Introduction

It is well recognised that the ecological crisis requires us to rethink social practices, from the organisation of our cities, energy infrastructure and supply chains to what we as individuals should contribute in terms of changing behaviour (e.g. IPCC, 2023, Yussof and Gabrys 2011). This collectively felt need for a ‘societal transformation’ repositions institutions of higher education as possible ‘agents of change’ (Fazey et al. 2020). Rather than focussing on analysing ecological degradation and societal developments, many feel that these institutions now must actively partake in the collective identification and fostering of pathways for societal transformations (Patterson et al. 2017). In light of this, the conventional ‘information deficit model’, which assumes that more insight into problems will also lead to solutions, seems less and less apt for the current day and age (e.g. Bulkeley, 2000). Many now suggest that, rather than just conveying information by providing more reports, articles and teaching modules, institutions of higher education should engage in co-productive and transdisciplinary endeavours, which typically involve a kind of reciprocal relationship between researchers and societal stakeholders (Gibbons et al. 1994; Funtowitz and Ravetz, 1993; Seidl et al., (2013)). Moreover, what is called for is a continued ‘experimentation’ to find the appropriate responses (cf. Bulkeley, 2023). This argument applies not only to research, but also to the domain of education. In this paper we reflect on six years of experimentation with a mixed classroom, a course in which students and practitioners learn with and from each other about key societal challenges.

Education plays a key role in shaping the co-productive interfaces currently advocated, for instance through experiments with ‘community service learning’ and ‘transdisciplinary education’ (e.g. Chupp & Joseph, 2010, Daneshpour & Kwegyir-Afful, 2022). In such initiatives, students are typically invited to contribute to finding solutions to real-world problems (e.g. Brundiers et al. 2010). Also rooted in real-world problems is the educational concept of ‘lifelong learning’. Traditionally, the assumption in this discourse has been that professionals need to ‘update’ their skills and expertise amidst a dynamic economic environment. As Colardyn and Bjornavold (2004: 69) open a 2004 overview article on lifelong learning, ‘The knowledge-based economy, new technologies, the growing speed of technological changes and globalization all influence the needs to improve the population’s skills and competences.’ The current environmental and climatic crisis arguably asks for something different: a deep engagement with the grand challenges of our time (e.g. Streekstra et al. 2023). Conversely, as Biesta (2006) rightly puts it, this discourse places too strong an emphasis on the economic function of (lifelong) education and too little on individual development (‘subjectification’) and the role of education in democracies and the problems they face, such as rapid collective action to mitigate climate change.

Within this broader concern of a global environmental crisis and the search for suitable educational approaches, we are particularly interested in educational experiments that connect policy practice and academic research in novel ways. Typically, the science-policy interface is understood unidirectionally in terms of ‘turning science into policy’ (Watson, 2005), a vision that is in line with the information deficit model. Many intermediary players occupy this interface, including environmental assessment agencies, scientific councils, strategy departments, communication officers, and so on. Such actors work hard to broker and integrate scientific insights into policy processes, but unintentionally they also create a congested and fragmented landscape with many silos and barriers between research and policy practice. Moreover, many people active at this interface are trying to find new ways to connect knowledge to societal transformation (Wesselink et al. 2013). We argue that one way to do so is to create a direct and dialogical cross-boundary interaction between students, policy practitioners, and researchers in the form of a mixed classroom. While there clearly is no lack of experiments and literature about lifelong learning, the science-policy interface or transdisciplinary education, this paper has three distinctive contributions positioned at the crossroads between these debates. First, this paper pays attention to both the educational and the institutional dimensions of pedagogical experiments. We believe that attention to both dimensions is crucial for moving from one-off educational experiments to lasting novel practices. Second, we use this double lens to report on a unique case we have been engaged in for years in which students and policymakers learned together: a mixed classroom, which we define as a pedagogical experiment bringing together communities with the intention to spark reflection and learning among and across these communities. For the mixed classroom we were awarded the second Dutch Higher Education Premium in 2021. Third, by detailing how we as teachers organised and taught and tinkered with this course for six subsequent years, we have the ambition to help other teachers with shedding light on the key considerations in organizing a mixed classroom.

To fulfil these ambitions, we structured the paper as follows. In the next section, Tinkering at the science-policy interface, we describe our methodological approach of tinkering and provide context for our mixed-classroom experiment. Subsequently, we will discuss the literature on boundary crossing to frame our experiment in more detail (Boundary crossing between communities). Here we will focus on two learning mechanisms, ‘reflection’ and ‘transformation’, and will subsequently discuss how we tinkered with both individual and organisational learning. We conclude the paper with a section called Mixed classrooms of tomorrow, in which we describe i) the main conceptual insights from the paper and ii) the key lessons for teachers at institutions of higher education interested in developing mixed classrooms.

Tinkering at the science-policy interface

Experimenting with a classroom at the science-policy interface

The mixed classroom is the product of an ‘inquiry’ (Dewey, 1938) into new forms of education at the crossover between academia and policy. The genesis of the mixed classroom was in late 2015, when we had the opportunity to set up a new university institute that would become the Urban Futures Studio at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Co-financed by the university and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, the initiative was prompted by the diagnosis that dominant forms of science-policy interactions based on ‘knowledge transfer’ premised on the information deficit model are no longer fit for the purpose for contemporary networked societies facing the challenges of climate change. We aimed to identify new, more direct, and productive forms of exchange. As the contract with the ministry stated, we were to work on ‘the development of a new, creative interaction between policy and science’.

Taking inspiration from American Pragmatism in particular (cf. Hoffman et al. 2021), we tried to see the work of the Urban Futures Studio in terms of finding a new role for research and teaching. This involved both finding innovative approaches to the challenges of real-world contexts and supporting practitioners in ‘getting a grip’ on difficult situations. Such a pragmatist approach departs less from ‘instructing and informing’ and a preconceived notion or theory, and more from a ‘conversation with the situation’ (Schön, 1992) informed by ‘hunches’ (Van Breda, Swilling (2019)) about possible steps forward in difficult situations. In the words of Stark (2014: 89):

the consequence of pragmatism’s revisionist ontology is that those who frame their work through the lens of pragmatism are not looking for “the Truth” but rather “what fits” for the situation (..) Small ‘t’ truth is constructed through interaction with the environment, and, at least for the Deweyan scholar, is always viewed as being situated within what Dewey calls the ‘contextual whole’.

Our first experiment at the science-policy interface was inspired by the hunch about the potential of a ‘mixed’ classroom. Education is typically either organised for students or professionals, which implies that the classroom itself is a site of untapped potential for developing new crossovers. Moreover, we realised that the social and professional distance between the worlds of the university and that of policymaking is often underestimated. From a pragmatist point of view, an ongoing conversation with the situation is required, which calls for a setting where this dialogue and social contact can occur (cf. Schön, 1992). Informed by the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) we conceived of university teachers and students on the one hand, and policymakers on the other, as members of different ‘communities of practice’ with distinct cultures, habits and routines, settings and dynamics that do not easily meet in practice. Wenger et al. (2002: 4) define communities of practice as ‘groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.’ Scholars like Wenger understand learning as key to becoming (and remaining) a skilled practitioner in practices varying from carpentry to photography, from urban planning to marketing, and to obtaining membership in the community organised around that practice. Because of this close connection to group formation and group membership, learning is understood to be characterised as happening fragmentedly in ‘landscapes’ consisting of multiple, often disconnected communities (Wenger-Trayner et al. 2014). By bringing practically and institutionally separated communities together in a classroom setting, we hoped to foster deeper forms of both social and cognitive learning about the problems at stake and how those problems are collectively addressed, by whom, and how knowledge is shared in doing so. Building on a pragmatist logic of inquiry, and a search for what ‘fits’ given the problem context, the mixed classroom itself was also developed in a constant ‘conversation with the situation’ (Schön, 1992).

The role of the teacher: Six years of tinkering

To articulate our role as teachers we draw on the literature of science and technology, which can be seen as a field with an affinity to the history of American Pragmatism (Marres 2005). The notion of ‘tinkering’ in this literature helps to illuminate how the mixed classroom was created by learning by doing in response to the contextual constraints, challenges and opportunities that arose (e.g. Resnick and Rosenbaum, 2013; Wilkinson & Petrich, 2014). Knorr-Cetina introduced the notion of tinkering in her study of laboratory work to emphasise how research practitioners are constantly exercising creative and imaginative work, ad hoc playing into the situations that emerge. As ‘tinkerers’ they

are aware of the material opportunities they encounter at a given place, and they exploit them to achieve their projects. At the same time, they recognize what is feasible, and adjust or develop their projects accordingly. While doing this, they are constantly engaged in producing and reproducing some kind of workable object that successfully meets the purpose they have temporarily settled on. (Knorr-Cetina 1981: 34)

We believe that the notion of tinkering can be usefully applied to experimentation outside the lab in which people search for new forms, deviate from conventional approaches, and in which material and social circumstances cannot be taken for granted. This includes our experimental search for a mixed classroom. Thematically, in line with our Urban Futures Studio work, we focused on the active engagement with the future or ‘futuring’, while leaving the precise form and pedagogical set-up open in different ways. The first challenge in the beginning was to embed the mixed classroom into the rules, procedures, and regulations of academic education and policymaking. For academic education, this concerns basics such as selecting a time slot and developing a study guide with formal learning aims and identifiable assessments, which would be in line with the number of credits available for the course. In the beginning, we largely followed the existing structures. This resulted in a course of 7.5 ECTS (20 hours per week) that would last for one period of ten weeks. We realized that policymakers could not commit the same number of hours as students, so we opted for a format in which the actual mixed classroom setting with both groups would take place on Wednesday afternoons and students would have the full Friday for seminars to work on their project on top of that. Our main concern at the beginning was whether policymakers would be interested to join and sign up. We were confident that the innovative appeal and the collaboration with policymakers would attract students but were less sure that the policymakers would recognise the value of engaging with students and see participation as appropriate. Accordingly, we went to great lengths to make the programme as appealing to them as possible. We selected a venue close to the policymakers’ office in The Hague, programmed a range of well-known, reputable guest speakers and coordinated with our contacts at the ministry to circulate the call for participation. Once the policymakers had signed up, we identified with them five key themes relevant to their work for the scenario assignment in the course. Along with the setting, the focus and guest appearances, we also constantly tinkered with the format to foster reflection. For example, we drew inspiration from the book and website Liberating Structures to stage biographical and reflective ‘celebrity interviews’ with guest speakers about their futuring work (Lipmanowicz and McCandless, 2017).

We redesigned our mixed classroom in the second year based on the experience from the first run. The mid-term and final evaluation revealed that, while the guest lectures were well-received, they also focused on conveying information at the cost of intensive interaction between students and policymakers. Hence it was the ‘mixing’ that was seen as intriguing. Some policymakers appreciated the ability to lean back, listen and learn, positively citing ‘back-to-school’ feelings but other policymakers, as well as most of the students, regretted the lack of time for interaction and community building. In the subsequent years, we continued to tinker with the format to improve the balance between learning, reflection, interaction and creative and imaginative work. One important challenge for us was how to connect the reflection with practitioners on their work and the more creative and imaginative work by students in a generative way. After the second edition we departed from the idea of teams with policymakers and students, and instead had them interact more loosely. To increase the available time devoted to the interaction between students and policymakers (see Table 1 for the adaptations) was an important challenge. Gradually the lectures (arguably an instantiation of the information deficit model) became less prominent, whereas the interaction between students and policymakers took a more central position. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when we taught the course online for two years, we learned how important physical settings are for staging the interaction. Within the limiting conditions of distance learning, we tried to create as much room for interaction as possible by creatively engaging with virtual meetings. For example, we played around with the fact that people in virtual meetings joined from their homes: we designed assignments in which we asked participants to select books and objects to discuss topics and organized ‘telephone walks’ in which students and policymakers interviewed each other while individually walking through their respective neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, our ability to facilitate the interaction between them was clearly constrained, and we once again appreciated how much the possibilities for fruitful interaction between the two groups depends on the creation of the right generative, informal conditions.

Table 1 Tinkering with the format of the mixed classroom between 2016 and 2022.
Full size table

For each subsequent year, we observed a growth in the appetite for more interaction on both sides. As we increased the time and room for interaction, the desire for more time and room for interaction only seemed to grow (as the responses in evaluations suggested). We saw, in other words, an ‘unfolding desire’ to learn more about the other community. We realized that the mixed classroom activities did more than satisfy an existing need for interaction across boundaries; they created an appetite for more. These experiences and reflections convinced us of the intrinsic value of the interaction between students and policymakers and the potential of making that interaction the basis of mixed classroom pedagogy.

Boundary crossing between communities

The science-policy interface can be considered an instance of different communities learning with and from each other, in this case, students and policymakers. In educational sciences and learning scholarship, there is a burgeoning literature emphasising that meaningful learning occurs at boundaries, like those between communities at the science-policy interface (e.g. Akkerman and Bakker, 2011; Engeström et al. 1995; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002; Oonk et al. 2022; Veltman et al. 2022; Wenger-Trayner et al. 2014. Boundary crossing is seen as potentially beneficial to learning as the experience of sociocultural differences can lead to discontinuity in action or interaction, creating room for reflection and the development of new ideas (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011). The concept of boundary crossing is based on the pedagogical foundation of ‘dialogicality’, which does not conceive of learning as a linear process of building up a knowledge or capabilities drawn from a given source – akin to the information-deficit model – but as a reciprocal process of meaning-making that is particularly generative in undefined situations, such as those taking place at boundaries. From a boundary-crossing perspective, ‘learning is understood broadly as developing new ways of doing or new ways of making sense of doing, as triggered by collaboration with or participation across multiple practices’ (Akkerman and Bruining, 2016: 247). Building on an extensive literature review, Akkerman and Bakker (2011) have identified four learning mechanisms involved in boundary crossing, two of which are particularly relevant for the mixed-classroom experiment: ‘reflection’ and ‘transformation’. In unpacking these mechanisms concerning the mixed classroom, we will focus on reflection as individual learning and transformation as organisational learning. Through this multilevel analysis, we concur with Akkerman and Bruining (2016: 247), who argue that ‘boundary crossing can take place at institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels, possibly simultaneously’. In the subsequent two subsections, we will describe how the boundary-crossing mechanisms of reflection at the individual level and transformation at the organisational level played out over the course of the six years in which we tinkered with the mixed classroom.

Individual: reflection at the boundary between communities

Akkerman and Bakker (2011) define the boundary-crossing mechanism of reflection as follows:

the role of boundary crossing in coming to realize and explicate differences between practices and thus to learn something new about their own and others’ practices [which potentially] results in an expanded set of perspectives and thus a new construction of identity that informs future practice. (ibid.: 144–145, 146)

In short, awareness of the diversity of perspectives is a precondition for reflection. This is of course a crucial element in any (critical) social science classroom. Yet Akkerman and Bakker (ibid.) also distinguish between ‘perspective making’ and ‘perspective taking’.

Firstly, ‘perspective making’ is about ‘making explicit one’s understanding and knowledge of a particular issue’ (ibid.: 145). For policymakers, we observed an apparent need to give words to all the tacit knowledge that defines the realm in which they operate. For students, we not only observed that they became aware of the qualities and limits of their disciplinary perspective and the logics of academic work, but they also had first-hand experience with how their academic knowledge could be of practical value for policymakers, helping shift perspectives. It was empowering for them as they could now feel how their academic study allowed them to make practical contributions.

Year after year, we observed that the students appreciated the policymakers’ efforts to give words to their professional reality. The ‘perspective making’ of policymakers contributed to a richer understanding of the policymaking process among students. One student (2016–2017) understood much better how policymaking works after finishing the course:

What I learned from the policymakers was an insight into the policymaking practice. Some of the experiences they shared really stuck with me, such as how participation is almost always a box to check, due to time and resource constraints.

These reflective insights were stimulated through a range of micro-interactions (interviews, conversations) during the course, as well as comprehensive assignments. A notable assignment is the ‘Practitioner Profile’, a format inspired by Forester (1999) in which students conduct interviews with policymakers to help understand their daily policy practice. Students then write a narrative about the interview using the first-person perspective, effectively taking up the position of the policymaker. This led to fine examples of perspective making, such as the following profile entitled The Heart is a Lonely Hunter:

During my time studying Sociology I had never expected that later I would be occupied with the parking policy of the city of Utrecht. And yes, it is rather funny, because there are few topics that sound as boring as parking policy. Moreover, I don’t even like cars. I don’t drive a car. I got my driver’s license a few years ago, but I rarely use it. I always use my bicycle. Still, this is where my heart lies: engaging with citizens, thinking and analysing future developments, and coming up with concrete parking and mobility solutions for our city. (policymaker 2018–2019, written up by student)

Secondly, there is ‘perspective taking’—‘[to] look at oneself through the eyes of other worlds’ (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011: 145). This is also evident in the quote above. After all, while these words in the practitioner’s profile come from the policymaker, the framing comes from someone else: here it is a statement by a student developing a first-person perspective on the policymaker’s work. Another policymaker from the 2018–2019 edition highlighted the learning mechanism of perspective taking:

Because of the interaction with students you are continuously stimulated to look at your own work from a different perspective, both from a substance and a process perspective. (policymaker, 2018–2019)

In the mixed classroom, the relationship between perspective making and perspective taking tends to be somewhat asymmetrical; the policymaker’s perspective typically plays a more important role than that of the student. Because the course focused on the practice of policymaking, this uneven situation was probably inevitable. But at the same time, in the first year we learned that interaction between students and policymakers is only beneficial if the learning situation is largely reciprocal. We also tried to foster this from the second edition onwards, notably by addressing students and policymakers as equal learners who both have something to bring to the conversation (see Fig. 1). In this, we were also helped by unforeseen circumstances. To our surprise, language barriers turned out to be an equalizer in realizing this equal footing. While policymakers tend to have more expertise in the domain they are operating in, they are professionally operating in Dutch and were found to be much less fluent in English than students. This difference in proficiency at times led to discomfort and in a way erected another boundary. Yet over time, it also contributed to the reciprocity and balanced out the interaction. It was probably necessary that we actively recognised and shared this ‘handicap’ with the group. In doing so, we created a space in which the various insecurities of participants were made objects of reflection, coupled with the commitment to collectively find ways to work through that insecurity. A beautiful example was the practice in which students would help policymakers find the right English words in small group conversations.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Students and policymakers interacting during the mixed classroom.

Full size image

Organizational: transformation towards novel practices

In the case of this mixed classroom experiment, not only did individuals learn, but also organisations. In this regard, organisations are concerned with the science-policy interface, which is necessarily related to both the university and governmental bodies, in particular, national ministries. In Akkerman and Bakker’s boundary crossing terminology, this type of organisational learning can be recast as transformation: ‘profound changes in practices, potentially even the creation of a new, in-between practice’ (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011: 146). As the transformative education literature reveals, it is both conceptually and methodologically complex to distil transformative effects on individual learners (Aboytes and Barth, 2020). A similar problem exists with organisations; effects on organizational change cannot always be readily observed, and there are many other factors influencing this change. Yet, we can unpack how we tinkered with the organizational contexts we were involved in. In doing so, it is helpful to conceive tinkering as ‘institutional entrepreneurship’, which describes ‘change agents who initiate divergent changes, that is, changes that break the institutional status quo in a field of activity and thereby possibly contribute to transforming existing institutions or creating new ones’ (Battilana et al. 2009: 67). The object of change, institutions, can be defined as the formal and informal rules of the game (North, 1990; Scott (2010)). The main institution here is the science-policy interface, the way we exchange knowledge and organise continuing education between research and policymaking, which is traditionally characterised by a strong separation and based on the information deficit model. Our tinkering as institutional entrepreneurs diverged from this routinised practice, in which we logically had more influence on our own academic organisation than on the policy side of the science-policy interface.

In our activities as institutional entrepreneurs, we observe three distinct dimensions relating to transformation of the science-policy interface, again inspired by Akkerman and Bakker’s (2011) work on boundary crossing.Footnote 1 First, hybridization is the process by which ‘ingredients from different contexts are combined into something new and unfamiliar’ (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011: 148). Throughout the years, we tinkered with the setup of the final event, which was always a staged public experience. In the first year, we experimented with an exhibition about the future. While positively reviewed, we realized that it remained somewhat of a curiosity and therefore needed a stronger conceptual underpinning to function as a ‘perceptual bridge’ between academia and policymaking (cf. Auger 2013). Over the years, this involved adapting a well-known ‘dramaturgical configuration’Footnote 2 to a futuring setting in which students and policymakers could show their ideas and learnings, resulting in ‘museums of the future’ (2018–2021), an excursion (2017–2018) and a ‘sanatorium for temporal confusion’ (2021–2022).Footnote 3 The hybridization was a synthesis of three elements: (a) the aforementioned ‘dramaturgical reconfiguration’, such as of a museum or excursion, (b) the final product and event of a course, typically through project presentations and (c) a public debate with a thematic scope, such as the future of mobility or the circular economy. ‘The Museum of The Linear Economy’ (2019–2020), for example, was set up as a museum in a fictional, future urban night shop, which had gained a new meaning as a place of encounter in the transition away from a culture of consumerism (Hoffman et al. 2021). This setting not only connected the theme to the cultural context of consumption, but it also created a hybrid setting that facilitated a new conversation about the future. The Museum of the Linear Economy was ‘opened’ in a final event at the end of January 2020 and from there ‘travelled’ to the National Conference on the Circular Economy (NCCE) and the Pathways to Sustainability conference in Utrecht (March, 2020).Footnote 4 At the NCCE, alongside two presentations by students, two policymakers from the fictional ‘Ministry of Resources and Culture’ reflected as if they spoke in the year 2050 on how their ministry and its key policies had come into being, triggering an energetic discussion about the need to include values and cultural aspects into conversations about Circular Economy policy. At the January opening and the two other events, the museum in the night shop setting helped to stage a different, more values-based conversation about the circular economy, with an emphasis on the need for engaging with alternative future images. In response to this experienced need, multiple policymakers of the ministry signed up for an annual Summer School on futuring, and organized an in-house workshop, led by our colleagues. It was perhaps not a surprise, then, that at the NCEE event the then minister of Infrastructure and Waterworks, Stientje van Veldhoven, chose the museum as the setting to give her report on the conference for social media (Fig. 2). We were not always so successful, however. It remained a challenge to actively bring together academia and policymaking – in particular given the limited time frame of the period. Over the years we developed our understanding of the nature of this final event, but it never became a ‘model’, and tinkering remained necessary.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Opening of the Museum of the Linear Economy and a Ministerial report on Twitter.

Full size image

Second, the mixed classroom did not only lead to new practices and cultural forms at the boundary between academia and policymaking, but it also resulted in what Akkerman and Bakker (ibid.) call crystallisation: a process through which novel forms become embedded in existing practices. Importantly, the mixed classroom was followed by subsequent courses with a similar configuration, for instance, a comparable summer school (started in 2018), a mixed ‘challenge-based’ course at Utrecht University (2022) and, as a kind of culmination, a Continuing Education initiative (started in 2023) to transform other master courses drawing on the mixed classroom format. In each of these instances, we played a role ourselves in the crystallisation or acted as a sounding board for colleagues who were inspired by the concept. As the years went by, we became more (pro-)active in communicating the ideas behind the mixed classroom within the university and beyond. Importantly, in many instances the crystallisation did not concern the mixed classroom as a whole, but methods or formats we developed through our years of tinkering. For instance, the concept of the Museum of the Future circulated well beyond the mixed classroom and was hosted with our input at other events. Another example is the detective wall that students used to develop their futuring intervention, although this was developed in relative isolation from the interaction with policymakers (Fig. 3). Within Utrecht University, the mixed classroom to some extent became an ‘exemplar’ of how practice-oriented education can be organised, complementing more conventional forms such as consultancy projects. We became an even stronger exemplar when after winning the Dutch Higher Education Award in 2021. Since then, we have been frequently invited for interviews or to give talks about the concept in different educational contexts both within the Netherlands and abroad.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Students working with the ‘Detective Wall’.

Full size image

Third and finally, Akkerman and Bakker (2011: 149) observe that for the boundary mechanism of transformation to remain productive continuous joint work at the boundary is a requirement. At the start of the mixed classroom, which coincided with setting up the Urban Futures Studio, we realized that a new course like this would involve significant coordination efforts on all sides and require us to team up with ‘warm contacts’ in the partnering ministries. What we perhaps had not anticipated was the extent to which this ‘joint work’ remained crucial over the years. In each subsequent year, we experienced how in such a dynamic policy context our legitimacy and relevance needed to be reaffirmed by the policy groups involved. This compelled us to constantly check in with our non-academic counterparts and to listen to the issues they were struggling with. And this is perhaps where our mixed classroom course stands out. The transformative nature of the course largely stemmed from the fact that we never saw this course as a ‘training’ for individuals (‘we convey knowledge to you’); rather, we conceived of the course more as a collective space for staging a different kind of conversation around certain policy issues. The continuous work at the boundary can be seen as a form of tinkering or inquiry, in which the search is never fully finished or routinised.

The fact that continuous work at the boundary remained necessary also relates to a final observation on the type of institutional entrepreneurship we engaged in. Battilana et al. (2009) make a distinction between the development of a vision and its subsequent implementation. Admittedly, in most of the years discussed in this paper, the mixed classroom was about developing a vision and tinkering with that and less about the implementation of that vision. In later years this aspect became more important, in particular by functioning as an exemplar for colleagues and academic administrators. Importantly, we engaged less in ensuring the mixed classroom became part of the informal and formal institutions within our educational institute, because the mixed classroom remained a relatively shielded niche (see Boon et al. 2014) and the tinkering approach of continuous adaptation makes the overall format not easy to emulate without devoting significant time and resources. What is more, while both the boundary crossing literature and institutional entrepreneurship literature emphasize confrontation and the role of opponents (‘institutional defenders’), we experienced little of such friction. Probably because we saw our role more in the realm of inspiration and less in formalising this format, for instance, through the allocation of teaching hours and streamlining the flow of financial resources. In the last years discussed in this paper and the period beyond the scope of this paper, our attention shifted to this implementation issue.

Conclusion: mixed classrooms of tomorrow

Conceptual insights

The societal inability to respond accurately to the ecological crisis also requires a reflection on how universities can improve the impact of their practices. We have argued that this predicament requires a phase of educational experimentation. Our mixed classroom is an example of such an experiment, one that is primarily situated at the science-policy interface. It is only one of the many possible and necessary interfaces between academia and the rest of society. This study shows that the perspective of boundary crossing, as developed by, among others, Akkerman and Bakker (2011), is a useful way to conceptually refine the challenges and potentials of organising education in such crossovers. The notion of boundary crossing helps to understand what kind of setting we as teachers have created (our ‘boundary work’) and how participants learn in and through such settings, including the learning about into the boundaries themselves (what Veltman et al., 2022, call ‘boundary awareness’). More specifically, we have suggested to look at our work at the boundary between science and policy as a form of tinkering, which implies a continuous reflective role for the educator, who needs to combine the crafts of teaching and institutional entrepreneurship. Typically, these two forms of tinkering go hand in hand; the search for pedagogical and institutional practices can be analytically separated, but in practice, they are mutually reinforcing or even undistinguishable. Yet, this study shows that it is conceptually helpful to discern both the pedagogical and institutional dimensions of tinkering, because educational innovations at the interface (or boundaries) with society almost necessarily involves a form institutional entrepreneurship to embed the new practice in the existing contexts. The latter dimension is often overlooked. Accordingly, we concur with Akkerman and Bruining (2016) that boundary crossing should be addressed as a multilevel problem in this regard, referring to both (i) the individual and social learning through actual boundary crossing and (ii) the institutional learning about the new boundary-crossing practices developed. What is more, the perspective of tinkering adds to the boundary crossing literature as well as the literature on teacher expertise because of its emphasis on reflectively experimenting with an educational situation, complementing a focus on dimensions such as expertise or the mastery of constructive alignment in a university course (Biggs, 1996; Van Dijk et al. 2020).

While the approach of tinkering in the mixed classroom has been the strength of the course and has led to a lot of appreciation of students and other educators, near the end of the period discussed in this paper (2016–2022) the limits of this approach also became apparent. On the one hand, year after year, the course required a considerable time investment from both students and teachers. Moreover, it was at times stressful, because with tinkering comes a good deal of uncertainty until a very late stage. Additionally, by institutionalizing some aspects of the course, such as administrative aspects (registration, certificates etc.) and formats (such as the practitioner profile and interviews with experts by the teacher), room can be opened for tinkering in other dimensions. What particularly interests us is the prospect of experimenting with different communities beyond that of students and policymakers, such as artists, activists, and entrepreneurs (Streekstra et al. 2023).

Takeaways for educators

We have unpacked and illustrated our experiences as tinkering educators with the format of a mixed classroom. Clearly, our approach of inquiry precludes any cookbook-like suggestions, but we do hope to inspire other educators to tinker with educational settings at the boundary between different communities, in particular at the interface between science and society. What can other educational experimentalists learn from this study about the conditions for such experiments? Clearly, there needs to be time, space, and funding to experiment, fail, reflect and improve. In the first year, the Museum of the Future was in many ways not a suited hybridisation at the science-policy interface; yet both students and policymakers appreciated the intervention a lot, and it allowed us to refine the final event in the subsequent years. Moreover, while we believe that meaningful educational interventions at the boundary between science and society profit from a tinkering approach, we also acknowledge that a certain amount of stability is necessary. In our case, this was the team of educators, which remained largely the same, and a policy community, which consisted mostly of civil servants at ministries. In our practice at the science-policy interface, we for instance learned early on that in hierarchical organisations such as a ministry, early involvement and buy-in from high-level civil servants (directors, directors-general) is crucial for the participation of mid-level and junior civil servants. Moreover, over the years, we came to understand the social and cultural life of policymakers at the ministries better, including the policy discourse and effective ways to stage generative conversations with limited time. This allowed for a level of routinisation on our side.

Other dimensions never became routinised, however. We continuously struggled with the different ‘temporal logics’ of the university and policymaking organisations such as ministries. Whereas university education is predictable, it is also inflexible. We for instance were confined to a timeslot and period in the year, which precluded an appreciation of the temporal dynamics of policymaking, for instance electoral cycles or the procedure of coming to a vision or strategy. Such conflicting logics are not different for other science-society interfaces, if one collaborates with a museum there is typically a build up towards the opening of an exhibition. Our suggestion to fellow educators is to firstly reflect on these temporal logics and see what alignments are possible. Secondly, and more fundamentally, it would help if academic bachelor and master programs would have more flexibility to respond to the temporal logics of communities in society. While this may come at the cost of predictability and routinisation, it would provide more space for meaningful ways to connect education to societal developments.