The academics of the Laboratory of Child Development at the MCU Institute of System Projects participated in a number of research events hosted by University of Greenwich, London, on May 25-29.
The first event was the 6th Conference of the European Society for Research in Adult Development (ESRAD) that gathered development psychologists who are interested in adult learning potential and technologies for its development. The participants made presentations on the problems of intellectual and personal development, leadership, psychological sustainability in the globalzed world of digital technologies, new communication media, and increase in life expectancy.
MCU academics gave a series of reports on dialectical thinking of adults. Nikolai Veraksa, Senior Researcher of the Laboratory of Child Development, spoke on dialectical cognitive structures, finishing his presentation with a striking demonstration of a dialectical task offered to the guests. They had to solve it applying the Hegelian concept of Border.
The topic of the dialectical task was continued during the poster session in the reports by Olga Shiyan, Assosiate Professor and Leading Researcher at the Laboratory of Child Development, and Igor Shiyan, Head of the Laboratory.
On the next day after the ESRAD Conference, the 2nd International Symposium on Dialectical Thinking was launched. This Symposium was initiated by MCU, which hosted the 1st meeting in June 2017. The 2nd Symposium was chaired by Michael Basseches of Suffolk University, Boston and Nikolai Veraksa, MCU. Many researchers from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, the US, Switzerland and Sweden participated in the Symposium. They discussed the structure of dialectical thinking, potential for its development in children and adults, dialectical thinking in education, mental therapy, consulting, conflict management. The guests were specifically interested in the workshop on positional training by Igor Shiyan and Olga Shiyan.
The 3rd International Symposium on Dialectical Thinking will be held in July 2019 during the convention of the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA) in Moscow. Also, the Russian translation of the book by Michael Basseches ‘Dialectical Thinking and Development of Adults’ will be published soon.