Dealing with different boundary crossing levels of performance and backgrounds of students in understanding/interest in boundary crossing

This workshop session led by Carla Oonk discussed factors determining increasing levels of BC performance and how to turn these into learning trajectories for continuous BC competence development.

Participants started to explore the BC Rubric (Gulikers & Oonk, 2019) to get acquainted with different levels of BC performance. That could have been enough for a whole workshop...though, we continued discussing complicating factors for BC competence development. Examples mentioned were type and number of boundaries to be crossed (disciplinary; cultural; academia-society); level of ‘otherness’ to work with (e.g., variety in working habits; intercultural group work in house or in the field); required level of integration and innovation; required depth of reflection.

A few minutes were left to discuss what this means for learning trajectories. When designing learning trajectories, we should consider including extra-curricular learning experiences since they often provide BC learning opportunities. Think about student challenges, but also board or other voluntary work may provide many BC learning opportunities when BC learning goals are made explicit. And how about enabling students to set their tailored personal BC leaning goals at several stages in their study programmes? The BC concept could be studied with the help of self-study materials (see e.g. BC toolbox; knowledge clips) after which personal learning goals can be set for different learning opportunities that students meet. Some food for further thought.

If you have some thoughts about this, please feel free to share them to boundarycrossing@wur.nl.