Abstract

Although Italy has participated in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) since its very beginning, higher education at Italian universities is still being pursued through a top-down didactic approach and a quality assurance system that seem to contradict the principles of student-centred learning and teaching. However, these are foundational within the educational program of the EHEA, as they foster students’ initiative and self-commitment both along their curricular pathways and later on in life.

My presentation will focus on how I have searched to counterbalance the constraints of monologue lecture style in the last three academic years by organizing workshops in the second part of my course schedules. My aim has been to give my course attendants the opportunity to take on an active role according to the contents and aims of the course, and, in two of the workshops, to participate in the very process of creating the course program or co-designing a fragmentology research project. To set up the three workshops, a designer from the Oslo University (Andrea Alessandro Gasparini) and I have created an interdisciplinary framework where design thinking and philology bridge together through the principle of empathy. This principle is at the core of both domains. I will be presenting the framework, the events, and the insights from them.

Alessandra Molinari

Alessandra Molinari is a research fellow for Germanic Philology at the University of Urbino. Her research interests include theoretical issues (e.g. how to define disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity) and practical ones (how to design a research project) within the domains of Medieval philology, cultural heritage, and learning sciences. Currently, she is leading the digital fragmentology project Textus invisibilis.