Initiative Lead
Dublin City University

Primary Contact
Emer Ní Bhrádaigh
Emer.nibhradaigh@dcu.ie

€30000

Enhancement across Disciplines

PASSION- from Passion to Action – educating Students in Social InnovatiON, is a T&L initiative concerned with upskilling, enabling and empowering academic staff to embed social innovation and entrepreneurship in their disciplines, so that they can foster in their students the behaviour, skills, thinking and attitude in devising, testing and launching sustainable innovative solutions to social problems.

The initiative will provide a suite of activities including workshops, field visits to social enterprises, and reusable learning objects (videos and case studies) to support developments in the curriculum.

PASSION is about the professional development of academics in devising suitable social innovation and entrepreneurship approaches to teaching, motivating and guiding students via appropriate assignments, projects, and evaluation rubrics. Academics will devise cross-disciplinary problem-solving assignments through which students learn to be community-engaged, professionally competent graduates with an understanding of the complexities of solving wicked problems. Alongside innovations in the formal curriculum, DCU is developing a complementary suite of co-curricular workshops and mentorship programmes in the new Entrepreneurship and Innovation Hub in the U Student Centre, working with relevant Clubs and Societies working on award-winning social enterprises such as Giveback.ie, DyslexE and Map the Way. By considering tailor-made problems in conjunction with local NGOs, students can develop their innovative and entrepreneurial skills in a supportive ecosystem.

PASSION will bring staff and students beyond understanding the UN Sustainable Development Goals to doing something about them; it brings students from being passionate about an issue to being able to articulate and design a solution, and to have an actual impact.