Seminar: Grete Arro

Conceptual change - what it is and how it relates to environmental consciousness and behaviors?

Our systemic knowledge about the world has never been so thorough; yet human behaviour, on individual and societal scale, has never been so damaging to the systems that keep us alive. How psychology could answer to that paradox? (Do you think, that I know that?! No! But I have some hypotheses.) In the seminar, we try to conceptualize, what might be the reasons for the wide-scale environmentally careless behaviour; that leads us to the question, what a systemic model of the relevant aspects of environmentally conscious thinking and behaviour could look like; and why deep conceptual understanding - or conceptual change - might be one of the important aspects in that model. Hopefully we also have time to look at the evidence that demonstrate, how to elicit conceptual change in different groups of learners.

Dr. Grete Arro (Tallinna Ülikool/Tallinn University)