Dr Kerry Chappell one of the course experts from GSE facilitating her workshop.

SciCulture: Envisioning the Future of Education in 2050

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.

Working to address this, the EU project SciCulture (led by the University of Malta) brought artists, scientists, researchers, educators and entrepreneurs together in an intensive 5-day course this month in Greece. These diverse participants were guided by experts from partners around Europe (including the University of Exeter’s Graduate School of Education) 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 transdisciplinary thinking is the way forward.

This year’s intensive course showed how challenging and rewarding it is for groups with diverse backgrounds to work together. Participants were purposefully placed with other individuals with differing expertise, creating a space where the highly philosophical teamed with 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 posthuman provocation for education to an education model with continuous learning where the school is the community. The transdisciplinary approach worked to envision different futures that tried to make small strides to improve society.

The next SciCulture course will take place in November and will continue to develop the approach. Grants will be available for students from affiliated Universities. 

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. For more: sciculture.eu | FB: www.facebook.com/SciCultureCourse | Twitter: @culture_sci

Date: 2 May 2019