When Doing Challenge-Based Learning, You Need Critical Morality to Contribute to Societal Challenges

With Challenge-Based Learning (CBL), universities aim to explicitly contribute to societal challenges, mostly involving moral dilemmas. As such, students, teachers, university management, and external stakeholders get morally involved in societal innovations. We analyze the existing CBL literature on this involvement in three dimensions, e.g., personal, interpersonal, and collective. We find that all three levels are present but that the criticality needed for societal challenges is discussed less explicitly in the CBL ethics literature. As a first step to answer this gap, we explore instances of how CBL programs of Mbarara University of Science and Technology (Uganda), Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands), and Tecnóloglco de Monterrey (Mexico) are confronted and deal with this criticality. We conclude that it is fruitful for further research to look into the strengths of CBL to engage students in real-life moral experiences continuously and that more research on critical morality at the personal, interpersonal, and collective dimensions is necessary for CBL as a pedagogical method for universities to contribute to societal challenges.