Collaborative curriculum design as a way to foster community engagement

What role is there for community partners in higher education? How do participatory  processes contribute to teaching and learning in an increasingly complex, connected and globalized world? How can collaborative curriculum design enable student empowerment?

On 14 December 2023, Lien Mostmans and Linde Moriau, partners from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in the freshly started Erasmus+ SPACE project, aimed at Supporting Professionals and Academics for Community Engagement in higher education, explored these questions in a poster at the three day conference ‘Higher Education with Impact’ organized by Hasselt University (Belgium). With this conference and poster session, Hasselt University brought together researchers, teachers and educational professionals that emphasize and critically examine the role of higher education in cultivating learners as active and engaged citizens who are committed to contributing to the sustainable development, health, and well-being of their communities.

In their poster ‘Fostering community connections and student empowerment through collaborative curriculum design’, Lien and Linde discussed collaborative curriculum design as a participatory process, involving actors from all parts of the educational ecosystem (students, NGOs, teachers, industry, policy,…), who come together to create a future-proof curriculum that prepares students for 21st century society. Advantages of collaborative curriculum design were discussed, including fostering reflective professionalism and willingness to innovate amongst learners, as well as challenges and obstacles, such as dealing with potential communication barriers between actors and curriculum misalignment. By including reflective questions, the poster, which was made to be (re-)written upon, was designed so as to elicit interactive response. Take-ways from the poster session conversations include: i) the importance of developing a tailored approach to participatory curriculum-making processes, aligned with both aspirations and possibilities of the involved participants, (ii) the importance of providing shared collaboration tools and platforms to support the co-creation process, and (iii) the need to expand the core group of enthusiastic innovators, with more hesitant – and potentially more critical – faculty members, students and/or societal partners throughout the (re)design process, in order to work towards a sustainably anchored and broadly supported curriculum.