This article was first published on 19-03-2026.
It all started with chocolate, a cup of tea and a good discussion with some friends (also colleagues) about why the senses are barely trained in university education, according to the foreword of the nearly 200-page book Come to Your Senses: a senses-based learning guide. Students look, sure, but what about tasting, smelling, listening and touching? Those are barely touched upon after primary school. A missed opportunity, say Sitzia and co., “because integrating them into education leads to contextual, interdisciplinary and higher-quality learning”. In other words, the more you use your senses, the more you pick up and remember things.
“For example,” says Sitzia, once again busy making cups of tea – the chocolate remains in the drawer. “I give a lecture on polyvocality in museums – i.e., different perspectives on a historical event or subject – at half past eight in the morning. Normally that means lecturing a group of zombies, barely present or awake. And then I tell them we’re going to sing. Not the same song all together, but everyone singing their own song. I count to three and then they begin.”
Grant
The result? Chaos. There are people singing different songs. There are people who refuse to sing. And then there are those who are just in shock, laughs Sitzia. “And then I start my lecture. For example, we might talk about how I’m abusing my power by forcing my students to sing. Or we might conclude that nobody sings the same thing. And so we come to heart of the matter: what does and doesn’t work with polyvocality in museums, and what happens when you don’t listen to each other and everybody just does their own thing. I promise you students won’t forget that lecture.”
Sitzia was awarded the Comenius Leadership Fellowship in 2021, a grant worth €500,000, for her research on sensory learning. She and her team at FASoS did a literature review, and then she and some colleagues from other Maastricht faculties spoke to a number of experts such as dancers, chefs and sommeliers, people who use their senses as part of their jobs. This led to the development of some practical exercises, course material, and even an elective course, Sharpening Your Senses, for medical students (“they have to observe all the time”) and students at her own faculty.
Play with clay
That doesn’t mean that sensory learning is of no use to other people, everybody could benefit from an expanded worldview, emphasises Sitzia. Take, for instance, the time when students were told to mould a self-portrait in clay, blindfolded. In an effort to stimulate creativity and solution-based thinking, but feelings of frustration soon won out. “They were far too perfectionist, they couldn’t surrender themselves. Someone made some toadstools. The clay was moist, smelled like earth. Those toadstools ended up being a perfect example of how a sensory experience can lead to out-of-the-box thinking. That can come in handy when you have to write a thesis, on whatever subject.”
Sitzia published her findings and course material online, then the book followed “to even more effectively show the value of sensory learning”, also to non-academics. In an almost comic book-like fashion, with colourful collages and speech balloons, the reader is shown how to do the exercises step by step, in a book made by teachers and students who followed the elective course and joined other classes within the project.
Go outside
“What has stayed with me is that the learning process is deeply personal, it’s not just about what you know or what you’re studying, but also about how you feel, how you observe things, how you experience them. That goes beyond just writing a paper or listening to a lecturer,” says Lena Orlandini, a FASoS alum and now studying in Paris for a master’s. She is responsible for the exercise ‘Planting the Seeds’ in the book, about the importance of a diverse ecosystem (by sowing a variety of plant species) and the parallel with the universe, which should have enough space to accommodate different points of view and discussion. “Maastricht has always had a different approach to studying, thanks in part to problem-based learning,” adds Johanna Firley, another graduate of FASoS, who has since moved to Vienna. “Learning doesn’t have to happen only in a classroom, it can be beneficial to find other places to do it. Sometimes using your senses can make dry textbooks easier to understand. Go and study in the garden for a change, listen to nature, smell things. It will change your perspective.”
One of the things Sitzia remembers from her research is the students’ answers to the question, what does research smell like? “Like overheated computers and musty libraries, they said. That depressed me a little. It became my mission to convince them that you could learn from a visit to a museum, or by playing with sound. If the university is ready to try it, we could implement sensory learning in a flash, everything we’d need is ready to go.”