At our GDTA Spotlight session on December 14th, Prof. Dr. André Bresges, Executive Director of the Institute for Physics Didactics at the University of Cologne talked about “Teach to Start Up”.
Universities worldwide are shifting their focus on three pillars: Research, Teaching, and Community Service. Especially for public universities, it is important to show how scientific work gives back to the communities that support it. It acknowledges, furthermore, that universities foster growth and well-being for their surrounding communities.
How might a large university become more sensitive and develop insights into the needs of their surrounding community? Two structures within universities come into focus: Startup and teacher education centers. Both structures or agencies are completely separated by background, culture, and personnel. But both typically have an extended community network: Markets and market players, on the one hand, schools and families on the other. And both worlds can be connected by one idea: Design Thinking.
In his talk, he explained the Idea of Colognes’s “Teach to Start-Up!” approach and showed examples of how Design Thinking connects people of the same community, who may be worlds apart, in a structured process.
Prof. Dr. André Bresges studied Physics and Technology Education at University Duisburg, in the center of the “Ruhrgebiet” when it was threatened to become the “rust belt” of Germany. After his PhD, he made postdoctoral studies in neurosciences, where he studied brain activities of young drivers learning to drive a car, and mass behavior of drivers in a traffic jam. His fascination for the collaborative behavior of humans in unfamiliar and complex situations is the mainstay of his research, and explains his interest in Design Thinking as technique to navigate uncertainty.