What PSYCLIC is about:
Project duration: April 2021 to March 2023
The main points: - Climate change is one of the major challenges mankind is facing. 2019 was the second warmest year on record (NASA, 2020).
- There is a consensus among scientists that the cause of climate change is man-made (Cook et al., 2013), with large implications for how we live, work, eat, and act as individuals as well as a whole society.
- In the past years, there have been increasing numbers in grassroots movements and NGOs for example, the “Fridays for future” movement has mobilized the world´s largest demonstration with approximately 7.6 million participants worldwide (Wahlström et al., 2020).
- Considering that climate change is a product of many human factors, such as the way we spend our money, make political decisions, and consume every day, it is clear that experts who are well versed in human psychology can make a decisive contribution to a behavioral change towards a more climate-neutral way of living, through changing attitudes, motivations, and perceptions of people (Osbaldiston & Schott, 2011).
- Climate change psychology being a niche topic within a niche creates a great challenge to engage more psychologists in the topic from a diverse range of psychological backgrounds.
- Furthermore, as climate change psychology can be conceived as an applied field of psychology, it is also necessary to have an applied training of psychology students so that they are able to not only be knowledgeable on climate change psychology, but actually are able to have the skillset to solve pressing issues of climate change.
- Therefore, in this project we will create a novel digital educational toolkit that will help establishing climate change psychology as work domain for psychology graduates by addressing climate change psychology topics from environmental, social, work, and organizational psychology perspectives and utilize the broad range of digital educational possibilities, such as e-learning, flipped classroom, and blended-learning approaches.
- At the same time, to make sure that theoretical knowledge is connected with the development of applied skills, we will focus on developing concepts that include the collaboration with NGOs and grassroots movements, enabling students to try out their knowledge in real-world settings.
