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Education
Developing sustainable leadership and multi-stakeholder collaboration

In adaption to technological change and evolving demands of the labor market, universities need to reshape their pedagogical approaches, course design, and learning environments. Universities and workplaces should join their forces to explore future skills development needs and to offer innovative, inclusive, and shareable learning opportunities for all.

Published : 04.12.2024

In September 2024, Haaga-Helia and three other European universities launched a new Erasmus+-funded RDI project SHUTTLE – Sharing Future Learning Environments for Higher Education and Lifelong Learning. The project aim is to build skills, courage, and resilience through developing transdisciplinary and sustainable leadership competences in collaboration with higher education and industry partners.

The SHUTTLE project promotes human-centered (H2H) learning, digital skills development, and purpose-driven stakeholder collaboration, integrating generative AI and other new and emerging technologies as pedagogical tools. The project results help universities and workplaces in fostering visionary and courageous H2H leadership skills and redesigning learning environments to suit the needs of learners from different educational, professional, and cultural backgrounds.

The role of the associated university and industry partners was discussed and planned in the kick-off meeting, paying special attention to building long-term partnerships.

Transdisciplinary and sustainable leadership competences to navigate future challenges

Barrett, Alphonsus, Harmin, et al. (2019) state that reflective and critical co-learning and knowledge-sharing is required across disciplines to successfully develop future competences needed for complex transdisciplinary problem-solving. They identify four groups of crucial transdisciplinary leadership skills necessary for tackling global sustainable development challenges:

  1. Collaboration, communication, negotiation, conflict resolution
  2. Reflexivity regarding one’s own disciplinary, professional, and cultural standpoints
  3. Transdisciplinary analysis of needs, challenges, and solutions
  4. Engagement across sectoral and community partnerships in real-world contexts

During the SHUTTLE project, we conduct research into such transdisciplinary competences along with future-oriented and sustainable leadership theories (e.g. Liao 2022; Durst, Chowdhury, Davila, et al. 2021). Our ultimate aim is to build a pedagogical framework, open educational resources, and transformational learning communities focused on future competences of self-leadership; digital leadership; business, marketing and communication leadership; intercultural leadership; and collaborative leadership.

Collaboration with multiple stakeholders to share needs, knowledge, and learning

The SHUTTLE kick-off meeting was hosted by the project coordinator, University of Applied Sciences in Nysa, Poland, in October 2024. Along with Haaga-Helia, the project partners are University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague, Czechia, and Polytechnic University of Castelo Branco, Portugal.

The historical city of Nysa had just weeks before the meeting been badly affected by the catastrophic floods in Central Europe. The city was under systematic repair, which in a way underlined the urgency of the project aim. To increase our resilience in the face of drastically changing conditions, we need visionary and proactive leadership approaches to scaffolding and coordinating intense and integrated co-learning and collaboration between multiple public and private stakeholder groups.

To co-create and test digital tools, open educational resources (OERs), community platforms, and other future learning solutions suitable for both higher education and the world of work, several associated university partners from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Mexico were included in the project proposal. To help organize industry collaborations and to widen the regional and international impact of the project, we also involved two industry associations: HENRY – Finnish Association for Human Resource Management and Association of Chemical Industry of Czech Republic.

The SHUTTLE project provides us with cross-cultural opportunities to test and develop new ways of co-learning and research collaboration in the form of transdisciplinary research groups, digital stakeholder communities, and shareable e-learning solutions and platforms.

The SHUTTLE project is co-funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author solely, so neither the European Union nor the funding authority can be held responsible for them.

References

Barrett, M. J., Alphonsus, K. B., Harmin, M., Epp, T., Hoessler, C., McIntyre, D., Reeder, B., & Singh, B. 2019. Learning for transdisciplinary leadership: Why skilled scholars coming together is not enough. BioScience, 69(9), 736-745.

Durst, S., Chowdhury, F., Davila, A., Kraus, S., & Cheng, C. F. 2021. Employees’ psychological characteristics and sustainable leadership in firms with high and low entrepreneurial orientation. Journal of Small Business Strategy, 31(3), 59-71.

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