ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we investigate how educators at the level of tertiary education can design for learning participatory skills in and across practices in a networked world. The chapter thus complements the last chapter, Chapter 11, where focus was on facilitating young children’s participatory skill development in the transition from day-care to primary school. We develop a set of design principles for ‘simulated social practice’ and experiment with the implementation of these principles in a learning design in higher education. Furthermore, we develop a design procedure for teachers’ design of simulation tasks in a concrete educational setting. The design procedure is firstly based on the transformation of academic learning objectives into clear, conspicuous workplace skills, and secondly on the formulation of tasks that simulate the use of these workplace skills in practice. The aim of the learning design experiment is that the classroom should become a learning space for both academic learning and simulated real-world practice, i.e. a learning space where aspects of students’ current and future lives may come into play and the students get roles both as academics and as professionals. The evaluation of the experiment – and thus of the design procedure – focusses on whether the students have increased their knowledge of the professional skills needed in practice and on their potential change in attitude towards a future job within the profession in question.
