About Mythic Minds

 According to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
"The Mind is Like a Rider on an Elephant".
Our job is to become skilled at training our wild elephants!
The mythologies and metaphors of our minds
can help communities around the world to flourish!

Mythic Minds is the blog for the Positive Education Action-Research (PEAR) Laboratory at the University of Toliara (UoT), in the Atsimo Andrefana Region of Madagascar.

I am Dustin Eirdosh; a North American researcher, visiting from the German University of Kassel, and serving as the Research Director for the PEAR Lab here at UoT.

My academic interests lie in the examination of moral judgement in the face of complex issues. I've been a farmer of beef and dairy cattle for most of the last decade - when not in the fields I was passionately studying the moral psychology of meat eating from every imaginable angle.

My original and now dormant blog; Mythic Meats - aims to understand the epic tale of how humans came to eat meat - and how we interpret such a mythic understanding into the policies and practices of our food systems.

This new project; Mythic Minds - aims to do the same for the epic tale of our brains, schools, and society. Exploring how we interpret such a mythic understanding into the polices and practices of our educational systems.

As we explore the value of the EvoS program for the first time in a developing African Nation University system - this blog will share our strategies and experiences in telling the Big History of Brains, Schools, and Society - with an eye for the advancement of Academia across disciplines!

Don't forget to "LIKE" Mythic Minds on Facebook!

With the successful piloting of the PEAR Lab curriculum during the winter and spring of 2013 - we are now entering Phase II in which our Educational Psychology Students are using our Unified Human Sciences framework to better understand the concepts of Positive Psychology and Youth Resiliency from a fully-rounded evolutionary perspective.

In Phase III - these very same Students will experiment with implementing educational interventions - that they design - to improve the well-being and academic performance of regional High School Students! We are using a Service-Learning model of education as both the method of teaching, AND the subject matter for our Educational Psychology Students!