Integrating Social Innovation and Service Learning in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges to Nurturing Youth Changemakers

Our world is now facing a range of pressing social problems and challenges. In recent years, social innovation has emerged as a promising approach to tackling these current and future challenges. There is increasing expectation for the young generation to become social change agents or innovators of tomorrow. As a training ground for grooming high-caliber talents, higher education institutions are ideal platforms for incubating youth social innovators.

To facilitate this trend and unleash the creative potential of university students, we designed an integrative pedagogical model that combines social innovation and service learning, which, we argue, is a viable, sustainable, and cost-effective way for mainstreaming social innovation in higher education. We piloted this integrative pedagogical model in four undergraduate courses that cover a range of major social issues and challenges in Hong Kong society in 2023 and evaluated the effectiveness of the model.

In this presentation, we will present the findings of the evaluation, uncovering the enabling factors and challenges that students, course instructors, service-learning coordinators, and community partners faced during the implementation process. We argue that a paradigm shift is needed to move away from the notion of 'students as customers' to 'students as coproducers', which puts students at the front and centre of their learning experiences. This is especially important when we aim to train students to be social innovators and future changemakers. However, as students' roles transformed, confusions and tensions occurred as it was a new experience for all parties. We will discuss the sources of confusions and tensions and shed light on the ways to optimize the integrative model so that the model can be applied at a larger scale in the future.

Overall, we hope the findings of our pilot would be useful for higher education institutions, educators, and community agencies to develop an effective pedagogical model that fosters university students' motivation, mindsets, and skills of social innovation.