My research is primarily aimed at gaining deeper understandings in three inter-related areas, all supporting happiness and well-being in human life:
- complexity, growth, self-organization and balance as key variables at all levels in nature, psyche and culture
- play, learning, creativity and social responsibility within the framework of positive psychology
- psychological contributions to organization and leadership at all levels
I regard the different sciences as a combined project carried by the ideal of balancing ever more diverse and ever more coherent insights into nature, culture and the human condition. Unfortunately the sciences combined often do not sufficiently agree on what counts for science to be taken collectively serious.
My primary research involvements are:
The GoodWork(R) Project is lead by professors Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon with their colleagues at Harvard University, Claremont Graduate University and Stanford University. Since 1998 I have been responsible for studies of good work in Denmark, Latvia, Norway, Sweden and Finland. "Good work" is defined threefold by being good for the individual, living up to the standards of the respective domains and being good for society at large. Obviously, it is far from easy to determine what is exactly good and not good - but this just seems to grant further importance to the project, as few would argue that it is good not to know what is good.
The Danfoss Universe project is aimed at creating better pedagogy for understanding nature. It is deeply ironical that schooling has managed to represent Mother Nature - the most intuitive and concrete of all - in ways so abstract and boring that students shy away. In this project we aim to bring more fun, more depth, more understanding and more motivation into the teaching of natural sciences. The project is supported by The Ministry of Education, The Egmont Fund, and the Bitten and Mads Clausen Fund.
The www.godskole.dk -site is an electronic tool for evaluating subjective well-being in school. 40 variables are derived from essential positive psychology and students are allowed to score their subjective well-being according to these on certain locally determined intervals. The project is funded by the users comprising schools from the municipalities of Ballerup, Copenhagen, Fredericia, Frederiksværk, Greve, Kerteminde, Køge, Sønderborg and others.
The LEGO Learning Institute has been founded to better integrate play, learning and creativity in the world of children.
For a complete list of my academic activities in Danish, see: forskning.dpu.dk - search: knoop - and wait about 15 seconds.
