Interdisciplinary Teaching for Creative Minds

Since 2009, the Leonardo Project at RWTH has been dedicated to offering students insights into the diverse disciplines of departments beyond their own course of study, offering creative minds an excellent opportunity for interdisciplinary learning. To this end, the project organizes and designs courses that look at a subject area from at least two different perspectives.

Typically, two professors from different faculties take a look at the subject matter of the course and give contrasting insights into interdisciplinary thinking. In addition, the Leonardo Project gives student initiatives a platform for working on topics that interest students and bring the activities of such initiatives to light. Thanks to the project’s large network, top-level speakers are always willing to participate. In recent years, for example, speakers have included Richard C. Schneider, the longtime correspondent in Israel for broadcaster ARD. Besides instructors from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, colleagues from RWTH's Profile Areas and the diverse professional student initiatives are also involved. The Leonardo Project connects these different University members in order to open up new perspectives for students and allow them an up-close and personal experience of interdisciplinary work.

Topics in Focus

These endeavors have generated a lot of interest among students. As a result, around 1,000 students take one of up to ten different teaching modules on offer each semester. These modules cover a wide range of topics, with lectures such as The Future of Medicine or seminars on the subject of structural change.

Four basic criteria must be fulfilled in the modules:

• The course must be accessible to students of all disciplines and generally, no specific prior knowledge is required.
• All students should experience interdisciplinarity first-hand, i.e. learning by doing.
• Responsibility of science, research, and teaching must be covered in class.
• By taking these modules, students can feel they are able to   work on global challenges and identify creative scope.

This profile is intended to address the challenges that RWTH graduates often face in their careers later on: Nowadays, cooperating and interacting in interdisciplinary teams is common in many professions. Being “thrown in at the deep end” and quickly finding your way around new problems is often part of everyday life. This can only be successfully handled if students learn to appreciate and value other disciplines. These skills are taught and put into practice using examples in the Leonardo courses.

Politics and Culture Are Essential in the Project

The global challenges of our time are not limited to science and technology issues alone; political or cultural issues are just as essential. One example from the past semester is the course Antisemitism and the New Right – Taking Stock and Analyzing the Facts. This course looked at the context behind a political development that moves and concerns many people both inside and outside the University, and identified opportunities for action by individuals and motivated groups. Prominent guest speakers were renowned historian and publicist Volker Weiß – among others, a contributor to “Die Zeit” newspaper – as well as Talya Feldmann, artist and survivor of the antisemitic and racist terrorist attack in Halle in 2019.

Focused Attention and Informed Responses

Co-organizer of the series, Professor Stephan Braese from the European-Jewish Literary and Cultural History Teaching and Research Unit, is also pleased with the success of the course: “Leonardo has provided a unique opportunity to introduce students from all departments at RWTH to the latest scholarly knowledge on the New Right, antisemitism, and racism. Especially in view of right wing extremist positions recently advancing into the center of our society, it was important to discuss these topics with internationally renowned experts – both for their analyses and opportunities for individual engagement.

Individual events are organized beyond the teaching modules. The annual events program of the Charlemagne Prize at RWTH is co-organized by the Leonardo Project. When the prize was awarded to the three Belarusian politicians Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Veronika Tsepkalo, and Maria Kalesnikawa last year, the Leonardo Project called on students to submit questions for a panel discussion with the prizewinners. The best questions were then selected, and the students who submitted them personally addressed them to the prizewinners when they visited RWTH. Hot topic-of-the-moment events continue to be offered on a regular basis. For example, in December 2022, the German-Iranian journalist, author, and physician Gilda Sahebi spoke at a discussion about the current situation in Iran.

Impressions of the 2022 Charlemagne Prizewinners’ Visit to RWTH.

Fotos: Andreas Schmitter

What Is Next?

The well-established formats will be continued while new tasks are also emerging. Since 2020, the Human Technology Center (HumTec) of RWTH has been in charge of the Leonardo Project. Their work is structured around the triad of research, teaching, and responsibility. Therefore, the Leonardo Project, as one of the Center's fields of activity, is taking on an even greater role in integrating the topic of interdisciplinary teaching at RWTH. This is because teaching expertise on describing and solving global challenges – which are always socio-technical – lends itself to be pooled here. The project promotes a culture of supporting and spreading integrated-interdisciplinary thinking.

For this reason, offers are currently being developed for doctoral candidates so they can deal more easily with the tension between discipline-specific qualifications and interdisciplinary problem awareness and use this productively for their own scientific work.

In short: Leonardo has always been and will continue to be involved wherever students who are enthusiastic about shaping a future worth living are needed to deal with complex social challenges. After all, future social challenges require not only highly trained scientists but also courageous and committed citizens.

– Authors: Lennart Göpfert, Sönke Hebing, Stefan Böschen