Abstract: “Categorization is fundamental to human existence (Saljo and Hjorne, 2009). Essential as it may be this form of thinking has negative consequences. Bullying has become a public concern in the United States and the United Kingdom due to large scale shootings and suicides. King-Shaw (2008) maintains that adolescent who do not have the needed support from teachers, parents or friends may experience long term psychological problems or resort to suicide. A Change Laboratory (Virkkunen and Newnham, 2013) was held with 35 immigrant school going adolescents. The results revealed that there is indeed a process of internalization of the social world but that it is personally transformed in order to arrive at a negative or positive form of sense making. The adolescents reworked the negative ways of perceiving their socio-cultural spaces and selves through questioning socio-cultural abstract forms of thinking.”

Keywords: Abstract thinking; bullying; suicide; formative intervention, change laboratory