Lecture: “Cultivating an Ideas-Informed School” von Chris Brown (University of Southampton)
02. Jun
Chris Brown, professor of education, will discuss the question of how schools can become environments where students, teachers, and leaders alike are empowered to engage critically with knowledge, resist misinformation, and act on ideas that improve lives and communities.
- Monday, 2 June 2025, 14.15–15.15 p.m.
- Lecture Hall 2
- The lecture is open to the university public and registration is not required.
In his lecture “Cultivating an Ideas-Informed School: Equipping Students, Teachers, and Leaders to Engage with Knowledge that Matters”, Chris Brown draws on findings from a large international study of 7,000 participants across seven European countries. The study tested a new model for understanding how people identify and engage with high-quality ideas—and avoid harmful ones such as science denial, populism, and conspiracy thinking.
Chris Brown will present the model’s findings, namely key drivers of effective engagement with ideas as capacities that schools can actively cultivate in both staff and students. This session explores how these findings can inform practical strategies for whole-school improvement. By developing the conditions for an “ideas-informed” culture, schools can equip their communities not just for academic success, but for democratic citizenship, wellbeing, and societal resilience in an era of increasing complexity and misinformation.
Chris Brown is Professor of Education (University of Southampton) and Head of the Southampton Education School. He has a long-standing interest in how people go about harnessing great ideas to improve the human condition. In 2023, the internationally recognized expert in educational research received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel
Research Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) to conduct collaborative research at the University of Tübingen and has since been working closely with researchers at Leuphana, too. Prof. Marcus Pietsch invited his colleague to the Leuphana Institute of Educational Science during his stay in Germany for this lecture and further cooperation.
Further Informationen:
Leuphana news on the Emerald Outstanding Paper Award
News article about Chris Brown’s stay at UTübingen with the Bessel Research Award