Lighthouse Projects

Leuphana offers a liberal education programme called Studium Individuale (B.A.), which gives students the freedom and the responsibility to design their own tailored Bachelor’s curriculum. “Ways of Knowing” is the major-specific methods course of the Studium Individuale – additionally, all students participate in a general introduction on scientific methods in the Leuphana Semester (common first semester for all Bachelor students at Leuphana). Since the Studium Individuale is highly interdisciplinary, allowing students to combine all sorts of courses, “Ways of Knowing” pursues a highly foundational and critical approach to methods: The goal is to learn to “know how to know”, how to ask good questions, understand how different methods will lead to different forms of knowledge, and how to interpret them critically, thus fostering a continually reflective outlook within the pursuit of self-directed learning. The focus lies on instilling the basis of methods and skills which can then be honed and developed through practical application and ongoing experiment, e.g., in reading and interpreting scientific texts, in counting and analysing numerical data, in observing and describing phenomena, etc. For the “Ways of Knowing Lighthouse”, we have developed a set of games, e.g. playful ways to engage with the interpretation of statistics, or a variant of the classic game “Taboo” called “Explain It Like an Acrobat” which challenges students to describe basic objects like tables or refrigerators while forbidding most terms commonly associated with them.

COURSE OWNER: PD Dr. Steffi Hobuss

GAME – DIDAKTIK TEAM: Dr. Johannes Katsarov, Marit Klinge