Environmental Studies Certificate Program (EN)
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Building Bridges between Natural and Social Sciences and the Humanities

How can we improve the communication?

12.08.2020

By Hugo Enrique Reyes Aldana

Supervisor Dr. Gesa Lüdecke

Our societies are currently facing many distinct challenges influenced by multiple factors, such as global and local politics, social movements, and natural systems. Addressing these problems requires skill-sets that can connect and communicate the diverse elements involved in a particular challenge or phenomenon, whether political, societal, natural, or most often a combination of these. However, finding individuals with these skills and knowledge is not simple, especially considering the nature of most education systems in focusing on academic and vocational specialism. Although adding to the challenge, this can also be seen as a hopeful opportunity.


Interdisciplinarity can counter the issue of over-specialism and thereby offer effective solutions to the challenges societies are facing. Creating dialogues between people from different backgrounds such as the natural and social sciences and the humanities, in order to to develop ideas together, could generate higher-impact changes in societal, political, and natural spheres.


One example of this type of interdisciplinarity in practice is the Rachel Carson Center. In particular, the Environmental Studies Certificate Program (ESCP) invites students from all programs in Munich’s Universities to acquire the tools necessary to approach present and future challenges. The question remains: with so many differing perspectives and languages, how can effective dialogues be enabled?


This is the question we intended to answer in a two-hour workshop. Students from the ESCP were invited to participate, all of them coming from a very wide range of disciplines such as Linguistics, Physics, Anthropology, Biology, Environmental Sciences, and Theology, to name a just few. The main focus was how to communicate the relevance of biological and ecological phenomena to issues related to human activities. During the workshop, online interactive educational tools were applied, with a focus on basic knowledge of biology and ecology, for topics that have been frequently portrayed in general discussions on issues such as extinctions, GMOs, management of natural resources, and societal changes. The most important part of the workshop was the discussion, where all participants had the opportunity to share their concerns, ideas, opinions, and possible solutions to the problem of communicating scientific knowledge to other domains of society in a way that is effective and promotes positive outcomes.

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Keywords that were mentioned when the participants were asked: "Which difficulties do you have when facing environmental issues?"

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Keywords that were mentioned when the participants were asked: "What is 'environment' for you?"

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At the end of the workshop, the participants were asked to share their remarks on the overall problems linking society and environmental science and these are some of the most mentioned keywords.


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