Taking TECT to the next level with TECTU
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We can reopen the old assumptions and conceptual models if we think with our more intricate experiencing as well as with logic. We can think everything more truly if we think it (...) with attention to how we think it, and with the critical understanding that no concept, rule, or distinction ever equals experiencing. Our more intricate experiencing may carry it forward, but is not replaced thereby. It is always freshly there again, and open to be being carried forward in new ways, never arbitrarily, but always in quite special and precise ways.
Eugene Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, 1997, xxi The TECT (Training in Embodied Critical Thinking) project will conclude its three-year term in 2023. TECTU (Training in Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding) will succeed this project, commencing in 2024, for another three-year term (2024-2026). The participating universities in TECTU are the University of Iceland, the University of Aarhus, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Groningen, and the University of Ljubljana, with Technion in Haifa being an associate partner. The University of St. Gallen will be entering this project as the 8th partner in 2025. The structure of the TECTU training consists of three modules: I) 12 webinars, II) summer school and III) supervision of independent projects in which trainees employ the ECTU methods for relevant research questions. For the past three years, Training in Embodied Critical Thinking (TECT) has annually trained around 30 trainees, (chosen out of 150-200 applicants), in the methods and scientific-theoretical foundations of Embodied Critical Thinking. The consortium has consolidated as a team and laid the foundations of an embodied approach to thinking within research with a broad intellectual output. After the first successful run, we have come to see that a different kind of “understanding” is a key feature of this training, thus shifting our focus and objectives. |
The TECTU partners during the project´s kick-off meeting in September 2023
Participate in 2024
The first year of TECTU will be hosted by the University of Iceland, Iceland. The program is open for applications until March 21st, 2024. Eligible are graduate students, researchers and professionals from different fields. For testimonies of former participants click here to get a taste of the experience of the program and visit our news page.
For further information on the project and its courses you can contact us here Important dates:Webinar I: May 21st - June 25th, 2024
Tuesdays, 11-13:30 Central European Time (CET). Summer school: August 12th-16th, 2024 Takes place in Reykjavík, Iceland. . Webinar II: September 17th - October 22nd, 2024 Tuesdays, 11-13:30 Central European Time (CET). Independent project: submitted December 15th 2024. |
New objectives and new focus of TECTU
In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful
or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meanings (...), learning to say with the trouble of living and dying in a response-ability on a damaged earth. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016, 1.
In a time, in which polarizing and reductive forms of thinking are gravely threatening human and more-than-human life on the planet, severely hampering our ability to care for the pressing global problems, understanding seems a key feature of human thinking. Understanding implies in-depth grasping of subject-matters, as well as interdisciplinary, intercultural, intersubjective and interspecies understanding. We have come to see that this capacity is a skill that needs to be trained, in which embodied forms of knowing and conditions of empathy and listening play a crucial role.
New partners from the University of Bielefeld (UoB), of Aarhus (UoA) and St. Gallen(UoStG) will support this focus, by adapting TECTU to current cultural, societal and gender issues and to political philosophy. TECTU will focus on major social, political and environmental challenges by not abstracting from the felt and experiential dimensions of understanding involved.
TECTU methods are a safe way of immersing deeply into challenging grounds, while enhancing a mutual understanding of different backgrounds, to think better together. In this manner, students and researchers also learn to translate and contextualize their expertise relevantly beyond the expert jargon.
or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meanings (...), learning to say with the trouble of living and dying in a response-ability on a damaged earth. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016, 1.
In a time, in which polarizing and reductive forms of thinking are gravely threatening human and more-than-human life on the planet, severely hampering our ability to care for the pressing global problems, understanding seems a key feature of human thinking. Understanding implies in-depth grasping of subject-matters, as well as interdisciplinary, intercultural, intersubjective and interspecies understanding. We have come to see that this capacity is a skill that needs to be trained, in which embodied forms of knowing and conditions of empathy and listening play a crucial role.
New partners from the University of Bielefeld (UoB), of Aarhus (UoA) and St. Gallen(UoStG) will support this focus, by adapting TECTU to current cultural, societal and gender issues and to political philosophy. TECTU will focus on major social, political and environmental challenges by not abstracting from the felt and experiential dimensions of understanding involved.
TECTU methods are a safe way of immersing deeply into challenging grounds, while enhancing a mutual understanding of different backgrounds, to think better together. In this manner, students and researchers also learn to translate and contextualize their expertise relevantly beyond the expert jargon.
Motivations behind the TECTU initiative
Unless we accept that at this point in intellectual and scientific history some radical re-learning is necessary, we cannot hope to move forward and break the historic cycle rejection-fascination with consciousness in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 1992, 246
Relevance
Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (ECTU) is an international collaboration initiated by UoI 2018, to develop, test and teach methods supporting the integration of individual, social and environmental experience in the frameworks of research, to strengthen thoughtful reflection within this context. Publish-or-perish-stress, financial and accelerating time pressure (Rosa 2016) diminish conditions to do so.
Re-connecting with the felt and experienced dimension of thinking counteracts a disconnection that a disembodied tradition of research has enacted between the human observer and its objects of research, today enhanced by digitalization (Johnson 2017, Varela & al. 1993, Petitmengin 2021). Making the turn to embodiment methodologically fruitful, the ECTU initiative is being recognized internationally as pioneering in the field of higher education. A network of affiliated partners (see TECT and TECTU/partners), is growing constantly, as are the alumni of the training, becoming an active community forming innovative research and training initiatives (see News and Events).
Response to a sense of crisis
TECTU strives to overcome the cut between the human and more-than-human world that a naïve and much criticized Western paradigm of the neutral observer-stance has brought about. By creating spaces and conditions in research to re-integrate what too often is excluded, TECTU cultivates sources of understanding that are rooted within engagement and interaction. The corresponding tacit, sensitive and felt dimensions of thinking hold forms of knowing that complement theoretical frameworks involved. TECU taps into the potential of 4EA cognition, the embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and affective mind, in order to connect more wholesome, and with more empathy, to complex research matters (Schoeller & Thorgeirsdottir 2019).
As AI takes quantum leaps, and knowledge and tailor-made student papers can be downloaded, HE urgently needs to convey how in-depth engagement with subject matters has a benefit for life. This requires methods to motivate students to think for themselves in ways that open the mind, heart and will (Scharmer 2019), by creating spaces and conditions to engage deeply, and to explore how and why this matters in the context of the researcher's lifeworld. Trainees learn how to clarify their own and very real questions, intuitions, and perplexities, thus permeating topics in ways that are transformative also for the person engaging with them. Making the embodied aspects of critical thinking explicit, TECU complements skills of argumentation and analysis by engaging the dimensions of 4 EA cognition, rendering the felt, experiential and embodied layers of thinking fruitful for clarifying foundations for the sake to “think for oneself” (Kant 1748).
Research
To take TECTU to the next level, the course will be accompanied by qualitative, quantitative and action research on the effects of this training. A mixed methods approach will interconnect different focal points such as attention span, emergence of novel thinking patterns, trust in communicative settings, mental wellbeing criteria. This accompanying research will be an integral part of TECTU, which will help us to disseminate, further and refine our methods and approaches to critically develop the program sustainably into the future.
In the spring of 2024 the first book on the TECTU approach and training will be published by Routledge under the title: ENGAGING THE EMBODIED GROUND OF THINKING IN RESEARCH, TEACHING AND LEARNING (eds. D. Schoeller, S. Thorgeirsdottir and G. Walkerden).
Relevance
Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (ECTU) is an international collaboration initiated by UoI 2018, to develop, test and teach methods supporting the integration of individual, social and environmental experience in the frameworks of research, to strengthen thoughtful reflection within this context. Publish-or-perish-stress, financial and accelerating time pressure (Rosa 2016) diminish conditions to do so.
Re-connecting with the felt and experienced dimension of thinking counteracts a disconnection that a disembodied tradition of research has enacted between the human observer and its objects of research, today enhanced by digitalization (Johnson 2017, Varela & al. 1993, Petitmengin 2021). Making the turn to embodiment methodologically fruitful, the ECTU initiative is being recognized internationally as pioneering in the field of higher education. A network of affiliated partners (see TECT and TECTU/partners), is growing constantly, as are the alumni of the training, becoming an active community forming innovative research and training initiatives (see News and Events).
Response to a sense of crisis
TECTU strives to overcome the cut between the human and more-than-human world that a naïve and much criticized Western paradigm of the neutral observer-stance has brought about. By creating spaces and conditions in research to re-integrate what too often is excluded, TECTU cultivates sources of understanding that are rooted within engagement and interaction. The corresponding tacit, sensitive and felt dimensions of thinking hold forms of knowing that complement theoretical frameworks involved. TECU taps into the potential of 4EA cognition, the embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and affective mind, in order to connect more wholesome, and with more empathy, to complex research matters (Schoeller & Thorgeirsdottir 2019).
As AI takes quantum leaps, and knowledge and tailor-made student papers can be downloaded, HE urgently needs to convey how in-depth engagement with subject matters has a benefit for life. This requires methods to motivate students to think for themselves in ways that open the mind, heart and will (Scharmer 2019), by creating spaces and conditions to engage deeply, and to explore how and why this matters in the context of the researcher's lifeworld. Trainees learn how to clarify their own and very real questions, intuitions, and perplexities, thus permeating topics in ways that are transformative also for the person engaging with them. Making the embodied aspects of critical thinking explicit, TECU complements skills of argumentation and analysis by engaging the dimensions of 4 EA cognition, rendering the felt, experiential and embodied layers of thinking fruitful for clarifying foundations for the sake to “think for oneself” (Kant 1748).
Research
To take TECTU to the next level, the course will be accompanied by qualitative, quantitative and action research on the effects of this training. A mixed methods approach will interconnect different focal points such as attention span, emergence of novel thinking patterns, trust in communicative settings, mental wellbeing criteria. This accompanying research will be an integral part of TECTU, which will help us to disseminate, further and refine our methods and approaches to critically develop the program sustainably into the future.
In the spring of 2024 the first book on the TECTU approach and training will be published by Routledge under the title: ENGAGING THE EMBODIED GROUND OF THINKING IN RESEARCH, TEACHING AND LEARNING (eds. D. Schoeller, S. Thorgeirsdottir and G. Walkerden).