Bruno della Chiesa - Learning for Better Cultural Understanding

A former diplomat and science fiction editor, among other more exotic jobs, Bruno della Chiesa is a linguist trained at the Universities of Bonn and Paris Sorbonne, where he earned a D.E.a. in 1989. After France (60s-70s) and Germany (early 80s), he has lived in Egypt, Mexico, Austria, France again, Germany again, and in the United States. A self-defined "pluricultural European", he speaks and writes in English, French, German and Spanish.

After about a decade in the French diplomatic service, he joined the OECD and founded there in 1999, within the Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) the project entitled "Brain Research and Learning Sciences," which brought together experts from almost 50 different countries and is considered a seminal work in the field of educational neuroscience. This activity led to the publication of his book Understanding the Brain: the Birth of a Learning Science (Paris: OECD, 2007; also published Chinese, French, Japanese, Serbian, Spanish and soon to be available in Arabic).

Just after finishing this, he started to teach at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) a course entitled "Learning in A Globalizing World." which explores language learning in relation with educational neuroscience, international social and economic contexts, and cultural awareness. He first came to teach his HGSE course at Kurt Fischer's invitation, and since then taught either a semester or a J-term course every year. As a result of his teaching and research activities at Harvard over the last four years, he created and directed the Globalization, Languages and Cultures program, a HGSE-CERI cooperation, which culminated late April 2012 with the publication of the book Languages in a Global World - Learning for Better Cultural Understanding (Paris: OECD).

Meanwhile, Bruno della Chiesa continues to work in the neuroscientific field as a guest editor for the Mind, Brain, and Education journal, and has embarked on new endeavors which deal, among other things, with future international perspectives in math and science education as related to civics (in his capacity as Head of International Studies, ZNL Ulm University, Germany). His work on promoting and raising global awareness, summarized in his 'tesseracts-in-the-brain' hypothesis (see his 2010-2011 papers) links (educational) neuroscience, (language) didactics, (socio)linguistics, (international) policy, and (philosophy of) ethics.