Interdisciplinary Thinking
Students explore the concept of cultural evolution by comparing it to genetic evolution based on a number of concepts, and explore why cultural evolution is so important in our species.
Cultural evolution (lesson plan) Read More »
A reading text about the challenges of life in groups and how groups across biology have found ways to solve these challenges.
Life in groups and conflict resolution Read More »
Behavioral science is increasingly considered foundational for addressing various sustainable development challenges. Behavioral change and action competence have also become important goals in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), complementing and interacting with other educational goals such as the development of sustainability-relevant knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. We argue that these interconnected learning goals of ESD can be advanced by integrating interdisciplinary behavioral science concepts, methods, and insights into the design of curricula, learning environments, and processes for participatory whole-school approaches. Specifically, we highlight the role of metacognitive competency in self-directed individual and collective behavior change and we present our educational design concept for teaching human behavior as an interdisciplinary theme in ESD.
A lesson collection for the Human Behavior & Sustainable Development module.
Human Behavior & Sustainable Development Read More »
Materials for constructing causal maps about the evolution of human traits on the blackboard
Blackboard materials: Causal maps on human evolution Read More »
Human intelligence seems to be a social, more than merely an individual phenomenon. What can we learn from comparing human societies to human brains?
Human Societies as Collective Brains Read More »
This review and commentary on psychologist Edward Wasserman’s As if By Design provides a brief overview of the core argument from Wasserman, and discusses the implications for evolution science educators and students.
Evolutionary concepts are used, with varying and arguable degrees of scientific utility, across a wide range of disciplines. This contribution explores how understanding the structures of knowledge, or the organization of facts and generalizations in science, cognition, and education, may help illuminate the educational potential and evidence-informed pedagogical practices appropriate for teaching about the interdisciplinary application of evolutionary concepts.
OpenEvo is an educational innovation project from the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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