The Training Embodied Critical Thinking Initiative
Training in Embodied Critical Thinking (TECT) is an interdisciplinary European Erasmus+ project initiated by philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and environmental designers. TECT offers a fresh take and novel methodologies for students and researchers to think critically, contributing to the transformation and enrichment of the skill of critical thinking in the 21st century.
TECT responds to:
The turn to embodiment in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated how mind and body work together in thinking, in the development of ideas and in the pursuit and the production of knowledge. The pedagogical and practical implications of the results of these findings are being realized for the first time in the certified program of TECT. To account for the 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition, we include techniques and methods of thorough unfolding of subject matters (“close talking”), inclusive emotional intelligence (“reflexive care”), enhanced attention to the embodied dimensions of knowing (“focusing”), deepening of the experiential realm (“microphenomenology”), facing the unknown and paradox edges of issues and questions (“thinking at the edge”), thinking with empathic competence (“radical listening”), as well as methods of mindfulness, meditation and “environmental immersion”.
TECT consists of three half-year programs, including online webinars/seminars, individual supervision and a summer school (offering a total of 15 ECTS), providing foundations and training in novel ways of Embodied Critical Thinking. TECT’s online courses provide interdisciplinary foundations of embodied cognition and Embodied Critical Thinking, with a special emphasis each year. Three summer schools belong to the program, each with a different emphasis, providing solid practice-possibilities of Embodied Critical Thinking, with methods developed at the University of Chicago, at the Technion in Haifa, at the Universities of Iceland, Groningen and Ljubljana, at the Micro-phenomenology Laboraty in Paris and at the University of Applied Sciences in Jena etc. With these methods, students and researchers learn to unfold and think with the thickness of their actual experiences and situations.
The academic board of TECT includes philosophers, cognitive scientists, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, computer science and environmental design from the following organizations: the Network of Mindful Universities in the Digital Age in Germany lead by the University of Applied Sciences in Jena, the research-group Embodied Critical Thinking at the University of Iceland, the Center of Cognitive Science at the University of Ljubljana, the Institute for Brain Modeling and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, the Department of Environmental Design at the Technion in Haifa, and the Department of Computer Science at the ETH in Zurich.
TECT responds to:
- a crisis of critical thinking consisting of 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.
- a need to find new ways to think for oneself and form sound judgements in a time of breathtaking progress of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, social media, an unprecedented environmental, health and economic crisis, teachers of criticalcritical thinking must find new ways to entice students to think for themselves in order to engage in responsible actions and form their own judgements.
The turn to embodiment in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated how mind and body work together in thinking, in the development of ideas and in the pursuit and the production of knowledge. The pedagogical and practical implications of the results of these findings are being realized for the first time in the certified program of TECT. To account for the 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition, we include techniques and methods of thorough unfolding of subject matters (“close talking”), inclusive emotional intelligence (“reflexive care”), enhanced attention to the embodied dimensions of knowing (“focusing”), deepening of the experiential realm (“microphenomenology”), facing the unknown and paradox edges of issues and questions (“thinking at the edge”), thinking with empathic competence (“radical listening”), as well as methods of mindfulness, meditation and “environmental immersion”.
TECT consists of three half-year programs, including online webinars/seminars, individual supervision and a summer school (offering a total of 15 ECTS), providing foundations and training in novel ways of Embodied Critical Thinking. TECT’s online courses provide interdisciplinary foundations of embodied cognition and Embodied Critical Thinking, with a special emphasis each year. Three summer schools belong to the program, each with a different emphasis, providing solid practice-possibilities of Embodied Critical Thinking, with methods developed at the University of Chicago, at the Technion in Haifa, at the Universities of Iceland, Groningen and Ljubljana, at the Micro-phenomenology Laboraty in Paris and at the University of Applied Sciences in Jena etc. With these methods, students and researchers learn to unfold and think with the thickness of their actual experiences and situations.
The academic board of TECT includes philosophers, cognitive scientists, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, computer science and environmental design from the following organizations: the Network of Mindful Universities in the Digital Age in Germany lead by the University of Applied Sciences in Jena, the research-group Embodied Critical Thinking at the University of Iceland, the Center of Cognitive Science at the University of Ljubljana, the Institute for Brain Modeling and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, the Department of Environmental Design at the Technion in Haifa, and the Department of Computer Science at the ETH in Zurich.
