Topic 2b. Introduce complexity, transdisciplinarity and uncertainty in the curriculum, towards a holistic vision of reality.

Topic 2. Table of contents Curricular innovation Go beyond educating professionals to educating citizens with ethical awareness and civic commitment. [+] Introduce complexity, transdisciplinarity and uncertainty in the curriculum, towards a holistic vision of reality. Educating for glocality, democracy and interculturality. [+] Training of trainers. [+] Links with previous levels of education. [+]

Acceptance of the complexity of reality implies the interdependence of areas of knowledge in a real interdisciplinary approach of education.

Transdisciplinarity demands a holistic epistemological paradigm. Understanding complexity and tackling uncertainty involves three interconnections of knowledge: one that blurs the boundaries between related scientific fields; one that achieves the same for the boundaries between techno-scientific fields and human and social areas; and one that increases the permeability between different sources of knowledge.

This calls for higher education to:

• Take over the global-local relation. People need to gradually become world citizens without losing touch with their roots and continuing to play an active part in the life of their nation and their local community. Cosmopolitanism arises when the local contexts of interpretation are transformed in light of the encounter with the global.
• Prepare people to learn how to learn, to learn to manage in a vast and complex universe of information from multiple sources, and with a capacity for discrimination when working with information and knowledge, enabling them to self-manage lifelong learning.
• Integrate knowledge from diverse backgrounds (community-based research, indigenous knowledge, multicultural approaches). Open the current hegemony of developed north worldview to a dialogue with other worldviews aiming to find new balance, understanding and enrichment between cultures.
Transcend disciplines towards a complex thinking, incorporating cross-disciplinary curriculum contents. Make explicit the interconnection between human, social, environmental and economic problems at all scales.

• Make an explicitly holistic approach, having a waste framework in which contents must be situated. Facilitating understanding and visualization of the multi-dimensional reality as well as the mutual implications of all actions and actors on the planet.
• Actualize academic content in curricula, adapting them to the scientific advances of recent years, which introduce new paradigmatic approaches to reality, in a wide range of disciplines.

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