Crossing boundaries by living your question

As part of my PhD, we have created space for existential questions of students within the Bachelor Interdisciplinary Social Science of the University of Amsterdam. We have done this within the tutor meetings in the first year of the bachelor. We have created 4 tutor meetings, in three iterative cycles (academic years) using Reflective Interactive Design approach (RIO in Dutch) (Bos & Grin, 2012), thereby integrating students and teachers in the design process. Within the bachelor, students get to know 5 different social disciplines, and to cross the boundaries between these disciplines, students have two integration tutorials, in which they work on a societal challenge. The existential questions can cross boundaries between their high school experience and the academic world, between themselves and the outside world, between the different disciplines, and between where they are now and want to be in the future. University, is already a place full of challenges and anxieties, where students have to discover themselves and the world (Barnett, 2007). The multi crisis in which we live, makes university an even more scary place for students, as they get to know how severe the crisis really is, leading to existential threats (Saeverot, 2021). Existential questions help to incorporate the knowledge on an emotional level, thereby overcoming the unconscious desire not to know (Alcorn, 2013). Especially existential questions can have this role, as these questions grab you and keep you busy, and if students connect to the question, engage with the question, they become the questions and perceive the world from the perspective of the question. Here the questions integrates all the different experiences (Gadamer, 2013, p. 370).
Understanding the concept of existential questions is already a boundary crossing experience for most students and teachers. From the neoliberal picture of happiness (Adams et al., 2019), we perceive existential questions as being too big and scary, and related to crisis and therapy. This is a self-reinforcing mechanism, as we thus try to stay away from these questions, thereby neglecting our fears and anxiety till the point we cannot neglect these anymore, and have to face them in the existential crisis. And the chance increases, when neglected, these anxieties transform into an anxiety disorder (May, 1955). While our anxiety is also a door to self-knowledge (Kierkegaard, 1995). Especially students, being in the phase of their emerging adulthood (Arnet, 2006), have naturally all kinds of existential questions, like “Where, why and with whom will I dwell, love, and work?” (Parks, 2019, p. 94). Another boundary comes with living these questions, as this is the only way to find meaningful answers (ibid), which we have forgotten how to do so, in era full of technology only focusing on knowledge and answers.
The boundary I would like to cross in a common discussion, is how to create space for these existential questions of students within higher education. First, by exploring each other’s questions members feel as the most urgent ones, thereby using worksheets with helping questions based on the model of Dynamic Judgement formation (Broek et al., 2014). From this experience, I would like to start a group discussion based on the concrete examples of education, members working in. Starting with identifying the different boundaries group members experience within their own education. As a guideline, I will use the design principles we have developed to create space for existential questions:

Design principles
How do you conduct the conversation?
1a. Connect to the student's questions and/or need
1b. Encourage student to make space for their own questions.
2. As a tutor, reflect on areas of tension between role of tutor and role of teacher
On anchoring the student in themselves:
3. Search for underlying motivations.
4. Helping student develop personal and genuine relationship to study
About the student's connection to the world
5. Connecting with other students
6. Feeling at home in the study
7. Learning to deal with the sometimes difficult and painful outside world
What is your existential question?
8. Living out your questions





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