Interdisciplinary Skills Training (0.6 ECTS)

Course description

Future generations face unprecedented challenges; climate change, resource depletion, socio-economic and health inequalities. To address these challenges researchers will need to push us outside their disciplinary comfort zones to think differently about problems and possibly solutions. In other words, researchers have to work together in inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations. This new way of working requires a different skill set than those taught in disciplinary courses. Therefore, in this training participants will learn and experience the different phases of these complex collaborations. The course is designed for participants to go through the different phases of these complex collaborations: disciplinary grounding, perspective taking, finding common ground and integration. We combine both theory and practise to train collaborative skills. 

List course objectives

The objective of this course is to let participants experience the joys and difficulties of complex inter- or transdisciplinary projects.

List learning goals

After this course participants:

1. Understand the difference between disciplinary, multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations

2. Understand and experienced (and hopefully crossed) their disciplinary boundaries

3. Have experienced taking different perspectives

4. Have applied different listening levels

5. Have made an effort to find common ground with others outside their discipline

6. Have begun to understand the complexity of integration within inter- and transdisciplinary research projects.

7. Have experienced collateral happiness during the process