How can we imagine a better future for our society? And how can we meaningfully work together to achieve that future? These were some of the questions asked during the 4 year Erasmus+ project called SciCulture, with all lessons learnt from the project compiled into a report.
Four intensive international training programmes were developed to help answer these questions and as a step to addressing the complex challenges facing society. Each course consisted of 5 days with experts in the arts, design thinking, education, science communication and entrepreneurship. Course participants from different disciplines were mentored in small groups. They were guided to develop a different way of thinking and learning which put the disciplines into collaborative relationships to respond to the societal challenge at hand. This was done physically for the first two courses and then subsequently adapted to both a fully online course and a hybrid one.
Each course was evaluated in order to answer SciCulture’s core questions and understand its impact on participants. The evaluation efforts were led by the partners at the University of Exeter and resulted in a final report that gathered all the learnings from the intensive courses, now available online.
The researchers analysed SciCulture’s framework: how Design Thinking can be woven with creative pedagogies in a student-centred, transdisciplinary experience. The successes and challenges of the strategic partnership between 5 European organisations (University of Exeter, UK; University of Malta, Malta; University of Bergen, Norway; TU Delft, The Netherlands; and Science View, Greece) were also evaluated.
From the open-access report, it was possible to gather an understanding of the complexity of participants’ experiences shifting from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity. The report also identified the course’s main learning outcomes, namely working ethically with others, and knowledge building and embodied thinking. The emergence of creative pedagogies, especially transdisciplinarity, was correlated with the partner’s flexibility and dedicated time to planning the activities and, amidst the COVID-19 era, the study also reflects on the affordances and challenges of using a digital platform in education.
For any questions or thoughts about SciCulture’s results and reflections, please reach out to: www.sciculture.eu, Facebook: @SciCultureCourse, Instagram: @SciCulture, Twitter: @culture_sci, Email: sciculture@um.edu.mt