WORKSHOP INTERDISCIPLINAR PENTRU UNIVERSITĂŢILE TEHNICE
Interdisciplinar Workshop for Technical Universities

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims at presenting an interdisciplinary workshop for the students in technical universities that is organized by the foreign language teachers in collaboration with the teachers of psychology, philosophy, mathematics and chemistry. The educational purpose of this workshop is to introduce students to the science of the ancient world that, through its profound spiritual values, could help them go beyond their ordinary, materialistic view of the universe and perceive its harmony and more subtle dimensions. Such an attempt is considered to have good chances of developing in learners the intuition, imagination and creativity that are important not only in their present activity but also in their future profession and life in society. The author starts from the context of a unified Europe that has created a new list of priorities for a society predominantly based on knowledge and innovation. The immediate consequence of this phenomenon is the increased preoccupation of governments and institutions for Education and, particularly, for the education of foreign languages. The latest high-level events have thus acknowledged the ever increasing framework of competences of the teaching profession. These abilities are included in a holistic vision where the foreign language teaching is increasingly accepted as a multi- disciplinary, multi- sided activity. Here, teaching involves not only a specific foreign language but also the culture of the country where the language is spoken, with its values and traditions. Therefore, the educational benefit of this workshop would be to awaken in students the perception of the spiritual values created by the fathers of modern science who were inspired by a holistic view of the universe with Man in its centre. The deeper implications might be the stimulation in learners of a taste for self knowledge and also, for accepting the idea that man and nature make up one single Whole. From among the topics suggested, one may choose the mathematics of ancient Greece, the symbolism of numbers in antiquity, the school of Pythagora, the Art of alchemy etc. For the ancient mathematicians, for example, the axioms of science had the value of a truly spiritual doctrine. Alchemy was similarly based on the assumption that there is a certain identity of the essential substance in all things. The message of alchemy is, actually, not very far from the atomic physics asserting that the agent and the object of the experiment interfere and cooperate during experimentation. The teaching materials should be compiled by a team of teachers belonging to the above mentioned disciplines, who are supposed to possess the required expertise on language teaching, on the human psyche, the philosophical context of the respective period and also , on the topics of mathematics and chemistry.

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