Mid Sweden University

In the early 1980s an interdisciplinary and sustainability oriented education program started at the former university college in Östersund, located in the Mid Sweden mountain region. The founder of the program, Dr. Lars Thofelt, recognized the need for students to develop skills to be driving forces in the change societies needed for a more sustainable direction, and developed a pedagogy suitable for this. Thofelt’s pedagogic ideas had a main focus in helping students develop their inherent capabilities of solving problems and overcome obstacles in an as independent and entrepreneurial way as possible. This paper describes some of the interdisciplinary teaching approaches developed by Dr. Thofelt, and the ideas behind them. 

Dr. Lars Thofelt had several new, innovative and challenging ideas regarding teaching, at least for the time when he used them. Part of them have become more common in the Swedish school system under labels as “Problem based learning” and “Transformative learning”. 

Key element in Dr. Thofelts pedagogic legacy is to push the students to a self-propelled learning behavior rather than traditional teaching. Examples how to reach this goal are: 1) not too easily provide the students with answers will develop their problem solving skills, 2) doing-before-reading teaching is more time consuming but seem to give deeper knowledge, 3)  interdisciplinary teaching will in the long run benefit from having the interdisciplinary team within the department, rather than as a conglomerate of several departments.