Abstract
With the urgency to respond to the rapid changes undergoing in the world, it is becoming more pivotal than ever for universities to connect and actively engage with society to tackle our current global challenges. In the Netherlands, this shift towards contributing to a positive societal impact has permeated across higher education institutions. Numerous projects have emerged with an explicit focus on bringing real-life problems into the classroom to foster multidisciplinary collaboration and interactions across different stakeholders and the community at large. The literature presents multiple conceptualizations to describe the societal impact of universities, ranging from the social responsibility of universities to university-community partnerships. Nevertheless, little is still known about the impacts that such projects might have on the students, the teachers, and the community. Therefore, this research aims at exploring the effects of an education innovation, called HEF House, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. We conducted interviews and focus groups with students, teachers, and the local partners across three different cases happening within this project. We discovered many different changes that the HEF House is stimulating, changes in terms of knowledge acquired, skills developed, attitudes and values shifted, new relationships forged and ways of doing. We also learned about potential causes of such changes. They ranged from developing experiential learning experiences and combining different institutions and disciplines to co-creating with the different actors involved and reflecting together throughout the whole process. Implications on the relevance and value of (evaluating) such education innovations will be explored in more depth.
Author Information
Lorenzo Duchi, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Canan Mesutoglu, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Paper Information
Conference: ECE2024
Stream: Interdisciplinary
This paper is part of the ECE2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Duchi L., & Mesutoglu C. (2024) The Societal Impact of Universities: A Qualitative Evaluation of an Education Innovation ISSN: 2188-1162 The European Conference on Education 2024: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 1067-1080) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2024.83
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2024.83
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