An Eco-Logical Adventure – course for Professors and other staff

TU Delft expects their students to become well-rounded engineers; not just as professionals but also as humans living and working in this current complex and often challenging society. ‘The Reflective Engineer’, the honours specialisation ‘Awareness and Culture’, and the Study Climate program are just a few examples of initiatives that TU Delft started to ensure the wellbeing and  personal development of our students.

However, change starts at the stem, not the leaves. If we seek for change that lasts, we have to adjust as teachers, reflect on our responsibility as guides, and develop methods to inspire our students.

The ten-week course An Eco-Logical Adventure, for Professors, other teaching staff and interested support staff, is aimed at developing reflective skills from a focus on personal development. 

The title of this course refers to Gregory Bateson’s book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. His thesis implies that the conscious and the unconscious mind are connected with each other, with other parts of the human body, and with the environment (living as well as non-living); a system of systems nested inside each other. The mind, and therefore our thinking, cannot be seen as isolated from our environment. One of the consequences of his thesis is that new ideas are the result of collective and transdisciplinary thinking. This requires a form of inquiry that is not restricted to a single discipline, uses a meta-paradigmatic approach, follows creative, contextualizing, and connective thinking, and is rigorous as well as imaginative. The course will be an adventure, that is, a wonderful, strange, risky and uncertain journey that leads to new perspectives. It aims to clarify the process of transformative learning and teaching that lies at the heart of the Art Embedded Learning honours programme. The process involves participants becoming aware of their current thinking and consequent positions. This includes a number of individual and group stages: criticising existing assumptions and presuppositions, assessing alternative views, deciding to reject an old perspective or view in favour of a new one, or making a synthesis of old and new. This is expected to result in more justified beliefs to guide future action. 

Structure & Contents

The programme includes the ten steps of the transformative process, as formulated by Jack Mezirow (1978, 1991): 

1. Disorienting dilemma 
2. Critical reflection on assumptions 
3. Recognized discontent shared 
4. Explored new roles 
5. Self-examination with feelings of guilt or shame 
6. Tried on new role 
7. Planned course of action 
8. Acquired knowledge/skills to implement plan 
9. Built competence/confidence 
10. Reintegrated to life 

The participants follow all or at least most of these steps, although not necessarily in this exact order. Through music, dance, arts, theatre and unexpected events, teachers will have similar experiences as their students who are following the honours programme. The experiences are inspired by the following themes, among others: 

1. Emotion. 
2. Limits. 
3. Intuition. 
4. Ignorance/Uncertainty. 
5. Reflection/Thinking. 
6. Questions. 
7. Competition vs Collaboration. 
8. Failure. 
9. Privacy. 
10. Inner drive. 
11. Retrospective; Transformative Learning and Teaching. This will be the theme of the final sessions. 

Participants are required to keep a logbook, in which they report on their experiences, their assumptions and how these change during the course, their reflections, and how they will integrate their new insights into their professional and personal lives. They will then incorporate these considerations into an essay that they will hand in a fortnight after the end of the course and which, if of sufficient quality, will entitle them to a certificate.