Year 1

Embodied Critical Thinking and the Environment

Online Course (5ECT)

The program begins with an online course which consists of 12 webinars, taking place from March to May 2021. Each webinar provides lecture, inputs, audio-visual information, plus an interactive part with an international TECT expert, including discussions and/or exercises. Practices and working in groups and pairs will allow to experience a very learning-community. Teachers/trainers are come from all TECT partner universities and the Micro-phenomenology Lab.

Interdisciplinary foundations of Embodied Critical Thinking:

Introducing approaches to embodied cognition in philosophy and cognitive science
The challenge of the first-person perspective and lived experience in the understanding of consciousness
Mindfulness and Brain Modeling
Artificial Intelligence and Embodied Thinking
Environmental immersion and design thinking
Introducing the Methods of TECT with a special emphasis on situated thinking in environmental context: “Focusing”, “Thinking-at-the-Edge”, “Reflexive Care”, “Close Talking”, “radical listening”, “Environmental Immersion”.

Schedule: The online course will take place on Tuesdays from 13:30-16:00 Central Time, from March 2nd to May 25th.

Summer School (5 ECT)

According to common understanding, philosophy is about analysis and design about solutions. In this summer school, we combine these two facets. Becoming more critical is also about becoming more creative. Latter does not only imply fresh ideas, but also the design-process and the process of getting new ideas.

In this summer school, students/researchers will be introduced to methods of embodied critical thinking that were developed at the University of Chicago, at the Technion in Haifa, at the University of Iceland and at the Micro-phenomenology Laboraty in Paris. With these methods, students and researchers learn to unfold and think with the thickness of their actual experiences and situations. This novel combination of critical thinking in philosophy and in design makes theories of the embedded, extended and enactive mind concretely applicable in the thinking process, with far reaching implications for training a differentiated, creative and critical approach to frame problems and solutions and initiate projects.

The setting of University of Iceland will draw on the environmental resources available, by having students immerse in firsthand experience of landscape and environment to understand and to display how these affect thinking abilities and challenge as well as enrich conceptual patterns.

Results and goals
Students will work problem based on philosophical and environmental issues. They will get to know methodological corner stones of embodied critical thinking: thorough unfolding of subject matters (“close talking”), conditions of inclusive emotional intelligence (“reflexive care”), enhanced attention to the embodied dimensions of knowing (“Focusing”), deepening of the experiential realm (“micro-phenomenology”), facing the unknown and paradox edges of issues and questions (“thinking at the edge”), thinking with empathic competence (“radical listening”, methods of mindfulness), methods of accessing “extended and embedded mind” (environmental immersion).

Independent Project (5 ECT)

The independent projects are the final step in the TECT program and take place following the summer schools. They are pursued across the field of environment, design and/or philosophy and are supervised by a TECT teacher of the students/researcher’s choice.