Transforming the Psychology Classroom into a Creative Thinktank
A Semester-Long Project of Collective Imagination
“There is profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.” – Rollo May, existential psychologist
In Fall 2025, undergraduate students in a Social Psychology class participated in a creative thinktank to re-imagine “a society in which it will be easier to love.”
As a thought experiment, we imagined that the United Nations had called us up and asked us to build a new society as social psychologists. Using liberatory educator Paulo Freire’s method of dialoguing for critical consciousness, we engaged in the following steps for 14-weeks to design the vision of a psychologically-minded new society:
- We identified existing social structures in need of revision (education, child-rearing, governance, criminal justice, mass media, economics, healthcare, conflict resolution, social norms, institutional ethics, politics).
- We studied social psychology concepts to understand the psychological forces shaping these systems.
- We brainstormed ideas to reshape these social structures to foster psychosocial wellbeing, justice, and communal love for all people.
- We envisioned practical interventions to implement our ideas in society.
The result is a 200-page playbook titled: “Blueprints for a New Society in Which It Will Be Easier to Love: A 2026 Playbook by Social Psychologists.”
These blueprints represent the collective imagination of 17 psychology students and their professor, as a pedagogy of hope.
We hope it generates hope and possibility of co-creating a more loving society together.
This is our Project 2026.
Dialoguing for Collective Knowledge-Production
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and therefore bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which [students] deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” ― Paulo Freire, liberatory educator
This social psychology course applied liberatory educator Paulo Freire’s method of teaching for transformation, in order to operate as a creative thinktank. Freire critiqued educational models which simply funnel pre-existing information into students’ minds rather than inspire their creativity. Freire insisted that students are teachers and teachers are students; all have invaluable wisdom to offer, stemming from their lived experience. This wisdom can collectively produce fresh, new knowledge about the world—which can, accordingly, transform the world. Freire’s method empowers students to see themselves not only as learners, but as creative leaders whose visionary ideas can shape society to become more loving, liberatory, and just.
According to Freire, the most effective method for producing transformative knowledge is dialoguing for critical consciousness. This method invites students to engage in the following creative process:
- Select a concrete social situation that concerns us
- Pose a problematizing question about it to the class
- Guide collaborative dialogue among all class members that moves back and forth between theory and their lived experience
- Identify themes from the dialogue that reveal fresh insight into societal structures and dynamics
- Develop concrete solutions for social change based on these themes.
These blueprints were produced by dialoguing for critical consciousness every week amongst 17 psychology students and their professor, transforming questions into ideas that can change the world.
A Pedagogy of Hope (Professor’s Note)
As a clinical psychologist who worked as a psychotherapist with students in college counseling centers before I became a professor, I am attuned to the psychological realities of students’ worlds beyond the classroom. In recent years, my classes have turned into safe spaces where students have felt comfortable integrating the academic with the personal. It has become clear to me that many college students, like most of us, have lived lives of deep struggle. My classrooms in the deep South consist of students of all racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, neuro-identities and political affiliations. For many of us, societal struggles are interconnected with personal struggles. As such, my teaching philosophy is now crystallizing into a “Pedagogy of Hope.” If we only get a short time together, I want to make sure we use it well: to help us hold onto hope that we do not have to give up on the world, because we have the power to shape it to become more loving and beautiful—together, in community.