Heterogeneity and university teaching and learning (2017-2021)

According to its Strategic Guidelines 2025, the FHNW intends to take the increasing diversity of students into account in the design of its degree programmes and to promote diversity competence in all areas of its activities.

The project, carried out as part of the FHNW Equal Opportunities Action Plan, aims at developing, implementing and evaluating further education learning environments based on concepts of “critical diversity literacy”. Rather than driving for an instrumental understanding of diversity competences (in the sense of tools and tips for “dealing with diversity”), our aim is to pursue an approach of critical (self-)reflection. We wish to render visible the social constructions of reception and production of difference in the context of university teaching through specific exchange formats (we call them “contact zones”). Not only disadvantages but also privileges are brought to attention and scrutinized in a process which uses a repertoire of methods applied in art and theatre education, in order to generate new pathways to become active.

The developmental work is realized in a collective search movement. The central challenge is to conceptualize and design a specific space in which diverse interactions between persons – differently involved and situated in the power structures of the university – become possible. In these exchange situations, the various experiences of belonging and unbelonging are brought to a critical-performative reading practice. We try to understand the function of a system – the way a university grants or blocks access, supports or prevents careers, operates intersectional discrimination and allocates and distributes social opportunities and privileges.

The design of these workshops – an exciting process involving a team over an extended period – creates the conditions for a critical-performative reading practice. The generated scenarios, formats and further education concepts are critically reflected by colleagues who, as “critical friends”, provide feedback that enriches the concepts and makes them productive for further work contexts.

The participants in the “ateliers” are temporarily released from the constraints and obligations of their everyday lives. They enter a space in which uncertainties and open-ended encounters can be explored. Learning to read begins here with the distancing from or inserting doubt into the institutionally familiar and leads to the exploration of the university’s often unseen mechanisms and logics.

You can find out more under Ateliers.