Fragments for focus: bringing multiple aspects of the learning experience together
Winter 2022, Part 3
Hello, and welcome to On Learning, a newsletter of explorations and wonderings, sometimes whimsical and other times rigorous, about what it takes for learning matter.
Thanks for taking the time to read and think about what I offer. I really appreciate your presence.
Today, focus; but from the angle of how we think about pedagogy, not what we want our learners to do.
Here’s what we cover
E. F. Schumacher’s idea of how fragments of experience guide our decision making.
The implications of the dominance of the academic achievement fragment on the school experience.
How embodied cognition offers a way to think about how to adopt a pedagogy that brings into focus all the fragments of the school experience.
There’s this interesting assessment that students of English can do in Year 13 in NZ called Critical Text, and it involves applying a lens of some kind - theory, philosophy, critical position - to a source text. For example, a learner’s source text might be Othello, and they might decide analyse it through the lens of feminism, which of course will lead to a reading of Othello that is different from one that stems from the application of the lens of Marxism.
Now, the point of this assessment, really, is to illustrate that we look at the world through a particular lens all the time. Our reading of the world is never neutral or objective, but instead coloured by the tint of the lens. And the point is not that one lens is the best or most right, but that we can learn more about something by shifting our focus and looking at it in another way, that by considering what the different lenses show us as a whole gives us more nuanced understandings.
(Kids love this idea don’t they - just have a few sunglasses about with different coloured lenses and buckle up for hours of fun.)
The lens is our filter. It’s the way we let some things in and keep some things out. It’s what tunes us in to some things over others.
The lens creates the paradigm which shapes how we look at things, and thus how we think about them.
In the book Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, there is this passage on p. 28:
“Society, or a group or an individual within society, may decide to hang on to an activity or asset for non-economic reasons - social, aesthetic, moral, or political - but this does in no way alter its uneconomic character. The judgement of economics, in other words, is an extremely fragmentary judgement; out of the large number of aspects which in real life have to be seen and judged together before a decision can be taken, economics supplies only one - whether a thing yields a money profit to those who undertake it or not.”
And yet, as Schumacher argues, we have found ourselves as a society in a position where economics is the one fragment that trumps all else. Economics, we might say, is the lens through which we look at everything else.
We find ourselves in a similar situation in education. Before all else, our practices must lead to achievement in a narrow band of academic subjects: this is the only fragment that counts. And so it’s only once a practice - say one that emphasises creativity - can demonstrate that it leads to acceptable/greater achievement that it can become part of ‘how things are done ‘round here’. But this is folly. Academic achievement makes up only one part of the learner’s educational experience.
So, what might be these other fragments of an educational experience?
We could start by looking at what schools have in their vision statements. Doing so yields words such as: respect, integrity, creativity, self-efficacy, belonging, excellence, inclusion, equity, etc.
Or, we might think about emphasising different parts of the curriculum. For instance, in NZ we often talk about the ‘front end’, which refers to the section dealing with the vision, values and key competencies it lays out as essential for living a fulfilling life. Many schools have given this dispositional approach to learning a shot.
We might also think about the cultural norms and values we want to be emphasised, such as fairness (eg, in NZ we often talk of making sure people get a fair crack).
At heart, when we do this kind of thing, what we are seeking to do is make school more reflective of the real world. As an example, many businesses now look for job candidates who are both a skills and cultural fit. In the world of sports, a key All Blacks mantra is having a ‘no dickheads’ policy. In every job, it’s how you get on with others that counts, and so being able to build good relationships is a core part of the role. It’s this that often, and to a large degree, determines how well a person performs.
In other words, performance in the real world requires people to operate effectively in contexts made up of many fragments: skills, relationships, creativity, etc.
I wonder if this is how a primary, often solo, focus on academic achievement does our kids a disservice? Why? When this is the case, their achievements are attained by disregarding all other fragments. We might go so far as to say that their achievements in school are inauthentic, and thus a poor predictor of success in life.
Let’s pause. What am I saying here?
Academic achievement is ONE fragment that makes up a learner’s experience of school.
We cannot truly see a learner’s potential until we see them ‘operate’ in contexts where all the other fragments are in play.
The point of cuing other fragments as part of the learning experience is not greater academic achievement - that’s what effective work in the academic fragment is for - but an increase in that with which it concerns itself. For instance, well-being initiatives should be judged on the positive impact they have on people’s emotional, physical and psychological health.
It’s the interplay of these fragments that matters. For example, an effective well-being initiative PLUS effective academic instruction PLUS an effective learning culture that emphasises self-efficacy = ? (confident, knowledgable and skilful kids, who are keen to contribute to their community???).
Bear in mind that, while our first reaction might be that adding other fragments to the educational experience means we sacrifice academic achievement, it is quite likely that the sole focus on academic achievement actually restricts what a learner achieves.
When I played cricket, I was the kind of player who would look best in the nets. I could play shots both sides of the wicket. I had a lovely cover drive that would slam into the netting, sweetly timed. I could hook with abandon. It was great. All I had to do was focus on hitting the ball - there we no fielders I had to be aware of, no ‘chat’ to negotiate, no game situation to factor into my decision making. I never batted as well on game day, when all those other fragments were present.
I never made it as a cricketer :(
… (pause for dramatic effect) …
Now, the degree to which you are nodding along with me here is probably going to be determined to some extent by the theory of cognition you hold. Do you see the brain, and by extension the mind, as a kind of master computer tasked with directing the body but with some limitations (eg, short term memory), or do you see the brain, and by extension the mind, as part of a complex, interlinked and co-dependent mind-body system?
Under the mind-as-computer theory, learning is all about, crudely, getting stuff into the brain, ensuring we don’t overload things. After all, what we learn is the software that allows the hardware - us - to work.
This is an appealing metaphor, and on one level it does make sense. There are things that we learn where the process feels similar to downloading a software program: first, learn this, and then that, as we build towards the complete package - ah, mastery! It’s easy to see why this is a theory that has a lot of traction in teaching.
But I’m not so sure that it fully describes the learning process. In fact, it’s a metaphor that makes me uneasy because it disregards, and even minimises, the role of the body and our emotions. Me, I’m more drawn to the theory of embodied cognition.
“… in the embodied view the brain isn’t there to give orders: it’s there to pull together the strands of our internal experience so that the system as a whole can make sense of them …
The embodied approach sees our conscious self as being grounded in, and bound together by, the sensory experiences of the body and its interactions with the world. In recent years neuroscientists have begun to put these things together and come up with a unified explanation: that the mind is the result of an ongoing process of predicting what is probably happening, both in the world outside and within our bodies, and then taking action to adjust the dials. Moving in the world and interacting with it are the best way to make sense of what the brain thinks is true.
SOURCE: Carlone Williams, MOVE! The New Science of Body over Mind, pp. 25-27.
What does this mean, practically? First and foremost, movement and interaction are crucial for learning. And we need to feel to think.
But also, it forces us to think critically about that word I used above in Point 4: effective. If the way we make sense of, and by extension find ourselves in the world is through sensory experiences and interactions, by movement and predication, what does that mean an effective well-being initiative might look like, what effective academic instruction might include, what an effective learning culture might be?
These questions are important because the answers will be, to some degree, different from those you have if you ascribe to the mind-as-computer theory, where learning is all about getting stuff into the brain (and the only question being What’s in there already? so that precious time isn’t spent duplicating things). And so, given the dominance of the mind-as-computer theory in education, this partly explains why academic achievement is the fragment of focus through which all others must be viewed, and we find ourselves talking about the core curriculum, we find the arts being squeezed out, and we see time for play being questioned.
So what do we do?
Start by defining the different fragments of the educational experience in your context. There’s the academic achievement fragment, but what else? The creativity fragment? The inclusion fragment? The emotional health fragment? The physical health fragment? The curiosity fragment? The pride fragment? The learning-beyond-the-core fragment? The community fragment?
And then, make up some pithy phrases to help you think in ways that bring the different fragments together. Here are some examples from me:
Music is maths, but with a dash of magic.
Dance is storytelling, but with an injection of passion.
Block play is physics, but with a hint of daring.
Do you see the difference?
Do you see the movement, the interaction, the central place for feeling?
Fragments for focus: bringing multiple aspects of the learning experience together
Really great post Bevan - thank you! You tie together a lot of threads that are buzzing around in my head. Some of the same thoughts found their way into my recent book The Future of Teaching and the Myths that Hold It Back (as well as the more academic Intelligence in the Flesh from 2015). I'd really recommend the Caroline Williams book you quote from - full of really great ideas, many of them eminently practical for teachers. And remember the story Ken Robinson told in his famous TED talk about the great choreographer Dame Gillian Lynne who as a little girl was taken to a dance school and was astonished to find "Lots of people like me - people who had to move to think".
Keep up the good work!!
All the best
Guy