TNDY 407T - Experiencing Sustainability: Experiments in the Transdisciplinary Collaboratory

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them: the oft-cited Einstein quote has been widely used in the field of sustainability, a complex problem unto itself. While there has been no lack of drive to improve our lives on this planet, the ways we have approached sustainability have not appropriately addressed this complexity in the past, bringing us to a critical place in the present. There is a need to interpret, measure and share in how we experience sustainability from diverse perspectives in order to elevate it beyond a buzzword. This course will bring together a riot of students from different backgrounds with faculty from the neurosciences, environmental sciences, and performing arts to creatively imagine the look, feel, sound and smell of a more sustainable world. Together, we will use science, performance, history, etc. to better understand and imagine the world and its future. All course participants, including faculty and guests, will be co-learners in this environment. Ultimately, the course will create a different awareness around sustainability as well as new tools to advance the field. Specifically, the course will examine the benefits and limitations of past and current siloed approaches, and we will work with students to expand on concepts of inquiry and how they can align with their own values, individually and collaboratively, to create more holistic experiences around ‘getting it’. Practices would include: contemplative pedagogy’s contribution of first-person inquiry, and how to bring it into conversation with second- and third-person inquiry that are typically more valorized in academia, performance and activated spectatorship, transdisciplinary re-framing, systems-level analysis, complexity theory, action research and applied research, and artistic/scientific integration. he course is set up to be activity- and experience-based. In addition to some didactic and theoretical approaches, every class session will involve students “breaking out” in group work. It is designed to be transformative in getting students to think differently about their academic careers, their relationships with each other, and their place in co-creating our future world. Most of the ‘a-ha’ moments are structured to emerge from collaborative projects trying out the ideas discussed in class.
Units: 4
Course Type: Seminar