Training in Embodied Critical Thinking

Training in Embodied Critical Thinking

Background
The reason for the application came from a desire to have an impact within the academia, on how thinking is structured and trained within academia, which affects how we approach the world and how researches are constructed. As an interdisciplinary project, TECT is initiated by philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists and environmental designers in a response to challenges such as: (1) a lack of ability to think for oneself in the face of digitalized networks and an overflow of information, (2) a sense of being overwhelmed by complex globalized systems and a feeling of not being able to make any difference in civic engagement, (3) a lack of cultivation of what it means to be human today, as embedded in environments and relations, deeply local as well as globally interdependent. As philosophy teachers of critical thinking and as teachers in areas of computational, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and environmental design, we encounter this crisis as chronic discouragement happening in the first years of study.

Objectives
The context of this project are the deep seated consequences of a disembodied and exclusive tradition of the intellect and its use, excluding feeling, actual experiences, embodied know-how, situated competences, experienced environments, gendered specificity, and pre-conceptual meaning. The project's objectives are to respond to a state of crisis of an exclusive, disembodied, traditional understanding of intellectual and scientific work to which philosophers, anthropologists and natural scientists respond. In a time of breathtaking progress of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, social media, an unprecedented environmental, health and economic crisis, teachers of critical thinking must find new ways to entice students to think for themselves in order to engage in responsible actions and form their own judgements, and the project's objectives was to create that platform. In specialized contexts it had also become increasingly difficult for researchers to engage in an non-specialized public conversation. TECT therefore was aimed at responding to a crisis of disengagement, passivity and the negative effects of digitalisation among students.

Implementation
The project consisted of three 15 ECTS courses, divided into an online webinar, a summer school and an independent project (research paper). Each year one partner hosted the course (3 of 5 partners). The online webinars where taught by all the partners, but the summer school where taught by different combination of partners and guest teachers. The independent projects where also supervised by all the partners (2-5 papers per teacher). TECT is a training program for students and researchers, adding a missing link to the teaching and training of critical thinking on the level of higher education. The conventional methods of training critical thinking are not sufficient to address the challenges that students and researchers face today. The missing link is the methodological integration of the turn to embodiment in the cognitive sciences that proves mind, body and lived experience to work together in thinking, in the development of ideas and in the pursuit of knowledge.

Results
TECT offered a fresh take and novel methodologies of learning to think critically, contributing to the transformation and enrichment of the European tradition and skill of critical thinking in the 21. century. Via the TECT 15 ECTS courses, TECT introduced students to a break-through methodology for scientific, critical and philosophical thinking that has implication for education and pedagogy on all levels of education. The project's main output was based on the work and implementation of the project, the network, the written articles, the handbook.

The Partners:

HASKOLI ISLANDS, Iceland - Coordinator

ERNST-ABBE-HOCHSCHULE JENA, Germany
RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN, Netherlands
TECHNION - ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, Israel
UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI, Slovenia