Psychological skills for addressing the climate crisis and contemporary civilization challenges 2500-PL-PS-FO-50

"The course aims to deepen students' understanding of contemporary challenges to civilization, which provide important context for the work of future psychologists as practitioners and researchers. Key challenges of modern civilization, such as the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, social crises rooted in inequality, migration, and conflict, challenges related to the development of new technologies—including issues of disinformation and political polarization linked to media, social media, and emerging technologies—the transformation of the workplace, urban changes, green transformation challenges, health risks—including disparities in health and mental health—are all interconnected and relevant to the future psychologists' professional roles and the practice of psychology as a science focused on humans in social and environmental contexts. The course enhances students' understanding of these issues, their interconnectedness, and raises awareness of the ethical considerations involved. It also aims to foster critical engagement in solving civilization’s problems by using tools available to psychologists, such as critical and systems thinking, reflexivity, dialogue, promoting regeneration, and supporting the well-being of individuals and communities.

The course features a workshop format, where, aside from brief theoretical introductions, most learning happens through active methods within a workshop environment. In the first part, participants gradually learn workshop techniques by engaging in activities such as dialogue, discussion, pair and small group work, creative methods, and, depending on the group's conditions and skills, more organized forms like elements of drama or outdoor exercises. In the second part, participants become more proactive, selecting and developing topics from a prepared pool independently and presenting them to the group using active strategies (for example, planned exercises or discussion points). These tasks may involve group work where two or three people collaborate to prepare and present a topic. This active learning approach, emphasizing learning by doing and allowing participants to choose topics of personal interest, helps foster autonomy, competence, and the psychological skills necessary for future psychologists.

The first topics of the course introduce participants to the scientific foundation of knowledge about contemporary crises, including the concept of policrisis and meta-crisis. The focus and starting point are on the climate crisis, but the social consequences and related social crises are also emphasized. Because the climate crisis is linked to climate denialism, disinformation, and manipulation in the public sphere, an opportunity arises to develop skills such as recognizing, naming, and responding to disinformation, polarization, and manipulation that result from participation in modern information circulation and discourse, especially mediated by technology. Participants work on these skills through a series of tasks based on real-life examples of disinformation. This approach also enables the introduction of exercises, using climate and environmental discourses as examples, that promote critical thinking, avoid black-and-white thinking, foster dialectical thinking, and explore paradoxes. Additionally, it trains rhetorical strategies for addressing disinformation and knowledge transfer, such as debunking climate myths, while strengthening the ability to defend scientific positions on important issues. Given the polarization around these topics, it also encourages practicing the psychologically essential skill of managing conflict through dialogue and understanding different perspectives.

Another skill practiced during the planned workshop activities is reflexivity and self-reflexivity related to the issues mentioned above. This is exercised, among other ways, through reflection on reading passages, including both psychological and cultural texts. The presence of difficult emotions, stress, and anxiety when confronting societal problems also creates space for workshop work on psychological skills such as maintaining mental hygiene and caring for one's well-being and that of the group. Finally, in a workshop format, we will practice using creativity and cultural and artistic resources to address these challenges, as well as explore related ethical issues. Although the class is a workshop, preparing for it requires regular reading of short and occasionally longer texts, as well as other forms of self-preparation. Some of these materials are available only in English, so some proficiency in English is a prerequisite.
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