CANCELED - Workshop: Participatory teaching as mutual learning processes by Niklas Chimirri

At Roskilde University (RUC), students engage in problem-oriented project learning (PPL) each semester: They formulate their own research project in groups, they implement it, write a research report, and discuss their project’s knowledge insights and limitations at an oral exam. The Higher Education pedagogy at RUC is to support PPL and the students’ own learning processes. While the first semesters are explicitly interdisciplinary, students gradually specialize on specific problems and discipline-related theories. RUC’s pedagogy thus reminds of walking a tightrope, wavering between interdisciplinarity, disciplinarily and metadisciplinarily, between individual students’ and a project groups’ research interests, but also between understanding the university teachers as supporters of students’ project interests and problem formulations vis-à-vis experts in specific fields of research.

The workshop presents some of the potentialities and challenges of the RUC framework and shows how RUC’s psychology program “Social Psychology of Everyday Life” is trying to tackle these challenges through participatory course work and an ideal of the teacher as a fellow learner and participant in the students’ engagements. This ideal is also represented in the selection of psychological methodologies and analytical strategies introduced on Bachelor level, by underlining the unity of a research project’s subject matter, its theoretical apparatus, its methods, and the researcher’s subjectivity. The workshop gives a hands-on insight into the implications of this understanding for formulating and implementing a psychological student research project at RUC, including for evaluating its quality. In addition, another take on participatory teaching as mutual learning is presented that took place in the context of a student workshop on social design at RUC’s Humanistic-Technological Bachelor study program.