PhD for Innovation at Bergen Summer Research School 2024

At the 2024 Bergen Summer Research School, we facilitated the joint sessions on “Systems thinking and creative problem-solving” with participants from all six summer school courses (over 100 in total).

The theme of the 2024 Bergen Summer Research School was “Education 2030 and beyond: Addressing global challenges”. During our interdisciplinary sessions, we collaborated with UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education (UNESCO IESALC).

The challenge for our participants was to develop a policy brief on the contribution of higher education institutions to the Sustainable Development Goals. Policy briefs could either focus on the social, environmental or economic goals and their most important nexuses, and teams could choose whether they wanted to explore the role of teaching, research, engagement or governance and administration.

Participants were challenged to study recent publications by UNESCO IESALC as inspiration for their own policy brief to support the Institute’s research. Teams who present a particularly high-quality draft may be offered the possibility to write (and sign) a short blog post on their main findings at UNESCO IESALC’s website, or to co-author a publication on that topic together
with a Policy Analyst from UNESCO IESALC’s team.

Here is an overview of the ten Bergen Summer Research School policy briefs: