucial for meeting the needs of a rapidly transforming economy.
We outline here two examples of these insights on new attributes identified for the Future of the B.A. in the Fellowship, accompanied by illustrations of how curricula in Workplace Innovation can provide opportunities to develop, apply and document those attributes.
i) Develop capability in Problem identification, not just Problem-solving, through Learning opportunities that enable students to move beyond problem solving towards identifying the problems that need to be solved.
Examining and refining the framing for a Design Innovation challenge is a critical element in workplace innovation capability. Innovators must learn how to avoid “Solution Fixation”: a premature focus on a solution to a given problem statement, without analyzing the assumptions behind that statement’s framing of the design challenge, questioning how those assumptions can become testable hypotheses and exploring alternative framings of the problem (which might lead to quite different solution options). We use Case Stories from our own workplace experiences and classic cases from Design Thinking research – e.g., The Good Kitchen – to emphasize the importance of this capability.
ii) Social learning as a HASS pedagogy: social learning is a signature pedagogy in HASS education. This implies a transformation of our understanding of the world through exposure to different ideas, concepts, theories and understandings.
The concept of workplace innovation as a social process and the teamwork projects included in students’ Innovation Adaptation and Design Innovation tasks proved to be very engaging for the B.A. students. For many of them, this appeared to be their first opportunity to engage collaboratively in solving an authentic workplace challenge.
Disciplinary and interdisciplinary ways of knowing to contribute distinctive value
The project work within the Future of the B.A. Fellowship was designed to address the challenges and difficulties outlined in the quote from the final report’s prelude above, by re-imagining the place of HASS disciplines in the contemporary higher education context and creating a new value proposition for generalist HASS education that speaks to future students and employers. The previous two sections highlight how learning resources and activities to develop capability in workplace innovation could help to further those goals.
However, if academic institutions move – in the long term – toward providing opportunities for students across programs to develop capability in workplace innovation, the question arises as to the distinctive value proposition that B.A. students could provide to employers seeking to foster a more innovative workforce (versus, say, the students in the School of Business curriculum adaptation described above).
During the Future of the B.A. Fellowship project, two possible answers emerged as to how B.A. graduates can foster a distinctive contribution to workplace innovation. Both potential future directions are based on recognition of the added value from a diversity of perspectives amongst innovation team members, especially with respect to breakthrough innovations [Liu 2020].
One possible direction for these future B.A. curricula would leverage the distinctive and diverse lenses for seeing the world and tools for engaging with the world that arise from the 'ways of knowing' cultivated in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences disciplines.
For example, the study of History is intended to yield expertise in Historical Thinking [Carrasco & Serrano 2022], the capability to apply insights about the past to understand the present and to shape the future [Grasek 2008]. Historical Thinking capability can support innovation teams in understanding broader social, cultural, and economic impacts of innovation in different time periods and the potential impacts of contemporary innovations both in the present and future.
We have also used other examples of applying disciplinary ways of knowing from Humanities, such as highlighting the interesting links between current issues in workplace innovation and the “practical Philosophy” of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers [Ennals 2016].
2. A second potential way for future B.A. graduates to provide distinctive contributions to workplace innovation teams is via facilitating interdisciplinary thinking.
Another insight reported in the Future of the B.A. project report addresses this possibility:
The power of inter-disciplinary lenses for the world of work: because B.A. students often examine multiple disciplines in tandem, either as majors or minors, they develop different disciplinary lenses which they can then integrate to develop new, innovative and creative views of the world…This requires engagement with multiple epistemologies to build capacity for graduates to become fluid workers, capable of translating between different world views and adapting to new knowledges (capabilities fundamental to the change agents required by emerging economic transformation).
The capability described in this excerpt from the Fellowship’s final report has been investigated elsewhere under the label of Epistemic Fluency [Markauskaite and Goodyear 2016]. This can be viewed as both an individual capability, as described in the report excerpt above, and as a collective property of interdisciplinary teams who are able to leverage the insights from their multiple ways of thinking and knowing.
B.A. students may indeed be well-positioned as catalysts for such collective epistemic fluency and thus able to bring distinctive value in leveraging the diversity of thinking and knowing on an innovation team. However, in the underlined portion of this excerpt it appears that the responsibility for integrating interdisciplinary perspectives is to be left to the students; we expect instead that educators in B.A. programs and mentors in the workplace will need to model, coach and support students in developing and documenting this capability to integrate and leverage multiple ways of thinking and knowing.
References
Carrasco, C. J. G., & Serrano, J. S. (2023). The Origin and Development of Research Into Historical Thinking. In Carrasco, C. J.G. (ed.). Re-imagining the Teaching of European History: Promoting Civic Education and Historical Consciousness. Routledge. p. 25-42.
Causevic, A. (2022). Employability, Career Readiness, and Soft Skills in US Higher Education: A Literature Review. SPNHA Review, 18(1), 5. School of Public, Nonprofit, and Health Administration, Grand Valley State University.
Ennals, R. (2016). Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Followers. European Journal of Workplace Innovation, 2(1).
Gannaway, D. (2020). Making connections: future-proofing the generalist Bachelor of Arts program: final report 2020. Department of Education, Skills and Employment, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.
Gannaway, D. and Sheppard, K. (2019). Pursuing employability through generalist and specialist degree programs: Australian perspectives. Education for employability: learning for future possibilities. Edited by Higgs, J., Letts, W. and Crisp, G. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense-Brill Publishers.155-166
Grasek, S. (2008). Explore the past to understand the present and shape the future. Social Education, 72(7), 367-370.
Liu, W., Byler, E., & Leifer, L. (2020). Engineering design entrepreneurship and innovation: Transdisciplinary teaching and learning in a global context. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 451-460). Springer, Cham.
Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2016). Epistemic fluency and professional education: innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer.