The societal inability to respond accurately to the ecological crisis also requires a reflection on how universities can improve the impact of their practices. This paper reports on a prize-winning experiment aiming to strengthen the interaction of the university with the world of policymaking: a mixed classroom with students and policymakers. This classroom provides an environment in which policymakers and students co-produce insights, while giving policymakers direct access to academic knowledge and helping students to reflect on the dynamics of real-world contexts. The main goal of this study is to illuminate how learning in and through a mixed classroom experiment take places, for participants, teachers and organisational actors. To do so, we reflect on the continuous dialogue between our efforts as teachers and the experience of participants and others involved. To make sense of our teaching and institutional roles in this experiment, we suggest using the concept of ‘tinkering’. Further, to conceptualise the learning dynamics in a mixed classroom, we deploy the concept of ‘boundary crossing’, which turns out to be helpful in elucidating both individual learning (‘reflection’) and organisational learning (‘transformation’). Our study indicates that the notion of boundary crossing helps to effectively capture the learning situation we created and, as such, helps to redefine more generally how the science-policy interface can be understood and acted upon. For other educators interested in deploying mixed classroom-like approaches, we suggest that a tinkering approach can only work if there is sufficient room for experimentation, including failure and reflection, as well as ample time and funding. We also suggest critically looking at the constraints of the institutional logics and dynamics of higher education (e.g. the structure of semesters) and how their connection to the institutional logics and temporal dynamics of real-world contexts may be improved.

In the expansion of Lifelong Learning (LLL) at Higher Education Institutes (HEIs), we suggest that our task, as teachers, is to develop democratic, experiential, emancipatory and imaginative initiatives. In line with this aim, this paper suggests an approach to lifelong learning in which students and practitioners learn from and with each other. Key to our argument is that this ‘didactic mixing’ occurs at three levels: 1) the mixing of practitioners and students from different backgrounds, 2) the mixing of different ways of knowing, in particular, combining scientific and professional expertise with experiential knowledge, and 3) the mixing of different settings both on and off campus. Drawing on our experiences, we present teacher reflections on two courses that we organized in parallel in the winter of 2022: i.) Techniques of Futuring, in which master’s students and societal practitioners engaged with the contentious issue of the future of the rural Netherlands, and ii) the Coalition of Hope, in which master’s students and societal practitioners reflected on their personal and emotional experiences in engaging with societal change for sustainable futures. In reflecting on our design choices, we conclude that mixing in participants, ways of knowing, and settings allows teachers to craft their courses to their pedagogical foundations by continuously asking with whom, how, and where and why one learns. Furthermore, we propose that no single ‘mix’ counts as unambiguous best practice, but rather hope that this paper inspires teachers and others in the LLL community to reflect and act upon the setup of the learning experience and explore the agency they could have in didactic mixing.

This paper investigates how the teaching and learning about “wicked” environmental problems may be fostered through an educational approach premised on futuring–the active imagination of the future. The growing academic interest in possible and desirable futures provides a promising starting point for restructuring education as coupling knowledge to imagination and teaching to policy practice can open up new, experiential ways of learning. Empirically, this paper draws upon research on an experimental futuring course employing a “mixed classroom” formula in which students and policy-makers learn together about sustainability challenges. Drawing on the notion of inquiry, this course is set up with the aim to foster a critical engagement with the ways futures are imagined in political debates and decision-making. Through complementary activities, the students were pushed to imagine possible futures around a central theme, the transition to a circular economy, in interaction with the policy-makers and other practitioners. This culminated in a “Museum of the Future”. From our action-research-based investigation of the learning experiences in the course, we conclude that a futuring approach to teaching wicked problems results in a more active attitude of students towards the space in which wicked problems and solutions are collectively imagined and deliberated.