Soft skills are considered an essential asset for university students and graduates to adapt successfully in the contemporary workplace. Cultivating and integrating soft skills in Higher Education (HE) curricula and especially in STEM fields may seem a challenging task; however, introducing new teaching strategies and methods into STEM educational environments can contribute to the advancement for students’ soft skills and improve in parallel the academic outcomes.

In today’s rapidly changing world, traditional classroom-based learning and conventional teaching strategies are not sufficient to prepare students to adapt effectively in future professional roles, especially in the green economy area where students need to address real complex challenges related to the environment, society, and economy. Recent developments in STEM education have shifted towards more student-centered, experiential learning approaches.

How STEM professors in Higher Education Area (HEA) can be better equipped in mainstreaming innovative pedagogies in their courses, by supporting their students to practice soft skills through hands-on experiences?

What are the innovative pedagogical pathways that can serve as a bridge between academic knowledge and learning through experience?

How these pedagogies can empower STEM students to apply their empathy, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving and other essential soft skills to co-design and deliver innovative solutions that effectively address sustainability challenges and are oriented towards a more sustainable and harmonious world?

Some answers can be found and further elaborated in this Week, exploring the Experiential Learning and analysing two experiential learning pedagogies, specifically the Design Thinking methodology and the Service-Learning pedagogical approach.

Attending lessons and participating to activities proposed along the Week you will be able to:

  • Familiarise yourselves with the key principles of Experiential and Service-Learning;
  • Identify several types of experiential learning and the different models of Service-Learning;
  • Understand the different roles of educators in experiential learning activities and the opportunities it offers for students’ engagement and soft skills development;
  • Be aware of the importance of experiential learning in STEM higher education by being offered guidance for its application in technical curricula;
  • Comprehend how to develop a Service-Learning Action Plan and how to apply it as part of experiential learning activities within your STEM course(s);
  • Become familiar with the meaning of Design Thinking, explore the process and its benefits and transferability within STEM HE curricula;
  • Understand the connection of Design Thinking with soft skills’ improvement, by familiarize and inspire yourselves from current good practices applied at university level and which integrate Design Thinking in STEM courses.

Key words: experiential learning, innovative pedagogies, 21st century education, interdisciplinarity, hands-on learning, community service, reflection, critical thinking, civic engagement, creativity, empathy, ideation, collaboration, problem statement, ideas, prototype, feedback.

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