What Does Innovation Mean in Higher Education?
Roughly a year ago, I had a casual conversation with Xu Li, the Associate Director of the Global Engagement Office about designing an entrepreneurship course at SUSTech. We were chatting over takeaway coffee in the Starbucks on the first floor of the Administration Building. Robert, who I had no idea would later become my TA and collaborator in an experimental course, was taking notes in his impressively thick notebook, while sipping on his cold brew. Xu was sitting on the edge of her seat, as if ready to grab her takeaway coffee at any moment and run to her next meeting. People always seem to be able to identify an ordinary occasion as the moment of inception for an extraordinary adventure. So there it was, the inception of my entrepreneurship course and thereby my quest for the meaning of innovation in education with my two yet-to-be collaborators.
Our conversation about a potential entrepreneurship course and program soon spilled over into a more earnest conversation about issues we saw in higher education both in China and abroad, such as the lack of female role models, training in critical thinking, and how to encourage students to make their own informed unconventional choices in their careers post graduation. Xu told me that many universities in China in recent years have ventured into the new mission of building entrepreneurship programs and centers. It is part of the higher education institutes’ response to the national policy of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” proposed by our Prime Minister Keqiang Li, as well as part of a global response to the emergence of new technologies, new industries thereof, and therefore, the call for new talents. The higher educational institutes in Shenzhen are deemed especially apt for this new venture, as they are situated right at the center where the very first generation of tech entrepreneurs in China thrived, many of whose companies have continued thriving today.
As an educator who has fought my way through the higher education system in the United States while maintaining deep roots in China, and more personally, as a female scholar who has suffered from the lack of female role models, I felt propelled to act. I could sense that similar flames were burning internally across the table from me.
Our casual turned earnest conversation left me with a mind boggling question: what does innovation mean in higher education? A more practical question follows soon after: if a course is designed to incite innovation in students, and my students are potentially the new talents who have visions which I have not yet seen, in industries or fields that have not yet existed, what’s my role in this? What do I have to contribute?
Before teaching at SUSTech, I had known teaching only from my experience of teaching in the United States. I had taught at Princeton University when I was still a doctoral candidate. I had taught university-level academic writing in a youth correctional facility in New Jersey. These previous experiences had made me see myself as the carrier of academic skills, the transmitter of knowledge, and in some occasional heartfelt moments, a practitioner of educational justice, but by no means a teacher of innovation.
Then, the coronavirus pandemic broke out and changed our lives in January, 2020. My experimental course titled “Innovation in Cultural and Creative Industries” took off online a month after in late February. With the help of Robert and the support of the university, I adapted quickly to the format of online teaching, although not without a process of trial and error. I experimented with different online streaming apps and platforms, including Tencent meeting, Zoom, and Bilibili. The biggest challenge I faced was finding new ways to grab the attention of my students in our online teaching sessions, when they have the obvious option to pay attention to more informative, more fascinating content elsewhere online. So I designed different interactive means, such as response essays, viewing videos together online, or striking conversations with them whenever I could during the teaching sessions. These “interactive occasions” made me commiserate instantly with the all the live-streaming hosts or YouTube content creators in the Western context of how intellectually and emotionally demanding online content creation is these days. It also made me think: so is this what innovation in higher education means, that I co-create with my students? To inspire innovation, one needs to innovate oneself. The challenge of online teaching during the pandemic opened up a new space for experiments and innovations for the academic content creators.
Two incidents happened that pushed me further along my quest in innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education. In one of our discussions about the final creative project, I announced that the final project could be on any topic, and in any genre or format, as long as it falls into the field of “creative and cultural industries.” It could be a video game, a documentary, a website, a cultural project or startup proposal, literally anything, I insisted. “I would grade your final project based on creativity, feasibility of the project, market values, cultural values, and social values, but most importantly, I want you to have the freedom to do whatever project you’d like. Take it as an opportunity to experiment with something that could be your future career, or a passion on the side.” In response to my statement, a student of mine wrote to me in the discussion box in the Tencent meeting app, “My mom would say this wouldn’t help me find a job. GPA matters.” Having known him well enough at this point, and having known also his passion in CGI (computer-generated imagery) and special effects in film, albeit being a mechanical engineer major, I understood that the conviction in finding a well-paid job in one of the prestigious tech companies in Shenzhen was more of a decision in doubt. I started a whole discussion with him about grades, career options, social expectations, and conveyed to him my contrary conviction that young people should be allowed to experiment, take risks, and fail in their 20s, or even in their 30s like myself.
The second incident was another “off-topic” accidental discussion in class about the issue of gap year. Two of my students who have taken a gap year shared their experiences, one as an assistant director out of her love for film, the other as an idyllic traveler around the world searching himself, who now found his passion in computer. I shared with them in return my own experience of leaving American academia and moved to Berlin as an independent filmmaker in 2017. We have all been lost and found.
These little conversations with my students in the past semester made me rethink the purpose of education, my own journey of climbing up the ivory tower, and moreover, the meaning of innovation in the ivory tower, when obviously innovations happen outside as much as inside the tower, if not more. The true battlefield is out in the open field, unwalled, some even untreaded upon.
I was told, and so were my Chinese students, that “gao kao” or the Chinese university entrance exam is comparable to tens of thousands of soldiers crossing a single-plank bridge. The metaphor appears to describe a bleak reality of the education system in China. It especially holds true for tens of thousands of students in the rural areas where education resources are scarce. But if I think closely, for many who aspire to climb the ivory tower including myself, the metaphor speaks of the fear of failure. It speaks to all of us who have aspired to succeed, but only willing to tread upon the road that has been taken countless times by tens of thousands of predecessors, and that road happens to be singular.
Some of the creative projects and research essays that came out of this course have made me believe otherwise, that “gao kao” or education in general is not a single-plank bridge. To name a few, one of my students has designed an AI algorithm that categorizes and analyses the visual connections and differences of university badges; another project is a short documentary about how the pandemic has affected lives of people across the globe; another one deals with in-game marriage and its social implications; there is also a research essay on rental rights and reforms in the housing market for young people in Shenzhen. The list goes on. These projects made me feel both humbled and inspired in knowing how little I could do as an educator to incite innovation aside from showing them the existing landscape out there, its history and trends, and above all, to let them know they are free to explore. They are allowed to fail.
The truth is I myself am still in the process of trial and error of understanding innovation in education, and more broadly, of what kind of education that is being called for in times like ours when our society is witnessing substantial changes in all areas on a daily basis due to new technologies. But I take pride in knowing that if my students were called to cross the river via a single-plank bridge, they would know to build an AI algorithm to help them cross the river, or fight for the rights to rent a boat.