Leuphana Semester at College

Opening Week

The Leuphana Semester starts with an Opening Week. The Opening Week is simultaneously a practical workshop and a forum for ideas. During Opening Week, through your first academic work on a social project – under the supervision of relevant specialists – as well as through cooperation with other first semester students, you gain an impression of the manner in which scientific work, social practice and responsibility and general educational goals are combined at Leuphana College.

This module explores issues concerning the conditions of social coexistence through a questioning observation of both historical developments and present-day social conditions. Through engaging with specific text and visual media, students are introduced to the ways in which the human sciences and cultural analysis problematise issues, thus familiarizing them with categories of interdisciplinary reflection.

The module topic is presented in a joint forum event in overviews and at the same time continued in more depth through contributions from the individual seminars. The forum event is a market for discussions, differences and consensus, but above all it is a place for all first semester students to get to know one another and exchange views on the module topic in debates.

The module finishes with a public panel discussion with renowned guests from science and culture. Rüdiger Safranski, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Richard David Precht and Uwe Jean Heuser have been guests at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg college in the past.

This module gives you the opportunity to get an insight into the responsibility of research for society from an interdisciplinary perspective.Students deal with fundamental questions of responsible action in the 21st century and concretize this in the context of sustainable development in the digital age, also against the background of the role of science in shaping change processes.

A course of lectures and the accompanying tutorials set out the content framework for the module. They introduce the complex topic of sustainable development and furnish you with the initial tools so that you are able to participate in interdisciplinary global transformation research. In the course of lectures, you encounter lecturers who provide you with differing perspectives – switching between individual specialist fields and civic practice. In interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project work, the analyze questions from the sustainability discourse and present the results at the conference week. Above that they learn the basics of programming and data analysis and work on the development of a data literacy.

The conference week invites you to discuss the possibilities and limits of shaping the future with guests from the fields of politics, science and civil society.

In the interdisciplinary module methologies I, you develop qualitative and quantitative basics based on scientific theory and scientific history with the other students in your year. You will also be able to use the skills you gain from this in the other modules in the first semester as well as in your continuing studies.

What is science? This question is addressed in a lecture and in-depth seminar. Scientific ways of thinking and practices as well as approaches to and methods of systematic knowledge acquisition are also presented and critically discussed. In the process, you get to know significant philosophers of science such as Popper, Kuhn or Lakatos and grapple with the corresponding theories and methods.

You explore a variety of viewpoints and gain insights into the various fundamental problems and approaches within science.

In the subject-specific module methodologies II module, you learn which methods you have to reliably master in your specialist discipline. As a result, you already get an overview of the subject-specific methods and practise their application at the same time in the first semester.

Module: Introduction to the discipline

This module is an introduction to the content in your specialist discipline. You acquire your first scientific skills in your chosen main subject in lectures and seminars.

As a result, you acquire insight into your specialist field during the course of the first semester and get an overview of the related subject areas. At the same time you learn how to apply the methods and skills acquired during the Leuphana Semester to your subject area.