Admission requirements
None.
Description
Global Challenges: Understanding is the first signature Global Challenges course first-year students take at LUC. It aims to help you think and talk about global challenges as fundamentally complex, multi-level, multi-layered, interdisciplinary and dynamic problems that do not have -neat ‘solutions’. Instead, these challenges can only be engaged with continuously, in a conversation or debate between people with different experiences of the problem, different values, and different kinds of positions and forms of expertise. Becoming a Global Citizen requires you to find your own way of understanding, and later engaging, with these challenges.
The course consists of two parts, each focused on its own challenge: Peace (block 1) and Planetary Wellbeing (block 2). To foreground the need for interdisciplinary conversation, each block is centred on a proposition that captures key elements of the intellectual conversations pertinent to these global challenges. You learn about the challenges through engagement with these propositions, not only acquiring relevant content knowledge, but also essential intellectual and citizenship skills. The Global Citizenship portfolio, integrated throughout the entire first-year programme, allow you to keep track of your intellectual and personal development.
Course Objectives
Content
Gain insight into the importance, value, and limits of liberal arts and sciences education and global citizenship.
Gain a critical understanding of different ways of seeing and engaging with the global challenges of peace and planetary wellbeing.
Gain an understanding of specific frameworks for interdisciplinary research, including systems and complexity thinking.
Understand, explain, and apply core concepts in the study of peace and planetary wellbeing to specific case studies.
Skills
- Research, develop and defend coherent well-evidenced and well-reasoned arguments supporting different positions on the Global Challenge debates in:
- Written essay
- Oral pitches
- Conversation
- Debate
- Reflection
Timetable
Timetables for courses offered at Leiden University College in 2025-2026 will be published on this page of the e-Prospectus.
Mode of instruction
TBA
Assessment Method
Quizzes: 30%
Exam: 40%
Portfolio: 30%
Reading list
TBA
Registration
Courses offered at Leiden University College (LUC) are usually only open to LUC students and LUC exchange students. Leiden University students who participate in one of the university’s Honours tracks or programmes may register for one LUC course, if availability permits. Registration is coordinated by the Education Coordinator, course.administration@luc.leidenuniv.nl.
Contact
Dr. David Ehrhardt, d.w.l.ehrhardt@luc.leidenuniv.nl (Block 1)
Dr. Achim Häger, a.hager@luc.leidenuniv.nl (Block 2)
Remarks
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