Project Team
Sean Geobey, School of Environment, Enterprise & Development (Principal Investigator)
Meg Ronson, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (Project Manager)
Brenda Panasiak, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (Project Administrative Assistant)
Tara Campbell, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (Project Consultant)
Project Summary
This project is an in-person or remote half-semester long “social innovation lab,” in which students work alongside university faculty and staff, community leaders, residents, and one another to apply their course learnings to a timely “wicked problem” (Rittel and Webber, 1973) faced by the local community. This problem-based learning approach (Scholz and Anderson, 2018; Hung, 2011) forms a transdisciplinary community through numerous lab sessions. Similar to campus hackathons (ex. Flus and Hurst, 2021), the lab grounds participants in transdisciplinary education that connects students, instructors, and researchers from all faculties and becomes a platform for integrating shared high impact practices (HIPs). This project investigates the effectiveness of the social innovation lab’s integration into traditional academic coursework and as a supplemental co-curricular learning activity to support high impact learning practices such as service learning, capstone courses, and learning communities.