Sustainability transitions are not hindered by technological barriers but above all by the lack of well-qualified people. Educating the next generation of engineers and product designers is therefore more important than ever. However, a traditional widely used model of instruction and evaluation is not sufficient to prepare this next generation for the demands of society. It is appropriate that curricula should be adapted. If necessary, in a disruptive way. The question was how to develop an education module in which students are agents in their learning. In which students decide what and how they will learn, and in which they can prepare for a role in society that is in shock. To propel them in a new direction a disruptive education innovation has been designed and tested. This new method turns the traditional education model upside down. Students and lecturers are transformed in equal partners in aninnovation consultancy firm with a passion for engineering, product design, and with a focus on sustainability transition. Students explore their emotionally intrinsic values that enables them to accomplish great things, to experience meaning in their lives and work, and leads to a significant learning experience.Purpose of this paper is to give individuals and organisations involved in higher education insight into a new method of education based on new values such as student agency, equal partnership, partnership learning communities, significant learning experience, and the strong belief students have the capacity and the willingness to positively influence their own lives and environment
In this article, we have presented the two-sided research design that we developed for answering the question about how and what professionals and other participants of outreach social work practices learn from innovating their own practices. We distinguished five strengths the representatives of which all have to learn to play new roles in order to improve democratization and enabling the citizenship of citizens in vulnerable situations. Without outreach research, it would not have been possible to expose the connection between the learning of representatives of these strengths and other transformation processes on an individual, team, and systemic level. This underlines the importance of outreach research for successful innovations in the social field. In our opinion, our two-sided research design is a precondition for the co-creation of these relative autonomous strengths and the connectedness of each of these three levels. This article is based on the article about the research design of a multi case study of four educational cases Martin Stam wrote for International Journal Of Qualitative Studies in Education (2013b). This research design also formed the basis for a multi case study of six social work cases (published as 'Geef de burger moed' (2012)) and of three social quarter teams (is still ongoing). Both publications were used as a pad for his lecture for NOSMO, HvA en Andragogenkring in 2013. The article presented here elaborates on the findings of the social work and social quarter team case studies.
