International Trainingprogram Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding

Teachers from seven partner-universities are participating in this program. It encompasses 12 webinars (first half from May to June, second half from September to November, with intermediate volunatry practice webinars), plus a summer school taking place in Germany 2025. Application is open until mid February.

Program description:

“Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding” approaches critical thinking and understanding as a creative, eye-opening kind of experience that involves courage as much as empathy. The TECTU approach comes about by a) careful attention to and exploration of lived experience, b) by a discerning use of language that makes a difference to the topic and the person engaged in thinking; c)  attentive and generous listening to grant one another the freedom to say what one actually means and to make sense of complex topic; c) a skill to explore one's own bias and helpful perspectives by becoming more aware of the experiential backgrounds partaking in one's approach.
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TECTU 2025 will have a special focus on challenges and opportunities of transformation. In today’s polycrisis, we are confronted with multiple rapid changes, disruptions and transformations – of environments, of society and individuals. Among other things, the TECTU program will 2025 explore questions like:

How do we recognize crucial moments when transformation as a lived and embodied experience is taking place?

How do we grasp and think with experienced meanings related to important situations of change, disruption or transformation?

How do we differentiate between change, disruption and transformation?

How can moments of liberatory transformation be protected and strengthened within and through the way we do research?

And how does critical and embodied thinking enable us to grasp these processes of transformation more accurately?

TECTU involves three different aspects of critical understanding:

discussing disembodied traditions of critical theory and partially reflective approaches in the sciences and philosophy that disregard the complexity of the life-world;

learning to open and care for spaces that incubate creative insights, along with a comprehensive understanding of relevant subject matters;

developing skills to engage in critical exchanges that facilitate the clarification and development of ideas.