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Reflective Consensus Building on Wicked Problems with the Reflect! Platform

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We are limited not by our abilities, but by our vision.

– Anonymous.

Abstract

Wicked problems—that is, problems that can be framed in a number of different ways, depending on who is looking at them—pose ethical challenges for professionals that have scarcely been recognized as such. Even though wicked problems are all around us, they are rarely addressed in education. A reason for this failure might be that wicked problems pose almost insurmountable challenges in educational settings. This contribution shows how students can learn to cope with wicked problems in problem-based learning projects that are structured by the Reflect! platform.

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Notes

  1. This idea has been emphasized in the literature on “ill-defined” problems as well, in talk about “the core need to recharacterize the problem in order to solve it” (Lynch et al. 2009, p. 260).

  2. The last half of this definition goes back to the one provided by Richard Freeman in his now classic book Strategic management. A stakeholder approach: “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization's objectives” (Freeman 1984, p. 46). However, the first half of my definition should be added to that. The reason is that there are many decisions that are made by actors who do not have any particular interest in their outcome. For example, a group of experts that drafts a piece of legislation will certainly have a substantial effect on its formulation, but these experts may not have a “stake” in all this.

  3. Thanks to Jan Albert van Laar for pointing this out.

  4. For an overview, see Kirschner et al. (2003).

  5. See http://swemorph.com/macarma.html.

  6. See https://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-groups/philosophy-ethics/agora-web-based-ethics-education/.

  7. Thanks to Justin Biddle for pointing this out.

  8. From an epistemological point of view, work on wicked problems might, thus, best be conceptualized in a pragmatist framework—based on its anti-foundational, fallible, pluralist, and social character and focus on “radical contingency” (Norton 2015, pp. 64–67).

  9. See also Baguley et al. (2014), Jordan et al. (2014), Ramaley (2014), Seager et al. (2012).

  10. See, for example, the “navigational” approach developed by Berry (2007), Berry et al. (2013), Berry et al. (2015). Another impressive approach for an environmental studies program has been described by Parker (2012). See also Hall et al. (2018) and Kirkman et al. (2017).

  11. http://agora.gatech.edu. AGORA should not be confused with the web-based ethics education tool Agora mentioned above.

  12. It is impossible to compute the solution of wicked problems because it is impossible to compute the behavior of a system whose boundaries are not clearly defined, and wicked problems are, by definition, systems whose boundaries are not clearly defined.

  13. Quoted from https://reflect.gatech.edu/wicked-problems/. The original version of this problem description was developed by Jason Borenstein based on Borenstein and Pearson (2012). I am grateful for his permission to use it.

  14. Corresponding suggestions are summarized at https://reflect.gatech.edu/how-to-develop-a-symphysis-proposal/.

  15. For overviews of computer-supported argument visualization tools see Kirschner et al. (2003), Okada et al. (2014), Scheuer et al. (2010), Schneider et al. (2013). In the class described here we used two more recent tools that allow collaboration on web-based argument maps: Half of the teams worked with the AGORA software (http://agora.gatech.edu), the other half with MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com/tutorials/argument-visualization.html).

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Acknowledgements

This research and the development of the Reflect! platform has been supported by three grants: a larger one from the National Science Foundation (Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies, Award 1623419) and two smaller ones from the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) in the Ivan Alan College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. I am thankful for feedback that Jan Albert van Laar, Bryan Norton, Justin Biddle, Rafael Meza, Anne Zacharias-Walsh, Matt Cox, Daniel Sanbeg, Majid Ahmadi, and Daniel S. Schiff provided. Thanks also to Richard Catrambone and Jeremy Lingle (Co-PIs on the NSF project); Scott Robertson and Jeffrey Wilson from Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC) who created the platform; and the members of the VIP team Digital Deliberation who, in changing constellations, contributed substantially to its creation: Chris LeDantec, Ben Staver, DeAnna Brown, Philip Abel, Joshua Dwire, John Golden, Michelle Chiu, TJ Eneh, Sruti Guhathakurta, Shourya Khare, Sanskriti Rathi, Sally Hannoush, Minju Kwon, Savannah Quinn, Kexin Zhang, Phuc Huynh, Richard Aaron Jeng, Divya Yagnamurthy, Gauranshu Sharma, Sofia Davalos, Nia Alston Hall, Anamica Menon, Mary Alsayar, Angelina Suwoto, Theresa Hsieh, Kishan Chudasama, and Ermelinda Izihirwe.

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  1. School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 685 Cherry Street N.W., DM Smith Building, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0345, USA

    Michael H. G. Hoffmann

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Hoffmann, M.H.G. Reflective Consensus Building on Wicked Problems with the Reflect! Platform. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 793–819 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00132-0

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