Do you want to work with real-life issues? Are you interested in societal change? Discover the innovative elective Change Making. Change Making is an action-oriented programme where students and professionals work closely together as co-learners. This edition has the theme co-creating Sustainable Future(s).
During Change Making, students initiate, create, and evaluate innovative transitions together with other societal professionals. There are all sorts of urgent societal and ecological issues that require cross-disciplinary collaboration, such as climate change, food shortages, loss of biodiversity, armed conflicts, refugee flows, increasing inequality of opportunity, and political polarisation. Essentially, students and professionals collaborate as a 'think tank' together on a transition issue, using the transition cycle as the leading approach.
Examples of transition issues:
What if we stopped using disposable plastic?
What if we powered a city on AI?
What if public education allowed students of all backgrounds to choose their path?
What if everyone had equal access to healthcare?
Change Making goes beyond traditional education and has the following unique features:
Co-learning: students and professionals from the field genuinely work together, doing so from various disciplinary perspectives and areas of expertise.
Joint vision formation: Change Makers create a shared vision for the future. They do this by employing imagination and innovative thinking and breaking through prevailing systems.
Interventions in the real world: Change Makers go beyond theory by jointly carrying out small-scale, real interventions.
Emphasis on reflection and personal growth: Change Makers learn to know their own motivations and capabilities.
The theme of the course will differ every half-year. The coming semester (block 2&3 of the academic year 2024-2025) will focus on co-creating Sustainable Future(s). The following semesters will cover the themes of Healthy Future (block 5 & 6, 2024-2025), Fair & Resilient society (block 1 & 2, 2025-2026), and Digitalisation (block 5 & 6, 2025-2026).
Debby Gerritsen
You can find the timetable on Datanose.
This 18 ECTS elective is only suitable for Bachelor students from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, the Faculty of Law, and the Faculty of Economics and Business. Students need to have acquired at least 90 ECTS in their bachelor's degree before starting this minor.
A maximum of 25 students can participate in this course. Application is possible from 10-17 June and can be done using GLASS. Master’s students can send a short motivation to keuzeonderwijs-iis@uva.nl.
Prices can be found on the IIS website.
The IIS strives to reflect current societal issues and challenges in our elective courses, honours modules and degree programmes, and attempts to integrate the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in this course. For more information about these goals, please visit the SDGs website
If you have any questions, please email keuzeonderwijs-iis@uva.nl. The Course Catalogue information will become available later this month.