Open learning situations and students’ experiences of uncertainty

This chapter is based on a training module focused on project-based development. The training course is organized with the aim of strengthening the students' abilities to solve problems in intercultural contexts through innovation (Ellström 2004).

The organization of the course places the students in situations where they have to identify and argue for the professional solution to a given problem in collaboration with an external collaboration partner. Based on a specific case arising from this project-based educational trajectory, it is shown how students react with insecurity and uncertainty when confronted with difficult realities in practice and society's complex intercultural challenges. The case is analyzed critically, informed by respectively cognitive learning theory (Argyris & Schön 1978, Van de Ven 2006, Van de Ven e.a. 1999) and affectively oriented theoretical approaches to learning (Ziehe & Stubenrauch 1892, Balint 1994, Bion 1961, Hirschhorn 1988, Ogden 1982).

Through different perspectives, this analysis shows how the uncertainty experienced by the students can be understood as a phenomenon of heightened awareness, which arises in the encounter with the open and previously undescribed situations. In continuation, it is argued that when a training course is organized with a focus on the students encountering action-oriented scenarios in practice, they will inevitably experience uncertainty. It follows from this that education aiming at developing academically informed action competence requires didactically reflected approaches to uncertainty as a condition of open action-oriented scenarios (Schnack, 2010; Albertsen & Andersen, 2001).