Teaching Innovation by Tackling Wicked Problems — Campus Technology

Teaching Innovation by Tackling Wicked Problems

Safe landmine detection. Preservation of UNESCO World Heritage sites. Reducing human trafficking. Helping NATO deploy troops more quickly and efficiently. Ensuring ballot access and voting rights in marginalized and underserved communities. Those are all big, complex challenges that defy easy solutions. They’re “wicked” problems, as James Madison University refers to them.

Wicked problems, the bailiwick of the university’s JMU X-Labs, draw undergraduate students from across majors to come together as an interdisciplinary force, to think and work in new ways. Launched in 2015, X-Labs runs semester-long courses that call on students, faculty and off-campus stakeholders to work as partners in understanding big problems and coming up with ways to make an impact. The approach also requires developing “wicked students.” How faculty do that was the topic of a James Madison panel discussion during the recent virtual ASU+GSV conference.

Defining a Wicked Problem

“Wicked problems aren’t just hard problems. Hard problems require a complex solution yet they’re solved in a definitive time and with new techniques. Problems are wicked because traditional processes won’t solve them. And I can sum up some of the literature on wicked problems by saying they have many causes, they’re tough to describe, they don’t have a right answer. And — super interestingly to me — some stakeholders stand to benefit from the problem,” explained Erica Lewis, assistant professor in the School of Nursing. “Wicked problems require diverse perspectives to make forward progress. The interdisciplinary [approach] allows for deeper and broader problem understanding from multiple angles. And ideas from one discipline can be applied in a new way to or to a new area through a lens of another discipline.”

But the thing that really sets X-Labs apart is that the students (many of whom — but not all — are the brightest in their programs) are thrown into the deep end and spend a lot of their time flailing, feeling frustrated and experiencing the pain of failure. As Nick Swayne, executive director of 4-VA and founding director of JMU X-Labs, said in a article last year, “In the age of standardized tests, where there’s always a rubric and right answer and a checklist to get an A, some students can’t handle that … We’ve had some students say, ‘This is crazy, I can’t do that.’ We’ve had some faculty say, ‘This is crazy, I’m used to being in charge and you can’t do that.’ We say, ‘This is life.'”

Selling the Idea

On the surface, setting up a program like X-Labs is resource intensive and requires instructors to come together in ways that don’t fit easily into traditional department goals and fall way outside of pedagogical pathways. Yet, convincing the School of Nursing that students should participate in X-Labs wasn’t hard for Lewis. “There are so many wicked problems in healthcare and our society,” she said. After all, in spite of a “super-tight professional curriculum,” courses that focus on solving big problems “are important to our students’ development.”

Patrice Ludwig, associate professor of Biology and a member of the core faculty at JMU X-Labs, said the interdisciplinary nature of X-Labs is compelling to department heads too. “Look at homelessness, look at climate change, look at food insecurity. Underlying all of those things are biological processes. And if we don’t understand those deep disciplinary dives for biological reasons and how those show up in wicked problems, how are we ever going to meet the needs of society?” she wondered.