News
Boundary Crossing & Personal Leadership Course in the new Bachelor Marine Sciences: The first round!
In the new Bachelor Marine Sciences, we got the opportunity to develop and try out a completely new 3 ECTS course on Boundary Crossing & Personal Leadership (BC&PL). A course that is taught in the mornings of P2, and followed by a ribbon throughout the program (still to be implemented).
The new BSc Marine Sciences is an interdisciplinary, international programme equipping students to deal with complex, uncertain and open-ended and global Marine Science challenges. We wanted to start fostering students’ abilities to learn and work across different boundaries from the start of the program.
BC&PL are combined as we took the position of: to be able to learn with others, you first need to become aware of yourself. Who are you, what do you bring along, what are your assumptions, drivers, ambitions, what do you want to learn more about? These questions are at the start of both Boundary Crossing (i.e., the learning mechanism of Identification, which requires you to position yourself and possible other members in relation to the challenge you are working on) and Personal Leadership (i.e. to steer your own learning, you need to become aware of your starting point).
The course was set up to put students’ experiences with boundary crossing at the core. They practiced listening with an open mind, asking open and non-judgemental questions, interviewing people with different perspectives, exploring their own background, assumptions, power and privilege, their emotional and physical responses to controversial statements etc. In week 2 and 3 they practiced boundary crossing using Marine Sciences challenges. In week 2 the focus was on disciplinary and societal boundaries. Students conducted stakeholder interviews, stakeholder mapping and role-plays around Pulse Fishery, and pitched a final – shared – advice to a real policy officer. In week 3, they explored cultural boundaries while working on coral reef restoration in Kenya, through picture assignments, worldviews and debates.
A red thread throughout the course was that we (teachers), collaboratively with students, developed the “success criteria” for BC & PL. We asked students, via various activities, to come up with what they felt to be “good boundary crossing” and “good personal leadership”. We used padlet, prioritising criteria using a laundry line and single point rubrics for developing these criteria with students.
Moreover, students were divided in tutor groups (2 groups of 6 per tutor). Twice during the course, tutor groups discussed their learnings, insights, questions in tutor groups.
For the assessment, the focus was on using various types of assessments to allow students to explore themselves and to get to know themselves a bit better. For this purpose we used a development portfolio with prompts for every day. This is only for the students, they could use it in any way they liked. In the final week, students could use input from their development portfolio to develop an assessment portfolio of three activities: A moodboard showing a representation of themselves (PL); a BC learning journey, and a BC&PL self-assessment on the co-constructed criteria.
It was a great experience, challenging students out of their comfort zones – which they reported as one of their main eye-openers required for both BC&PL. They became more aware of the underlying assumptions and how these often drive their behaviour in groups. Co-constructing the success criteria was very much appreciated and can be seen through the following two quotes:
Developing these successcriteria together makes to rather vague concepts of BC and PL much more tangible for me.
I really like it that we can use the successcriteria to identify the things we personally want to focus on.
Surprisingly, while the use of the development portfolio was up to the students, we saw that students highly engaged with it during the sessions. It helped them to grasp their learning and think about the in-class activities in a variety of ways (i.e. sometimes they had to draw, map, identify emotions, develop open questions or other forms of reflecting). Also the fact that they were allowed to “play” and make mistakes was a very important characteristic of the course.
During the positioning assignment I felt very uncomfortable, as I could not really respond to the ideas or questions from the others. When the teachers stressed that this “becoming aware of what you don’t know, or what perspectives you did never think about before” is key to boundary crossing, this was an eye opener for me. After that I started to always search for “what do I not know about this problem?” and share this in my group. This really helped me to learn much more from others
If you are interested to find out more on the materials used in this course, you can check out the following links:
> BC&PL Development Portfolio
> BC&PL Assessment Portfolio
This news item was contributed by Judith Gulikers, the developer and teacher of the BC&PL course. ELS Colleagues Daan Buijs and Camilla Ramezzano were also involved in the designing and teaching of the course, together with other colleagues from TLC and teachers involved in the BMS program.