Abstract
While the Pandemic has increased awareness towards student wellbeing in higher education (HE), it also exacerbated existing challenges. Specifically, students pursuing their master graduation thesis often find themselves isolated and overwhelmed due to the individualistic nature of their project and the pressure to create a ‘masterpiece’. In this paper, we provide insight into how designing for community can positively impact thesis design students’ motivation, sense of community and wellbeing, which we identify as drivers of student success. We discuss and evaluate a community-based learning (CBL) program we designed and implemented to improve student success during the master thesis journey of 92 students at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, XXXX. Our findings from the program are that; (1) facilitating connections between students generates a sense of community; (2) a customizable program supports student agency which in turn drives motivation; (3) a focus on student success instead of performance improves wellbeing.
Keywords
design education, community-based learning, student wellbeing, pandemic
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.761
Citation
Van den Bergh, M., van der Bijl-Brouwer, M., and Price, R. (2022) A community-based learning program to improve wellbeing and design student success, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.761
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
A community-based learning program to improve wellbeing and design student success
While the Pandemic has increased awareness towards student wellbeing in higher education (HE), it also exacerbated existing challenges. Specifically, students pursuing their master graduation thesis often find themselves isolated and overwhelmed due to the individualistic nature of their project and the pressure to create a ‘masterpiece’. In this paper, we provide insight into how designing for community can positively impact thesis design students’ motivation, sense of community and wellbeing, which we identify as drivers of student success. We discuss and evaluate a community-based learning (CBL) program we designed and implemented to improve student success during the master thesis journey of 92 students at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, XXXX. Our findings from the program are that; (1) facilitating connections between students generates a sense of community; (2) a customizable program supports student agency which in turn drives motivation; (3) a focus on student success instead of performance improves wellbeing.