ABSTRACT
The Simmons World Challenge (SWC) is a unique, interdisciplinary programme developed at Simmons College. It immerses students in an intensive winter-session course that challenges them to tackle a pressing social issue, such as poverty, and create actionable solutions to the problem. In developing the SWC, faculty wanted to address not only the issue of generating business solutions to a significant world problem, but the issue of student engagement to foster learning that students would carry into their careers. To do so, we employed pedagogy from the literature on transformative, student-centred, experiential, cooperative and self-directed learning. This chapter describes the Simmons World Challenge of 2012, “At the Edge of Poverty: Empowering Women to Change Their Lives and Their Communities”, where four faculty worked with 20 students intensively for two weeks. We share SWC’s learning objectives, programme structure, the very different role of both the faculty and the student, and the curriculum.
