Training of Embodied Critical Understanding (TECU) strives to foster critical, motivated engagement and the skill of fruitful debate by 3 yearlong trainings for students/researchers in which 7 universities cooperate. TECU is a European innovation of educators/researchers responding to a threefold crisis: breakthroughs of AI (chatGPT) impacting student engagement; social media echo-chambers/polarisation endangering democratic dialogue; climate change-stuckness impacting students mental health.