We face a future that is increasingly unstable and difficult to predict: ever-more-complex global challenges demand a new approach to education and people from diverse backgrounds to work together to identify innovative and holistic approaches for more sustainable societies.
As an exercise, the EU project SciCulture (led by the University of Malta) brought artists, researchers, educators and entrepreneurs together in an intensive 5-day course this month in Greece. These diverse participants were guided by experts from around Europe to tangibly imagine what and how education might be in 2050.
Over the next couple years, the SciCulture project hopes to develop this course to effectively combine the various disciplines to facilitate critical thinking and dialogue. These skills are needed to guide decision making to arrive at solutions for the complex challenges society faces.
By facilitating a network of SciCulture ambassadors, this project has the ambitious goal of engaging thousands of individuals over the globe with the idea that transdisciplinarity is the way forward.
This year鈥檚 intensive course showed how challenging and rewarding it is for groups with diverse backgrounds to work together. Participants were purposefully placed with other individuals who shared differing expertise, creating a space where highly philosophical and practical minds needed to find a way to create and build on ideas together.
Despite the inevitable hiccups in these challenging working groups, participants produced highly creative and innovative projects. Their ideas ranged from a posthumanist vision for education to an education model with continuous learning where the school is the community. The transdisciplinary approach worked to envision a different future that tries to make small strides to improve society.
SciCulture鈥檚 next course is in Norway in November to continue to improve the approach with grants soon open for University of Malta students.
SciCulture is funded by the Erasmus+ Programme with support from the European Commission and partnered with the following institutions: University of Malta, Science View, University of Exeter, University of Bergen and TU Delft.
