NextEd Festival Invites Duke Community to Tackle ‘Grand Challenges’ in Education

How can Duke better integrate education in the humanities and STEM? How do we prepare students for success and leadership in the society and economy of tomorrow? What does it mean to provide an equitable educational experience for all students? How can we educate Duke students to be effective and responsible global citizens?

We invite the Duke community to tackle these Grand Challenges in the 2018 NextEd Festival. NextEd is sponsored by Duke Learning Innovation (formerly the Center for Instructional Technology), which first launched the festival in 2017, along with partners across the university. 

NextEd 2018 will feature four, week-long Grand Challenges—thorny, critical issues facing higher education that require new community solutions:

Humanities + STEM, considering how Duke can respond to a recent national academies report’s call for more integration of the humanities and arts with STEM;

Future-Proof Learning, examining how we can prepare students to be leaders in the technology-enabled society and economy of tomorrow;

Equity, Community and Inclusion, fostering discussions about how to support the educational experiences of all members of Duke’s increasingly diverse student body; and

Global Engagement, focusing on what it means to educate students to be effective, responsible global citizens.

Each week’s Grand Challenge will engage the Duke community as designers and problem-solvers. Talks by leading thinkers will inspire us to think bigger. Design workshops will bring diverse approaches to the table. Networking opportunities will yield new interdisciplinary collaborations, and mixing of methodologies.

NextEd is for everyone committed to advancing learning at Duke: students and faculty, advisors and mentors, inventors and researchers, developers and designers.

The festival open on October 2 with “Humanities and STEM at Duke: A Conversation on Teaching and Learning.” Pamela L. Jennings, a professor of Art and Design at North Carolina State University and a contributor to a new national academies report on the integration of the humanities and arts with STEM, will join Duke faculty Paul Bendich and Priscilla Wald for a panel discussion of the future of humanities, STEM and learning at Duke.

View a full list of events and register at the NextEd Fest website.