SG - Designing Education for Empowering Minds, Hearts and Bodies

About Designing Education for Empowering Minds, Hearts and Bodies

Presentations, workshop & dialogue

If education has a role to play in empowering us to cope with a world in crisis, how could it play this role? How could it stimulate our imagination, nurture our minds, hearts, and bodies, and broaden our perspectives? Support us in being respons-able in contributing to sustainable futures and in including multiple voices?

Tonight, we explore how we could shape and design our education trajectories and learning processes in such a way that they empower rather than discourage students in the face of global challenges. In an interactive way, assistant professor Valentina Tassone and knowledge & learning adviser Anke de Vrieze invite you to reflect on relevant questions in this regard. They are passionate about non-conventional education and learning approaches, and let you experience what the value of such approaches can be. Get a sense of what creative and embodied methods could be like, and discuss how educational set-ups could support change towards just and sustainable societies.

Valentina Tassone will engage us in heartfelt reflections on educational design. Together, we will reflect on the paradigmatic assumptions that (often implicitly) shape our relationship with the world and underpin our educational design and learning endeavours, on who we are (not) including in such endeavours, and on how to cultivate emotional empowerment and a pedagogy of the heart. By interweaving inspirational examples from educational practices, insights from research studies, and reflective moments, we will explore possibilities for shaping today’s education.

Anke de Vrieze will subsequently engage us in embodied and creative learning. How are our bodies invited to be present in our learning spaces, what is the relevance of embodied learning and what could embodied learning spaces look like? We’ll engage in exercises to experience, and reflect upon, the potential role of embodied and creative forms of learning and we’ll re-design our educational spaces!

About Rethinking Higher Education in Times of Systemic Global Challenges

Our times are characterised by daunting problems: alarming climate change, accelerated biodiversity loss, rising wealth inequality, food security threats, increasing resource scarcity, and other growing vulnerabilities and injustices. How should educational systems respond to such global crises? To what extent is our higher education developing the qualities and competences the world needs today?

In the face of urgent environmental and social problems, calls are made for a reform of our educational visions and practices. Alternative approaches question conventional modes of learning and researching, and challenge classical (western) ideas about what (higher) education should look like. What is the rationale behind these alternative views on the desired objectives and character of education? What could they offer that the regular system might not offer (enough)? And what kind of discussions does this evoke about the mandate and responsibility of the university, the nature of (good) science and education, and the role of students and staff?

About Valentina Tassone

Valentina Tassone is assistant professor at the Education and Learning Sciences group, Wageningen University. She is dedicated to exploring educational design and deep teaching and learning approaches that invite reflexivity about ways of being and doing in the world, an ethos of responsibility and (emotional) empowerment towards socio-ecological sustainability challenges. Her research studies take place in the context of (higher) education, community settings or society at large, and often at their crossroads. She has an interdisciplinary background bridging environmental and sustainability sciences on the one side, with educational, teaching and learning sciences on the other side.

About Anke de Vrieze

Anke de Vrieze is an anthropologist by training. She works for the Centre for Space Place and Society and the Centre for Unusual Collaborations, and is dedicated to shaping rich research and learning environments that nurture curiosity and wonder. Anke is co-founder of Re.imaginary and the WUR Transformative Learning Hub, and currently co-host of Embodilab, an open space to explore and practice different forms of embodied learning. At the Centre for Unusual Collaborations she supports researchers in effectively collaborating across disciplines and domains, and fosters co-learning.