Global Mindsets

Project Goal:

Create teaching methods and environments where young minds can explore the causes of global problems and use their creativity to come up with proposals for solutions.

Project Duration and Place:

The project lasted for four weeks, and it unfolded once a week in the International class at Halvorsminde efterskole.

Project Structure

First Lesson: We, The Storytellers…

We took a look at the political situation in Venezuela and France, where we discussed the role of intersubjective realities in shaping political decisions. The students were encouraged to find the links between the current problems and how these problems developed from certain biases and truncated truths in the national stories explored.

Second Lesson: The Stories of The River

We looked into India’s pollution problem with regards to its rivers. We watched a documentary about the Yamuna river, and then the students were encouraged to come up with questions that could lead them to potential solutions to this complex problem. The lesson’s core message was the importance of asking the right questions when it comes to tackling complex problems.

Third Lesson: Building Bridges over Biases

The students were encouraged to take a look at the questions they wrote in the previous class, and after a short lesson about cognitive biases, the students had to build a bridge between their questions and a potential bias that can hold the answer. This exercise trained the students to more easily spot certain judgemental errors when it comes to our environmental behaviour.

Fourth Lesson: Faulty Companies

In the last lesson, the focus was shifted towards the entrepreneurial sphere, where we tried out a game that focuses on spotting biases in decision-making in a business setting. The students had the chance to come up with a very simplistic business design of their choice that was subjected to certain fictional scenarios, where the students, as leaders of their organisation, had to choose between two decisions based on biases.