Center for Applied Dialectics

Manifesto

  • There is a fascinating emerging body of knowledge in the field of adult development.
  • Notably, the insights around cognitive development are not fully accessible yet.
  • How would our world look if we applied these evolving insights to the fields of businesses, education, politics etc?
  • CAD, the Center of Applied of Dialectics, opens up a platform for practitioners in the field of adult development, integrating research into their practice, exchanging findings and thereby nourishing each other, empowering others to do likewise.

 

Upcoming Salons -  The next dates: 

  • 11th Nov 6pm CET: Anastasia Belolutskaya:  The Engine of Creativity: how dialectical structures can help to solve «open start» problems.

Creativity is often defined as the combining, synthesizing or bridging of ideas, information or knowledge to generate novel, original, useful and appropriate solutions. What might be missing from such a definition? In this session, we will discuss why such a definition of creativity is insufficient and, moreover, why it could even be harmful, both in respect of scientific research and the developmental practices of creativity, especially education.Using examples from the latest global students' creativity study (PISA-2023), we will discuss the risks we take by sticking to the standard paradigm of creativity, especially in an era when artificial intelligence poses a challenge to human thinking. I will then propose another concept of creativity which can be formulated approximately as follows: the capacity to actualize a complex of cognitive and affective mechanisms, including dialectical, formal-logical and symbolic structures, in order to define and transform problems that contain a high degree of openness and uncertainty at the start. I call this class of problems “open start” (as opposed to open-ended) problems. I will put forward a possible approach to measure and develop creativity based on this concept.I can promise you that there will be more questions than answers, but I'm terribly interested in all this and I invite you to think further about it together with me.

About me: My name is Anastasia Belolutskaya, PhD in Psychology. I teach the psychology of creative thinking at Moscow City University and Moscow State Lomonosov University. My PhD work was about the dialectical thinking structures of children and adults, and my current research interest can be formulated as follows: uncertainty as a factor in activating dialectical thinking in educational practices.

The zoom link for all salons:  https://zoom.us/j/4078847969?pwd=K1ZxbWxEdi9aaXdJdGJKaTVuTEk0QT09 

  • Feb 6th 2025, 7pm CET: Jeff Schraeder, Applying CDF in Organizations 

Use this link to integrate the CAD calendar into your google calendar - no more misunderstanding about time zones :-) https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=d2VhdmVyQHByby1hY3Rpb24uZXU

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Past Salons:

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The Reading list - please recommend more :  https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/68149330?shelf=cad-center-for-applied-dialectics

Our youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@cad-centerforapplieddialec9451

The current expert practitioners holding the platform:

 

Some of the people at least loosely connected with CAD and their resources (in progress):

 

CAD - Otto Laske / interdevelopmentals.org 

The setup of CAD is financially supported by the EU, as it is part of the CADRA project - Cognitive Adult Development, from Research to Application - see https://fraendi.org/cadra/