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Crucial Skills 2

Vak
2023-2024

Admission requirements

This course is only available to students of the Honours College GGA.

Maximum number of students: 25.

Description

“Learning without reflection is a waste. Reflection without learning is dangerous.” - Confucius

In this highly interactive course we will study some of the most relevant skills for professionals in the 21st century. This course presumes that professionals with high emotional intelligence and self-awareness are the bound to become leaders of the next decades. Your consciousness on social, societal, individual and environmental levels will be enlarged through this course.

Some profound differences between university and professional life that we will tap into:

  • You will have to work intensively together with people you don’t know well.

  • You will have to present yourself and your results all the time.

  • You will have to be ready to reflect on yourself and others.

  • Nobody is responsible for your own development and well-being but you.

  • You will never have a clear idea how to get a good grade, since nobody is grading you and there are no assessment guidelines.

  • You will always be uncertain about the relevance and impact of your projects and task

Learning in this course is done by a combination of practising and reflection called experiental learning.

The course will be taught by Jacob Koolstra, you and all your fellow students. Each theme will partly be covered by Jacob and partly by teaching groups existing of students that are guided by Jacob.

After the lecture the teaching groups will get adequate and constructive feedback from their audience.

Course objectives

Objectives of the course are:

  • Practice a growth mindset by identifying continuous potential for personal development

  • Examine core values and identify a personal mission statement

  • Recognize the way that communication and presentation are mutually inclusive

  • Apply personal and theoretical reflection in writing

  • Practice how to generate new perspectives on conventional wisdom to discover possibilities, creative thinking

  • Connect traditional to new notions of value

Skills
Oral communication – presenting – project-based working – societal awareness – reflecting – resilience

Timetable

On the right side of the programme front page of the studyguide you will find links to the website and timetables, uSis and Brightspace.

Mode of instruction

Learning in this course is done by a combination of practising and reflection called experiental learning.
The course will be taught by Jacob Koolstra. Each theme will partly be covered by Jacob and partly by teaching groups existing of students that are guided by Jacob.
After the lecture the teaching groups will get adequate and constructive feedback from their audience.
Lectures will have the following topics:
Introduction and self-awareness (1); Communication (2);
Time management (3); Handling stress (4); Creativity and Innovation (5); Critique on the workfloor (6); Future Lookout (7)

This course is worth 5 ECTS, which means the total course load equals 140 hours.

Contact hours: 21
Self-study (including group work, assignments and literature): 119

  • Seminars: 7 seminars of 3 hours (participation is mandatory)

  • Preparation by teaching group: 15 hours per group

  • Literature reading: 1 hours/week

  • Preparational work: 2 hours/week

  • Essay Assignments: 1 hours per week

  • Reflection: 1 hours per week

Assessment method

The assessment methods will look as follows; deadline is dl.

  • 25% autobiography (pass/fail basis)

  • 25% future outlook (pass/fail basis)

  • 20% writing reflective blogpost (pass/fail basis)

  • 30% workshop (pass/fail basis)

X Option 1: Students could only pass this course after passing all partial exams.

Reading list

  • Arendt, H. (1987). Labor, Work, Action. In: Bernauer, S.J.J.W. (eds) Amor Mundi. Boston College Studies in Philosophy, vol 26. Dordrecht: Springer

  • Covey, S., (1989), The 7 habits of Highly effective people, Free Press.

  • Han, B., (2015), The Burnout Society, Standford: Stanford University Press.

  • Puett M., & C. Gross-Loh, (2017), Path: A new way to think about everything, Penguin books: New York.

  • Reynolds, A., (2006), “Zima Blue”. In: Reynolds. A., Zima Blue & Other Stories. Nightshade Books: San Fransisco.

  • Seneca, L. A., (2004), On the shortness of life, Penguin books: New York.

  • Voice, P., (2014), “Labour, Work, Action” In: Hayden, P., (eds) Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts. (p. 36-51) Rouledge: Londen.

Registration

GGA coordinator/administration will take care of enrolment.

Please note: students are not required to register through uSis for this class. Your registration will be done centrally after successful completion of the class.

Contact

Annette Righolt Jacob Koolstra

Remarks