In universities worldwide, there has been a movement away from mono-disciplinary towards multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary education, motivated by the notion that complex societal issues call for more than a single disciplinary perspective. To prepare students for a role in addressing these issues, flexibility within educational programs is…

Driven by the desire to address wicked problems and contribute to societal transitions, positive societal impact is on the agenda of higher education institutions. This article explores how the repositioning of education can take shape by redefining wicked problems as matters of concern. Problems presuppose solutions; concerns reflect ambiguities,…

The purpose of this article was to explore, from the perspective of students and graduates with disabilities, the skills that are necessary to be self-determined at university, why these are important, and how they can be developed to remain in university and graduate successfully. A systematic review, including 16 qualitative studies with a total…

Increasingly, sustainability challenges in transdisciplinary courses are used to confront students with different dimensions of uncertainty, such as unpredictability, lack of knowledge, or ambiguity. However, little is known about how teachers adapt their teaching to scaffold students through such uncertainty. This design-based study investigates…

Higher education plays a crucial role in supporting societal transitions towards more sustainable and equitable futures. As universities evolve to prepare learners to tackle wicked problems and lead long-term systems change, embodied teaching and learning approaches are gaining attention for their ability to integrate felt experiences with…

The interweaving of various societal challenges into polycrisis makes resolving nowadays wicked problems increasingly complex, asking for a transformation of both our design and our education practices in the Global North. In this paper, we describe why and how we are developing and researching a multi-actor educational and learning environment…

This study shows how HE teachers (particularly, business management and vocational studies) experience the teaching of critical thinking to foster student development of critical thinking skills (CTS) while working across diverse international contexts. Using a qualitative online survey and interview methodologies, we obtained rich information…

This study involved an intervention designed to examine whether employability prospects for STEM students studying mathematics could be improved. It incorporated use of non-routine problem solving in second-year mathematics courses at two New Zealand universities. From a theoretical standpoint, we conceptualised a novel construct called…

Collaborative drawing is a multimodal approach to examining problems within small groups of individuals when the perspectives of multiple stakeholders should be considered. Collaborative drawing can be useful for helping students visualize and analyze a challenging problem from different world views and provide opportunities to confront, discuss,…

Graduate employability is a key issue for higher education as new graduates face a highly competitive and rapidly changing employment sector. To maximise their likelihood of employment, graduates need to be able to demonstrate the skills and attributes most valued by employers. Employers, however, have long criticised the ability of graduates to…

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are increasingly completing university at rates higher than their male counterparts. However, the reasons for this trend, including factors that support Indigenous women's determination to persist with university study, remain undocumented in the literature. We applied a strengths-based approach to…

Problem solving has been characterized as one of the 'employability skills' due to the high demand for such abilities in a modern workplace. Most universities do not monitor progress of the generic problem-solving skills (PSS) of their students due to a lack of available assessment tools. We used previously reported 15-min tests to measure the…

Collaboration is recognised as valuable in enhancing students' learning as well as their social integration and sense of belonging at an institution, which lead to higher retention rates. We investigate the informal, self-organised collaborative practices of military and civilian engineering students in out-of-class settings using a mixed-methods…

For higher education graduates to be effective in the workplace, they require strong technical skills and the capability to operate across diverse knowledge landscapes to solve real world problems. At an Australian university, an interdisciplinary, short-term study tour programme was utilised to enhance students' inexplicit employability skills…

Higher education institutions increasingly recognise the need to develop both disciplinary knowledge and soft skills to foster the employability of their graduates. For students in International Studies programmes, the workplace opportunities to develop soft skills relevant to their intended professions are scarce, costly and unavailable to many.…