- Basic (elementary) understanding of how a transdisciplinary analysis of a complex challenge at the crossroads of society, technology, and science goes about.
- Basic understanding of what it means to have a perspective on a problem, including how a perspective can be analysed or actively adopted to see new aspects of the problem.
- Intermediate understanding of how ethical issues emerge in developing innovative technological solutions to these challenges.
- Intermediate understanding of which decisions in a research project can have broader consequences.
- Basic (elementary) understanding of how a societal challenge can be turned into an interdisciplinary research project.
- Intermediate understanding of how to organize a multi-disciplinary team on a CBR/L project.
- Communication skills (writing, speaking, listening, presenting) in a multidisciplinary team collaborating on a societal challenge.
- Some hands-on experience with basic research skills for conducting inter-and transdisciplinary research, such as basic understanding of “what a discipline is” (including the role of disciplinary perspectives), research methodologies (including problem-definition and utilizing scientific results), conceptual modelling, and measurement and data processing in different disciplines.
- Some hands-on experience with critical thinking, for example, by having practiced asking interrogative questions and recognizing weaknesses or underlying (hidden) assumptions in scientific arguments.
- Some hands-on experience with creative thinking, for example, by practicing to adopt new perspectives (e.g., a concept) on a problem
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The CBR/L project will be divided into three phases. In the transdisciplinary research phase, the challenge is critically analysed and investigated in a broader societal context. Concepts and theories from social sciences and the humanities (including ethics) are used as perspectives on the challenge, next to all kinds of relevant empirical and experiential knowledge. Workshops will be provided to facilitate different relevant aspects in this phase (like team-building, transdisciplinary analysis, project management, and content knowledge about the challenge). After this, all students will write a personal development plan (PDP), for which workshops will be provided. The second phase consists of interdisciplinary research. Members of the multidisciplinary team formulate research questions concerning the chosen part-problems of the challenge (which result from phase 1) and try to think of possible solutions from relevant disciplinary perspectives. Different disciplinary perspectives will ‘see’ different research questions and different kinds of solutions to the problem. Each student can choose their own topic of interest on which they conduct interdisciplinary research as a contribution to the CBL project – therein, their own interests are guiding, not the intended outcome of the project. In the final phase, the team members will have to make relevant connections between their results in phase 2 and in view of the findings in phase 1. The deliverables can be reports but also other media, or a proto-type.
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