Support for Teaching Wicked Problems: Designing Faculty Learning Opportunities for Facilitating Difficult Conversations Across General Education

ABSTRACT

Broad social, political, and institutional factors influence the design and implementation of general education curriculum, and by extension, individual courses and faculty. Among the many pressing issues facing university faculty, teaching about wicked problems may create situations that they are underprepared to handle or challenges in navigating the potential impacts on themselves and their students. The authors identified the need for faculty professional development in general education courses and, in particular, to support the teaching of courses in the new general education categories broadly relating to potentially controversial topics. The authors created a multilevel professional development framework centered around difficult conversations training for faculty. The programming is backward-designed and aligns with other broadly inclusive professional development programming for faculty. Further, collaboration among the teaching center and undergraduate education, in partnership with other offices, enables additional faculty collaboration and sharing of teaching approaches to address wicked problems across disciplines.