Louise Tidmand is a Danish “pracademic” – a practitioner and an academic. Her PhD research focuses on developing life coping skills, resilience and wellbeing in adolescents through a whole school approach intervention and was completed in February 2020.

 

Louise is a teacher and educational psychologist, and she has devoted the past eight year to transform research into tangible educational materials for teachers, parents and students to work with in a school or home setting. Her books and games have received recommendations from the Danish National Board of Health and the Danish Board of Social Services.

 

Louise is passionate about connecting research to everyday lives through strength-based methods and approaches that will enable schools to develop Positive Education school cultures. Through her business The Strength Academy, she educates and trains professionals, who work with children and young adults, in social-emotional learning, strengths, wellbeing and life coping skills. As part of her PhD Louise was enrolled at the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne, an experience that added an international perspective to her research. It also gave her the opportunity to visit pioneer Positive Education Schools around Australia, speak to teachers, school managements and world leading researchers about the core of Positive Education, future directions of positive psychology, and wellbeing literacy

 

Today Louise is associated to University of Aarhus as a PostDoc.

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>Masterclass: How to involve play in your teaching as a lever to unlocking academic superpowers in your class.

We all have childhood memories that are vivid in our minds, more than often they involve play, fun and positive emotions. They build somatic markers that can be triggered by a smell, a taste or music that we associate with that moment in time.

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Play is an unencumbered state that is ideal for exploring and understanding boundaries (Tidmand, 2020) and in this state we more than often wander into the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1967) where our students continuously open up for learning. 

In this talk Louise Tidmand will unravel the effect of playfulness on the dopamin reward system in the brain that triggers expansion of the range of our immediate thought and action repertoire – our cognition and our attention. 

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