Reflections and insights on the Diogenes’ project

 

Two scientific articles are going to be published about the Diogenes’ Project activities. They present a general overview and a reflection about the project and its main results. These are the abstracts of both of them.

 

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Critical Thinking Against Stereotypes: Lessons from the Diogenes Project

Henry Alexander Henrysson

Significant discussion has been going on in recent years on the role and importance of teaching critical thinking in schools. To be sure, this discussion has a long and interesting history and pedigree, but recent developments and the advent of social media has seen rekindled efforts in finding ways to teach young students to use critical thinking to battle misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Other roles for critical thinking in education have also been explored, for example how such thinking can dismantle harmful stereotyping. This paper gives an insight in one such effort which is the Diogenes Project, in which delegates from six European countries came together to develop a method to teach critical thinking to school children with special emphasis on gender stereotypes. Drawing on a methodology from business studies, the project introduced a novel way to use a Storyboard Canvas as a path to digital laboratories for students.

Keywords: Critical Thinking; Stereotypes; Curriculum; Schools; Questioning

 

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Digital Storytelling to Foster Critical Thinking on Gender Stereotypes

Henry Alexander Henrysson, Antonia Colasante

The idea behind the Diogenes project was to develop new and novel ways for schools to teach their students about the harmfulness of gender-based stereotypes. The project’s original idea was to use and modify a well-known method, the Brand Storytelling, in order to help students to fight and change their views on gender roles. The idea was to use the new and modified version to help students to set up digital laboratories in which they could use the narratives they would come up with to create a value-driven approach to ordinary situations. This paper gives an insight into the success and challenges of the Diogenes project with a special emphasis on how critical thinking was introduced into the so-called Brand-Storytelling Canvas.

Keywords: Critical Thinking; Gender-Based Stereotypes; Brand Storytelling; Schools; Education Systems

 

Photo by Dmitriy, Pixabay