Speakers
Description
Curiosity, divergent thinking, and exploratory reasoning are not soft skills. Instead, they are essential intellectual capacities for navigating the complex, open-ended problems that all individuals will face in their lives and careers. Yet in most university programs, these habits of mind are either absent or confined to stand-alone courses in critical thinking. Despite being widely recognized as necessary “21st-century” competencies, they are often overlooked in favor of technical skills that offer quicker, more measurable outcomes, a situation more satisfying to both learners and instructors. Yet even routine tasks, such as writing a compelling email, creating an engaging TikTok video, or building a research question from raw data, demand these capabilities. This presentation proposes a cross-disciplinary instructional model that makes curiosity and divergent thinking teachable and assessable through iterative activities, short feedback loops, and reflective metrics, positioning them as core components of a modern curriculum.
| Presentation location | In person (Kumamoto) |
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