Supporting students to become agents of change: Introducing and evaluating the Transition Cycle approach to teaching transformative skills

Human societies are dealing with urgent and daunting societal transition challenges, such as those posed by climate change, inequality, pandemics, and digitalization. In all these cases, we know that they must fundamentally change the way they do and think about things, and urgently so, but do not know how. Uncertainty about the direction of change and resistance to change are ubiquitous. Future generations must be equipped with capabilities for dealing with these challenges. However, there is an apparent mismatch between the skills currently taught and the skills needed to address complexity, uncertainty, and resistance. Using relevant existing frameworks and experiences we created and taught a course focusing on fostering these skills. For this purpose we developed the Transition Cycle, an original educational approach in which students work on a societal transition challenge in four distinct but related phases: imagine, connect, act, and assess. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the Transition Cycle and its underlying concepts, basic components, implementation in the course, and learning outcomes. We conclude by reviewing lessons learned and raising questions for future research and experimentation.