Author: Roger Teeuwen

The Erasmus+ team fully and deeply embraces:
– matters of concern
– collaboration
– commitment (conflict)

All partners agree to focus on:
A. “Innovative Transdisciplinary framework”; [working definition]
Transdisciplinarity, in this approach, is a context- and issue-specific combination of scientific knowledge, artistic knowledge and societal knowledge. Students are trained in working with these different kinds of knowledge domains. In addition, they become aware of what they as students – within a specific discipline or domain – can contribute to addressing complex societal concerns.

B. Refocus of ‘Stakeholder code of conduct’ to “Codes/matters of concern/conflicts”; Concerns/conflicts as a fruitful intersection and potential learning space.

C. “Team teaching approach” in which unlearning is the key focus and collaboration, composition, commitment (conflict), concerns are fully integrated.

D. “Re-imagination of the learning space”, test sites for boundary crossing.

Deliverables project:
E. The proposed outcome and aim of the project is a “Tuning document for Transdisciplinary Education combining Arts & Sciences” (note, an additional ‘Toolbox’ could be a means to ensure the translation of the tuning document to practice). For each outcome a tuning document will be composed.

F. All adaptable for specific use in partner contexts, open enough to customize. The adaptation takes place within each institution. So, falls outside the Erasmus+ project.

RASL (Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab) Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership

September 2019 – June 2022

RASL, the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (Willem de Kooning Academy University of Applied Sciences, Codarts, Erasmus University), will collaborate in this Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership project. Strategic Partnerships are transnational projects designed to develop and share innovative practices and promote cooperation, peer learning, and exchanges of experiences.

The consortium consist of RASL; the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), Technological University Dublin; Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest; Roskilde University; and the Master Transdisciplinary Practices at Zurich University of the Arts.

In this project the consortium will conduct research in Transdisciplinary learning in Arts & Sciences through the development of four elements (Intellectual Outputs):

• Transdisciplinary Education Methods; to arrange the process of multi-stakeholder collaboration and to stimulate mutual understanding.

• Stakeholder Code of Conduct (which was immediately altered to Code of Conflict); in order to ensure non-hierarchical collaboration processes.

• Transdisciplinary Teacher Programme; developed to train teachers how to teach a Transdisciplinary approach.

• A modular Transdisciplinary Student Programme.

And will will take place in Rotterdam (November 2020, January 2021, June 2022), Budapest (March 2020, June 2021), Dublin (September 2020), Zurich (November 2020) and Roskilde (November 2021).

Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab 

Is an open transdisciplinary collective of humans and non-humans coming from different worlds, institutions and walks of life, who together imagine alternative futures through collaborative knowledge invention. And thereby functions as ‘origamigram’. We fold, refold, unfold education and research into one other over again to generate a multitude of transdisciplinary compositions.

Why did RASL come into being? 

1. Wicked problems: There is a strong need for 21st century education to be recalibrated to be able to address the complex concerns of current and future times. 

2. From (Inter) Disciplinary to Transdisciplinary: Whereas traditional approaches are related to the transfer of (disciplinary) knowledge and interdisciplinary education aims for connecting knowledge, transdisciplinary education focusses on knowledge creation. 

3. Transdisciplinary practices: Context and issue specific compositions using 

scientific, artistic and societal knowledge focusing on the creation of new knowledges. 

4. Equality: Actors that are either excluded from conventional problem solving, or who merely appear as objects of research, will actively participate as equal research partners.

5. Institutions have to respond collaboratively: The combination of Arts & Sciences (A&S), participatory approach, the use of imagination and the creation of knowledge of what could happen in the future (new perspectives on existing status quo), dissolving the disciplinary boundaries and boundaries in Higher Education.  

What do we do?

RASL offers Bachelor Double Degrees, a Bachelor Transdisciplinary Minor (part of a Comenius Leadership Fellow project), collaborative Research, PhD research, RASL publications (publications.rasl.nu), and events. In these activities we explore and learn in transdisciplinary ways in which wicked problems do not become solved but are transformed into matters of concern. 

RASL generates tools, techniques and tactics that can: 

… open experimental research and learning environments to create new forms of knowledge.

… push us to ask questions differently.

… rethink and recompose our conceptual frameworks. 

… cultivate a different art of noticing.

… make ethological propositions of opening up other modes of living together on a damaged planet.

How?

We work from a not-having-an-idea to imagine alternative temporalities and materialize them through performance, improvisation, storytelling, creating new ecologies of value.

And do not think in linear ways:

• Affirm the potentiality of the present

• Create aesthetic enunciations of the futures

• Rewrite institutional memories

We meet in the speculative middle (not consensus but diversifying perspectives).

And emphasize the importance of fertile conditions prior to transdisciplinary research (care, commitment and courage).