New teaching and learning concepts for the teaching of sustainability skills

The BTU already maintains cross-faculty modules. What has been missing so far is a common, interdisciplinary orientation framework and a systematic linking of teaching and learning activities. This is where the new project, initiated by Prof. Peer Schmidt, Vice-President for Academic Affairs, and coordinated by Melanie Jaeger-Erben, Professor of Sociology of Technology and the Environment, comes in: "Transformative Teaching and Learning - Conceptual and Structural Foundations for Transformative Skills in Interdisciplinary Real Laboratories."

The two central questions are:

• How can we design and advance the cross-faculty and cross-disciplinary networking of sustainability and transformation-oriented study programmes in terms of concept, content and structure?
• How can we transform interdisciplinary studies into an arena for the promotion of transformative skills?

Over the next five years, scientists from four faculties and twelve departments at the BTU will develop framework concepts and joint teaching programs in the BTU's transformation and sustainability-oriented study programmes. In addition, there will be systematic offers for the promotion of transformative skills within the interdisciplinary General Studies in the future.

Transformative skills are abilities that are expressed in particular in transformation processes, such as the ability to understand transformation processes, to initiate them, and to reflexively shape and accompany them. These skills are trained primarily in applied and transdisciplinary projects and develop in collaborative learning processes.

With this project, the BTU is one of 20 universities that are being funded with 200,000 euros by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft e. V. (Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany) as part of the "Transformative Skills for Sustainability" network initiative. The initiative aims to anchor these skills permanently in university teaching and to reach as many students as possible.