CITL Faculty Book Club: Creating Wicked Students

CITL Faculty Book Club

One book, eight friends, and infinite possibilities! The next chapter of the CITL Faculty Book Club will meet in person at 156 Armory building from 11:30am - 1:00pm on Sep 12, Sep 26, Oct 10, & Oct 24. It’s a great way to connect with colleagues from different disciplines who are curious about the same topics that interest you.

Joining our book club has many benefits:

• Creating new collegial friendships
• Learning from each other’s experiences and points of view
• Using a free version of the book from our UIUC Library
• Earning an Accredible badge that can be displayed on LinkedIn
• Receiving a free CITL notebook to write your reflections and questions
• Suggesting ideas for our next book

Our selected book will be…

Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World (Hanstedt, 2023)

In Creating Wicked Students,  that courses can and should be designed to present students with what are known as “wicked problems” because the skills of dealing with such knotty problems are what will best prepare them for life after college. As the author puts it, “this book begins with the assumption that what we all want for our students is that they be capable of changing the world….When a student leaves college, we want them to enter the world not as drones participating mindlessly in activities to which they’ve been appointed, but as thinking, deliberative beings who add something to society.”There’s a lot of talk in education these days about “wicked problems”―problems that defy traditional expectations or knowledge, problems that evolve over time: Zika, ISIS, political discourse in the era of social media. To prepare students for such wicked problems, they need to have wicked competencies, the ability to respond easily and on the fly to complex challenges. Unfortunately, a traditional education that focuses on content and skills often fails to achieve this sense of wickedness. Students memorize for the test, prepare for the paper, practice the various algorithms over and over again―but when the parameters or dynamics of the test or the paper or the equation change, students are often at a loss for how to adjust.This is a course design book centered on the idea that the goal in the college classroom―in all classrooms, all the time―is to develop students who are not just loaded with content, but capable of using that content in thoughtful, deliberate ways to make the world a better place. Achieving this goal requires a top-to-bottom reconsideration of courses, including student learning goals, text selection and course structure, day-to-day pedagogies, and assignment and project design. Creating Wicked Students takes readers through each step of the process, providing multiple examples at each stage, while always encouraging instructors to consider concepts and exercises in light of their own courses and students.