Challenge-led education with UCL Grand Challenges

Students care about the world around them and want to make it better.  

Challenge-led learning helps them apply their knowledge to make a real difference. It shows the usefulness of the concepts learnt over the course of their studies, and gives them with skills that are essential to their future – and society’s. 

Challenge-led teaching is becoming a staple of higher education, and an area of excellence at UCL. UCL Grand Challenges is a key player in this area and offers much-needed connections between theory and practice. 

What is UCL Grand Challenges? 

UCL Grand Challenges is a programme aimed at supporting researchers, educators, and others in addressing complex, global societal problems. The work of UCL Grand Challenges is inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a list of global priorities concerning human wellbeing and environmental stewardship. 

UCL Grand Challenges works through themes, each focused on a specific issue. Each theme, or challenge, has a lifespan of five years, and is associated with a leadership team, composed of academic and UCL Grand Challenges staff, and an academic advisory group. 

Themes cover a wide range of sustainable development topics – from the environment and human experience to technology. You can see the current themes on the Grand Challenges website. 

Why should we embed the Grand Challenges in teaching? 

The Grand Challenges can be used as catalysts for thinking about, and developing solutions for, pressing global issues. 

Teaching around the Grand Challenges offers students who care about the planet and their communities an opportunity to learn how to turn their knowledge into impact. In doing so, they learn essential skills that will benefit them in their future careers. 

Embedding Grand Challenges in teaching means: 

• giving students the tools to address complex, real-world problems; 
• allowing students to learn important skills such as collaboration and critical thinking; and 
• empowering space for students to apply what they learn in tangible, rewarding ways. 

Connecting with practice 

Challenge-led education is about doing. Students should be taught the skills they need to work towards well-designed, implementable solutions. 

This can be achieved by setting students a problem to solve, or presenting and discussing how others have tackled complex societal problems. 

Setting a specific problem 

Students might be set a real-world problem to solve, and supported in designing a solution. This works best in combination with work-related learning. Where experiential learning is not achievable, scenario-based learning can also be valuable and has the advantage of potentially offering a wider range of issues to discuss. 

When giving students a challenge, make sure they also learn practical tools and gain enough understanding of the problem to suggest how their idea could be implemented.

Practical tools may include: 

• research tools, such as ethnography, secondary research, focus groups, surveys; 
• tools commonly used in innovation for social change, such as design frameworks, theories of change, relationship mapping; and 
• idea generation and testing methods, such as card sorting, prototyping, dramatisation techniques.

(See Design Council, 2025, and International Council of Design, 2025, for a starting list of tools.) 

The context of the problem may include: 

• understanding the main stakeholders, 
• policy considerations, 
• potential areas of intervention and levers, and 
• feasibility and sustainability (both financial and environmental). 

Presenting and discussing projects 

Where possible, students should engage directly with real-world projects.

• The richest interaction with a particular project consists in direct interaction between the students and the project itself, through a site visit if relevant, and discussion with people working on the project, such as researchers, creators, or working on delivery. Event-related projects easily allow for this kind of engagement, such as the Festival of Afro-European Arts, Performance & Scholarship. 
• Projects can also be used as case studies, explained by the lecturer and discussed in class. Projects driven by big questions are especially useful. See, for instance, Urban Prosperity: towards new concepts, methods, and pathways to impact for place-based flourishing, which could be used as a springboard to discuss urban flourishing more generally. 

Addressing complexity 

Grand Challenges are intrinsically complex. They involve a multitude of actors, both human and non-human, their relations, and their interactions. 

Mental Health & wellbeing, for instance, is not just about people. It's about the places where they live, who they interact with, the technologies they use, the air they breathe, and how these elements fit together. 

Hence, expertise from different fields is needed to address issues around this challenge, such as:

• digital design and psychology, to address body dysmorphia;
• built environment and global health, to ensure we are ready should another pandemic strike; and
• cybersecurity and neurodivergence, to address particularly insidious kinds of social engineering. 

As well as different kinds of expertise, we need to understand systems, how they change over time, and how interventions in one part of the system may have consequences elsewhere. 

Addressing complexity, then, can be achieved by: 

• Combining knowledge from different disciplines (interdisciplinarity), and academic knowledge with knowledge from non-academic practice (transdisciplinarity) 
• Applying systems thinking, a framework used to describe, and operate on, complex systems, understood as composed of actors, interrelationships, and dynamics (see References section, Systems thinking subsection, for more). 

Promoting responsible innovation 

It is important to support students in thinking ethically about innovation. Finding solutions is about the ends – but we need to think about the means as well. A big risk when innovating for social change is to design top-down solutions that don’t cater to the needs of communities, are achieved through extractive research practices, and have harmful unforeseen consequences. 

Ways to promote responsible innovation into the classroom: 

• Foster reflection on the innovation process: who decided that the specific problem we are addressing is a problem? Are they the same people who are affected by the problem? Should the problem be reframed to reflect the interests of marginalised stakeholders? 
• Foster self-awareness. Encourage students to ask themselves: am I the right person to address this problem? What’s my motivation to do so? 
• Emphasise collaborative and incremental innovation: lasting, equitable change is not created by superheroes or easy fixes, but groups of people co-creating gradual improvement through careful interventions. 
• Reflect on power relations, at the appropriate scale. Coloniality is a fundamental issue in international development, impacting research, development and implementation. At a local level, differences of class, race, disability, gender, age, and so forth, impact the dynamics of innovation. 
• Put needs first, solutions second. Fashionable or profitable tools are tempting, but not necessarily appropriate in addressing complex societal problems. Be mindful of, and if appropriate, discuss explicitly, hype and technosolutionism, i.e. the tendency to indiscriminately use technological fixes (see Morozov, 2013, for more detail). 
• Address directly practicalities and incentives, and how they might impact innovation. This might mean talking about balancing profit, impact, feasibility, and sustainability over time. 
• Prioritise inclusive methods, by teaching, for instance, participatory design, non-Western frameworks (see, e.g. International Council of Design, 2025) and trauma-informed practice (for guidance, see Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, 2022). UCL Grand Challenges also supports co-production where appropriate. 

Tailoring pedagogical methods 

Pedagogical methods should reflect the principles outlined above, by allowing students to work collaboratively, mindfully, and creatively. 

• Privilege experiential learning whenever possible. 
• Support independent experimentation and research.
• Foster a playful, affirming environment, where students feel encouraged to share ideas. 
• Provide different modes of interaction, allowing students with a variety of communication styles to share ideas. 
• Provide tools to engage in fruitful collaboration, valorising different kinds of knowledge, providing structure for division of labour and accountability. 
• Use dialogic methods to build knowledge with the students through discussion (see Pedagogy, in References). 
• Offer opportunities for students to evaluate their own, and each other’s work, by reflecting on their own progress and providing peer feedback. 
• Create meaningful interaction between students, for instance by playing games, getting a group of students to test another group’s prototype, discussing terms of collaboration. It is also important to use an appropriate strategy for group allocation (see Mantzioris and Kehrwald, 2014, for guidance), and group assessment. 

(See References and further reading for relevant materials.) 

Key takeaways

Embedding the Grand Challenges in teaching means: 

• privileging purpose-led, practical work, beyond discipline and institutional boundaries; 
• teaching how to address big problems with small interventions ;
• using empowering pedagogies; 
• focussing on ethical, decolonial, and co-produced solutions, and 
• cultivating an open, curious, playful attitude in the classroom. 

Further help 

• UCL Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education 
• UCL Grand Challenges Funded Projects 
• UCL Sustainable Education Network
• Education for Sustainable Development Guide 
• Embedding sustainability into your teaching and learning 
• Peer assessment 
• Assessing group work 
• Email Dr Elena Falco  

References and further reading

Design

Design Council (2025) Our Resources

International Council of Design (2025) International Indigenous Design Charter 

Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. Penguin Books. 

Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (2022) Working definition of trauma-informed practice 

Pedagogy

Bourn, D. (2014). The Theory and Practice of Development Education: A pedagogy for global social justice. Routledge. 

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed). Continuum. 

Giroux, H. (2020). On critical pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic. 

Open Spaces for Dialogue and Enquiry (2006) Critical literacy in global citizenship education.

Seal, M., Smith, A., Jarvis, J., & Mpamhanga, K. (2021). Enabling Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education. Routledge. 

Sibold, W. (2017). Enhancing Critical Thinking through Class Discussion: A Guide for Using Discussion-Based Pedagogy. 

Mantzioris & Kehrwald (2014). Allocation of tertiary students for group work: methods and consequences. Ergo 3 (2).  

Systems thinking

Arnold, R. D., and Wade, J. P. (2015) A Definition of Systems Thinking: A Systems Approach, Procedia Computer Science, Volume 44. 

Meadows, D. H. (2009). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Taylor & Francis. 

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline. Random House Books. 

This guide has been produced by Dr Elena Falco, Module Lead, UCL Grand Challenges, and Professor Douglas Bourn, Professor of Development Education, UCL Faculty of Education & Society.