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in Marseille, a pioneering license


Aerial view of the Aix-Marseille University headquarters, on the Pharo site, in Marseille

Devote a semester to “the color blue”, combining teaching in chemistry, literature and sociology. This is what a handful of Aix-Marseille University professor-researchers dreamed of when they created, in 2012, the science and humanities license.

Study the evolution of blue from Egyptian Antiquity to the present day. Explain how, in those days, a color so rare in its natural state was prepared. Then, take a big step in the history of mankind to evoke the links that were born in medieval times between blue and royalty. Before wondering what it was about literature. Was blue the favorite color of writers? ” Not really “, notes Florence Boulc’h.

With twenty colleagues, this teacher-researcher in chemistry worked for three years to imagine a license that would combine human sciences and exact sciences. After two years of transversal teaching, students specialize in the third year in a discipline, such as mathematics, chemistry, neuroscience, philosophy or teaching.

The idea of ​​this training had germinated during a university movement, in 2009. “During the six months of the strike, we thought a lot about the dream university, with this idea: we didn’t want knowledge to become commodities”, remembers Gaëtan Hagel, teacher-researcher in physics and educational manager of the license. But a question quickly comes to torment the spirits. How to teach both the exact sciences and the humanities without making a splash? The team finds the answer in the writings of Edgar Morin devoted to transdisciplinarity.

“Open-mindedness”

The idea then arises of defining major themes, to cross disciplines and thus “Get them to talk”, explains Gaëtan Hagel. Among these themes, “culture and language” mixes biology, linguistics and philosophy. “Systems of the world” explains the way in which man has viewed the starry sky. About what “Provide students with an open-mindedness that is not found in monodisciplinary training”, defends Florence Boulc’h.

The challenge: to train students to develop a critical look at a discipline – “Enlightened scientists”, as Gaëtan Hagel explains.

The majority have a scientific baccalaureate. The profiles should be more varied with the arrival at the next school year of those who have graduated from the “Bac Blanquer”, which has paved the way for new combinations of scientific and literary specialties.

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