A Synthesis of Posts During the Module and a New Vision for Education

In pooling my ideas for this final blog, I spent some time going through my posts so far and there seems to be a narrative that has been emerging. I’d like to frame this in the context of my previous blog on the traditionalist and progressivist divide in education, but rather than putting forward Kieran Egan’s Imaginative Education approach as a third, potentially integrative position as I did then, I would like to suggest something slightly different, simpler and even more firmly rooted in research.

In going over all my blogs for this module, it became clear to me that they can each be categorised as representing either traditionalist or progressivist values in education. To recap on the definitions of these positions, traditionalist approaches normally place an emphasis on the material to be communicated from teachers to students as the most important factor in education, whilst progressivists normally place the emphasis on the student, in terms of their development, unfoldment and wellbeing (e.g. Dewey, Palmer, Piaget, & Vygotsky) . My blogs on mathematics processing, where I considered the development of cognitive representations in arithmetic tasks; language, where I discussed how recent findings from the field of cognitive neurolinguistics has underscored the need for high quality linguistic education so as to allow students to fully ground concepts in cognition; and music education, where I discussed the transfer effects of music training on intellectual ability, listening skills, language skills, literacy, numeracy and so on, were all blogs that took a more traditionalist approach in that they placed the emphasis on the information to be communicated, and the importance of it. Where the arguments outlined in these blogs might be considered to have made novel contributions to the traditionalist approach might be in terms of their grounding in modern cognitive neuroscientific and cultural research. It is my feeling that this type of approach, where that which is taught in schools is supported and driven by empirical research, will hopefully characterise the future of traditionalist approaches to education. The Brainology program that Shannah blogged on last week is an excellent start in this regard.

Conversely, my blogs on mindfulness, where I introduced recent research on the implementation of mindfulness in schools and suggested that it might play a valuable role in modern PSHE; democracy in schools, where I outlined Kohlberg’s research, which suggests that democratic engagement of students in school management not only promotes moral development into post-conventional stages but might also be important in our educational system’s production of more politically engaged and interested individuals; and on eco-education, where I suggested that exposure to and education on the workings of natural ecosystems might promote the capacity for systems thinking and other sophisticated cognitive developmental capacities, are all examples of blogs where a more progressivist approach was taken, in terms of the fact that the emphasis was laid on the wellbeing and development of the students. Again though, where these blogs have made novel contributions to modern progressivist perspectives in education lies in the fact that they were rooted not in idealistic and philosophical conceptions regarding the value and ‘innate gifts’ of the child, but in modern developmental literature.

There must surely, though, be some way in which these two perspectives, traditionalist and progressivist, can find some integration, without resource to yet another nebulous theory that is more conjecture that empiricism. I believe there is, and I believe this can be found in a new conceptualisation of intelligence, one that is drawn from modern neurocognitive research, and which is supported by a new vision of education where we hold a much broader perspective on valued outcomes. The present system was instituted in the Industrial Revolution, and the traces of these roots are visible all through the modern factory-style education system. The needs of today, however, are very different, and it was Ken Robinson’s discussion of intelligence, the hierarchy of subjects, creativity and the needed educational revolution that really inspired this for me. This led me to consider Howard Gardner’s research on multiple intelligences, something which inspired much debate, but which we seemed to find an overwhelming agreement on in terms of the need for a broader conceptualisation of intelligence and ability in education.

It is this broader conceptualisation of intelligence and ability that I believe may be able to reconcile the traditionalist and progressivist positions. It speaks to the traditionalist position owing to its basis in the detailed understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms of processing, memory and learning that we are establishing in the literature, where we understand that semantic codes, motor codes and perceptual codes, for instance, all entail different types of representation and thus different forms of intelligence; and it speaks to the progressivist position in its recognition that student’s capacity to reason about, mature and understand the world is very much dependent on their cognitive, emotional, personal and social development, as these provide the contextual framework within which they engage with their studies.

None of this is particularly complicated. All of it simply involves a clear consideration of the research literature in some of its most pertinent areas, and a willingness to consider where applications could be made within the educational system. It is my feeling that as long as such an approach is taken, it is inevitable that such developments will take place, and it is my sincere wish that the relationships between scientists, theorists and policy makers will mature and be coloured by sufficient quality, that a clear, well-grounded and socially supported science of education, one that is able to transcend and include all perspectives on education in its empirical basis, may be born.

 

The benefits of music education: Where research and policy are blind to each other?

In this penultimate blog, I want to focus on the importance of music education. This is an important issue currently, as serious cuts to music education provision have been implicated as part of the government spending review.

Quite beyond my own subjective opinion on the importance and value of music education, I was amazed at how much solid cognitive and neurocognitive research there is that has documented how effective music education is at enhancing a whole range of cognitive faculties crucial to learning; so much so that a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience review noted that the musicians’ brain is actually becoming an archetypal example of neuroplasticity at work. Here is a quick once-over of some of the research findings:

Hannon and Trainor found that musical education produces functional and structural alterations in the auditory system, and Pantev et al. found that pianists demonstrate enhanced neural activity in the auditory cortex when hearing piano notes compared to individuals who do not play a musical instrument.  Furthermore, the magnitude of this neural activation correlated with the amount of years that the person had been undergoing music training. This suggests that such effects are not just down to individual differences but are rather a function of neural plasticity.

Additionally, musicians have been found to show structural differences in brain architecture in comparison to individuals with no musical training, with these differences having been documented in the greater volume of grey matter in motor, auditory and visual-spatial processing regions, all of which are associated with playing an instrument. This is understood to occur as a function of increases synaptic connectivity between such areas.

Of course the crucial question for the point that I am making relates to how much these improvements can be related to other domains relevant for learning generally. From the research, it seems that the changes brought about through music training do indeed transfer across to other domains relevant for education. I will now outline some findings in a few of the key areas of transfer – perceptual and language skills; literacy; numeracy; intellectual development; creativity and wellbeing.

In terms of perceptual and language skills, Peynircioglu, Durgunoglu and Uney-Kusefoglu found a positive correlation between musical aptitude and ability to manipulate speech sounds among preschool children. This correlation has been supported by neuroscientific studies looking at how the brain processes sound. Such studies have found that musical training brings improvements to neural processing of spoken words and the ability to differentiate between rapidly changing sounds – all important effects for phonological processing in learning.

In terms of literacy, fascinatingly, music training has been found to improve reading skills. Douglas and Willatts conducted a study where music training was deliberately designed to enhance auditory, visual and motor skills in seven-to-eight year olds over the course of six months. They found that reading comprehension skills in the music training group significantly improved whereas those of the control group who did not receive such training, did not. Butzlaff addressed this effect head-on by asking, “Can music be used to teach reading?” He conducted a meta-analysis of 24 of studies and noted a consistent relationship between music training and standardised metrics of reading ability. This effect, which has been replicated by a number of studies, was explained in terms of the music training improving children’s ability for phonemic processing of word sounds, brought about through the focus on differentiating non-semantically rooted sounds that is crucial to music training.

In terms of numeracy, owing to the demands on musicians that are playing from sheet music to engage rapid mathematical processes to divide and sub-divide beats and to convert rhythmically-defined notes into coherent music, there has long been a view that music training improves numeracy. Geoghegan and Mitchelmore conducted a study to test this hypothesis by assessing the effect of a music training program on the mathematics performance of preschoolers and found the music training group to return significantly higher scores. Additionally, in a correlational study, Haley found that children who had begun music training before the fourth grade demonstrated significantly higher scores on mathematics tasks than those who had not.

In the realm of intellectual development, there is also a widely reported finding that music training increases IQ. Gromko and Poorman conducted a study with preschoolers, finding that music training facilitates improvement on spatial-temporal tasks, and Schellenberg found such training to yield improvements across all IQ subtests. Furthermore, Chan, Ho and Cheung found that adults who began their music training prior to the age of 12 demonstrated enhanced memory for spoken words relative to matched adults who did not, and thus suggested that early music training may have long-term facilitatory effects on verbal memory. In collating the results of such studies as this, Hetland undertook a review of 15 studies and reported a consistently strong relationship, suggesting that music training going on for at least two years predicts significant performance gains on tasks demanding spatial-temporal acuity.

In terms of creativity, Koutsoupidou and Hargreaves recently noted that improvements in creativity were found subsequent to music training, but that these improvements were contingent upon the type of musical instruction undertaken. Specifically, they conducted a study in which it was reported that 6-year-olds who had received music training that had been improvisational showed significantly higher creativity scores than age-matched children whose music training had been didactic. This stands to reason owing to the continuous creative demands of musical improvisation.

Finally, in terms of wellbeing, Harland et al. (as cited in Hallam‘s review of the literature) found that personal and social development were significantly enhanced among pupils that engaged with the arts in schools, with those receiving musical training showing particular benefits in terms of social awareness, interpersonal skills, wellbeing and transfer effects.

These are just some of the results from the research on the benefits of music training to a whole range of learning metrics (check the above Hallam link for an excellent review). In light of these findings, I am amazed that the government would think that music education is something that can be cut without serious detriment to children’s learning. It seems this is a clear example of a situation in which scientific findings are not being implemented to inform policy. There are, of course, questions concerning to how far the type of music training programs used in these research studies could be said to be similar to whole-class music education (in some studies they seem very similar, in some not so much), but it is my feeling that the research is sufficiently strong that in order to extend the type of benefits that are discussed herein more widely, the sensible call is for more investment, focussed and research-informed, rather than less.

Multiculturalism, Linguistic Relativity and Education

At present, there is a fierce debate going on regarding the state of multiculturism within Britain, and the degree to which it can be considered to have been a success. Government has made the valid point that while we have many different communities living among each other, the levels of integration have remained low in places, some communities have remained isolated, and at times, moral standards have been sacrificed for fear of cultural elitism. For these reasons, David Cameron has recently called for a new “muscular liberalism” to begin to address these issues; one that understands the value of different cultural perspectives to be function of their alignment with universal values of equality, respect and humanitarian concern. I agree with this position, but it has come to my mind that there are some tricky corners of culture for this policy to navigate. One of these relates to how different cultural worldviews are mediated by linguistic relativity, and what this means for education.

The linguistic relativity hypothesis is one that has had a long history, beginning with such persons as St Augustine, Immanuel Kant and is now the subject of investigation by such eminent scientists and theorists as Steven Pinker, and our very own Professor Guillaume Thierry. It relates most basically to the question of how much our thought, and the way in which we are able to understand and conceptualise the world, is constrained by our language – itself an expression of culture. In this respect, we are probably all familiar with the (actually false) idea that while we only have one word for snow, the Eskimos of Alaska have a great many.

The linguistic relativity argument has been formulated in both weak and strong forms. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an example of a weak form, making the suggestion, now barely contended, that different languages influence thought, perception and worldview in different ways, and that this is some part of the equation of what it is that differentiates cultures around the world (there is a nice paper here on how English- and Chinese-speaking cultures differ in their worldview as a function of culturally important concepts being asymmetrically expressed in one language but having no equivalent in the other). There have been those that have advanced a strong form of the argument also, though. Wittgenstein was one of these, with his famous quote encapsulating this strong position, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. Within the field of developmental psychology, this question was also a point of departure between classical Piagetian and Vykotskian perspectives, with Piaget considering language as just another type of cognitive skill to be acquired, but with Vygotsky claiming that language, along with culture and social experience, may indeed constrain development. As noted in my blog last week also, Kieran Egan is another educational theorist that sees language acquisition as fundamental to cognitive development.

Whether the weak or strong forms of the linguistic relativity hypothesis are closer to the truth has been a subject of great debate and controversy within the field of linguistics for about half a century now. The majority of theorists have taken up camp behind the weak form of the argument, and in modern developmental research, though the questions raised by such theorists and Piaget and Vygotsky have been substantially refined and adapted according to the research, no definitive answer has been found. Recently, however, evidence from the field of cognitive neurolinguistics has begun to support the strong form of the argument. Professor Thierry, here at Bangor, has been conducting studies into this area, and has found evidence to suggest that thought is not just influenced by language, but, as Wittgenstein suggested, is actually constrained by language.

On the most basic level, this speaks to how incredibly important linguistic education is. This research suggests that if a person does not have the language to represent something (an abstract noun such as ‘compassion’, ‘respect’, ‘fairness’ or ‘equality’, for instance), then that person may be unable to fully ground such a concept in their sense of values and general worldview. It suggests that a broad vocabulary is fundamental to a broad understanding of the world. Also, importantly, implicit in these findings is the fact that linguistic education opens the door to being able to fully enter into and begin to appreciate one’s cultural heritage.

Practically speaking, it raises questions related to the challenges faced by teachers in our increasingly multicultural, and thus multilinguistic classrooms. In a conversation with Abigail a couple of weeks ago, we were discussing how in some inner city areas, often kids will be introduced into classes despite having almost minimal ability to speak English. How can we expect teachers to fulfil their important role when even basic communication in a language that both parties are fully at home with is an issue, especially in the present context where performance targets are seen to be so key? This is an extreme example, but it highlights the reality that in a world where we understand that different languages may maintain definitely different worldviews, and where classrooms are often composed of students for whom English, or Welsh, is not their first language, the challenges on teachers and schools to promote the mental, emotional and social unfoldment of kids on increasingly sophisticated levels, is great indeed.

I have been very impressed by the orientation of many Welsh schools to teach bilingually, and I value how this process not only prevents the erosion of Welsh culture, but allows the kids that pass through it to experience both English and Welsh cultural worldviews. I do not, though, see any clear way in which such a bilingual approach to education could be instituted in inner city London, for instance, where the number and variety of different first languages is much greater.

The present government’s orientation toward deepening the level of multicultural integration in Britain in a manner that honours variety in cultural perspectives but yet entails their alignment to universal values of freedom, respect and societal responsibility, is one I support. There are, though, as perhaps this blog has suggested, some tricky issues that will need to be addressed as this ideal begins to find form. Quite how this might work in relation to the interface between government policy, education and cognitive/linguistic developmental research remains to be seen, and I would be interested in any other perspectives that people have.

Beyond the Traditionalist and Progressivist divide – Kieran Egan’s Imaginative Education

This week I would like to use my blog space to briefly introduce the work of Kieran Egan, who is an educational philosopher at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and to discuss some of the issues he raises in a recent book, ‘The Future of Education: Reimagining our Schools from the Ground up’. You can find a review of the book from the journal Science, here.

This book takes an interesting stance on discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the prevailing approaches to education by first contrasting “traditionalist” and “progressivist” positions, and then, in the second half, by taking an imaginary retrospective look, back in time from the year 2050, at the types of educational reforms instituted between 2010 and that time, once the traditionalist and progressivist positions had been found to be wanting.

This use of the imagination is actually key to Egan’s ‘Imaginative Education’ approach, but before describing this model, since their contrasting positions have been the focus of some recent blogs, it might be useful to first consider the difference between the traditionalist and progressivist approaches.

Traditionalist perspectives have been the norm in education for an extremely long time, and can be defined according to their emphasis on the communication of important subject matter to the student (e.g. knowledge from the various subject domains) in a manner that may allow the student to acquire the necessary tools of knowledge and culture to productively engage with society. As such, this approach is often expressed in teacher-centred forms of learning that value performance-based outcomes, and in the traditional ‘lecture-model’ of teacher-student communication.

Progressivist approaches are far more student-centred. The have their lineage in such theorists as Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget and Kohlberg, who conceived of education as having the unfoldment of the student’s already inherent potential as key. Many of the blogs placing a premium on personal development, wellbeing, multiple intelligences and such (including my own I now realise!), definitely fall into this bracket.

In his book, Egan recognises that both of these approaches have their strengths, but bemoans the inflexible, partial and entrenched nature of their respective views. He recognises the importance of both the traditionalist emphasis on the communication of important subject matter, and the progressivist emphasis on the unfoldment of the student’s already innate potential as being fundamental to that process.

Egan’s own Imaginative Education approach incorporates these perspectives, and yet transcends them. As the name suggests, the role of the imagination is given special currency in his theory in terms of its importance in the learning process. This approach recognises that children and learners generally, inhabit conceptual world spaces in which the imagination can fundamentally efficacious in expanding and enriching their content. It places importance on the link between the affective nature of imaginative processes and the cognitive tools with which the student is able to understand the world, throughout development. Thus, a residual sympathy of Egan’s model with progressivist approaches to education lies in the role of ‘stages of development’. These are not conceived, however, in such rigid terms as they were for Piaget, but rather in a manner that draws from and advances Vygotskian notions that place language acquisition, social interaction and culture as central to the incrementally sophisticated fashion with which the child is able to understand and reason about the world. Similarly, a residual sympathy of Egan’s model with traditionalist perspectives involves recognition of the fact that knowledge-acquisition is fundamental also, but, in a conceptual movement that allows the integration of traditionalist approaches with post-modern conceptions on the relativity of knowledge, there are different ways of ‘knowing’ the world.

Specifically, the Imaginative Education model proposes that the cognitive tools that education should aim to facilitate the unfoldment of are oracy, literacy and theoretical thinking. The direction of this unfoldment is understood as hierarchically supervenient, with literacy being dependent on the capacity for oracy, and theoretical thinking being dependent on the capacity for literacy, with each of these faculties unfolding at different times in development and bringing with them the capacity for a multitude of additional cognitive tools also. Causatively central in this developmental process, for Egan, is language development, which, in bidirectional relation with these different cognitive tools, allows five different types of understanding, each of them unfolding in a stage-like manner. The first of these is somatic understanding, or the physical, pre-linguistic way in which a baby relates to the world. The second is mythic understanding, which allows the child, as they grow and develop, to begin to use language to represent things of which they have, as yet, no experience. The third is romantic understanding, which begins to unfold into adolescence, and which allows the child to linguistically reason in a way that recognises their individuality, and that is able to establish connections between related entities in the world. Egan suggests that this is followed by philosophic understanding, which involves sufficient linguistic development so as to begin to reason in terms of laws and theories that can effectively explain the world in a manner that entails increasing intellectual finesse, and this is followed with ironic understanding, where the individual is able to reflexively challenge their other modes of understanding in an intellectually creative way. The unfolding of each of these stages is, for Egan, contingent upon the increasingly sophisticated use of language and imagination.

It is therefore Egan’s contention that these factors of imagination-mediated language acquisition, cognitive tool use and stages of understanding should inform the way in which teachers teach, specifically so that techniques are used that deliberately evoke differentially stage-specific imaginative elaboration of the topic. In critiquing Egan’s approach, I humbly recognise that the short space I have used to here to explain it is surely insufficient for its complexity. I also recognise that it has sufficient support, interest and momentum to receive the very positive review in Science above listed. Still, though, while I acknowledge its indirect basis in research findings on developmental trajectories of language acquisition, the diversity with which we are able to employ cognitive tools, and the important manner in which affective valence has been shown to modulate cognitive processing, I am not aware of any direct empirical assessments of its effectiveness in real-world settings. This is not to suggest that I doubt its efficacy, the model does, after all, hold definite tie in’s with a number of educational principles that have been the subject of our focus (deep questions, self-explanation, stories, perceptuo-motor grounding, etc., all necessitate imaginative elaboration of given information) but just that like many of the suggestions we have advanced on these blogs, research is needed, and called for. In any case, I feel it will have been useful to differentiate the traditionalist and progressivist approaches to educational provision, so that we may orient ourselves, and the positions we take up, more clearly.

Links:

Imaginative Education Research Group

A paper on Imaginative Education by Dr. Sue Lyle, head of the School of Education at Swansea University

Another review of Egan’s book, The Future of Education

Eco-education and socio-cognitive development

This week, I’m going to focus my blog on the socio-cognitive benefits and importance of ecological and environmental education. This was brought up through conversations with Aaron, both and off this blog forum, in which we agreed that we felt that children and students of all ages could learn a great deal, and their cognitive and social development be definitely promoted, through learning about the harmonious functioning natural ecosystems. Nature, we agreed, is one of the greatest teachers.

The natural world is full of systems of symbiotic and harmonious relationships. Symbiosis relates to the interaction of two or more properties, organisms or factors, when the nature of that interaction is of benefit to both. This relates to the natural reality of synergy also, whereby these kinds of symbiotic interaction are actually productive of the emergence of new factors, properties or organisms that never would have emerged otherwise. In the natural world, synergy is the core of Emergence Theory, which suggests that the rich complexity demonstrated in physical, chemical, biological, natural and human systems, arises out of a manifold number of relatively simple interactions. This relates to Aristotle’s famous saying that “the whole if more than the sum of its parts”, and examples of this process at work in the natural world could relate to an ant colony, for instance, as given on Wikipedia:

“The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scent from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and build up of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending only on its local environment and the genetically encoded rules for its variety of ant. Despite the lack of centralized decision making, ant colonies exhibit complex behavior and have even been able to demonstrate the ability to solve geometric problems. For example, colonies routinely find the maximum distance from all colony entrances to dispose of dead bodies.”

Or it could relate to the biological organisation of life, from the subatomic level to the entire biosophere:

“Individual atoms can be combined to form molecules such as polypeptide chains, which in turn fold and refold to form proteins, which in turn create even more complex structures. These proteins, assuming their functional status from their spatial conformation, interact together and with other molecules to achieve higher biological functions and eventually create an organism.”

The crucial thing here is the fact that we are discussing already extant systems of relationships that are to the benefit of all, and that allow, when functioning optimally, the emergence of totally new factors.

Learning about these kinds of relationships could be crucially important in students coming to understand that cooperation does not always mean compromise, and that while there is a time when competition is the best option for the whole system (as with capitalistic systems, competition between parties looking to provide a service results in the highest quality of service at the lowest price being available to the consumer – ideally), it is quite possible for groups of persons, arranged in organisations, businesses, nations etc. to engage in mutually beneficial relationships where not only does everyone come off at least as well as if they had ‘gone it alone’, but totally new benefits are able to emergence in a manner never possible otherwise.

A fascinating example of such processes at work in human systems is co-intelligence (check out the Co-Intelligence Institute), otherwise known as “the wisdom of crowds”. This relates to the idea that, in certain situations, when a diverse group of motivated people come together to solve problems in a cooperative manner, their capacity to do so is fundamentally enhanced compared to any effort they were to make alone.

In relation to how such education on ecological systems might facilitate cognitive development, it is necessary to recognise that ‘system thinking’ (click here for research, and here for a simpler wiki definition), the kind of which would be necessary to understand the systems of relationships here described, actually requires quite sophisticated cognitive operations. One mathematical model of cognitive development, the Model of Hierarchical Complexity by Michael Commons at Harvard, has been suggested as an alternative to constructionist theories such as Piaget’s and that defines the qualitative difference between different stages of development as a function of the complexity of the behaviour considered. This model provides corresponding stages to Piaget’s four main stages, but provides additional ‘post-formal operational’ stages also. Crucially, the Model of Hierarchical Complexity suggests that the movement from its stage that corresponds to Piaget’s formal operations (his most final stage of cognitive development) to the next stage, involves the development of the capacity to move beyond cognitive operations defined by linear cause and effect relationships to the capacity to reason in terms of non-linear systems of relationships, where every part’s action is dependent and active upon every other part.

Stages beyond this involve the capacity to perform operations on systems, and then systems of systems and so on, but the key point here is that exposure to these kinds of natural systems, promotes the beginnings of system thinking, which is itself, as discussed, extremely important for building the kinds of cooperative (and competitive, where appropriate) and mutually beneficial relationships that may hopefully characterise our world in the future.

In researching this topic, I was encouraged to see that there are already some great educational and in school initiatives going on in this respect, some of them government sponsored. Here are a couple of links:

http://www.ecoeducation.org/city-connections

http://www.eco-schools.org.uk/about/

Citizenship, Kohlberg and democracy in education

“Ironic, isn’t it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack- jawed troglodytes has cost me the election. And yet, if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail! That’s democracy for you.”

(Mr. Burns in an episode of The Simpsons entitled “Two Cars in Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish)

The importance of political education has been key for great educational philosophers such as Dewey, who, in his Democracy and Education, named ‘good citizenship and civic efficiency’ as one of the fundamental aims of education. Parker J. Palmer is another writer on education and democracy, for whom this issue is seen as critical to the health of our society. In this blog I would like to discuss the potential for students’ engagement with democratic processes in schools to promote their moral development – an outcome that is fundamental to the citizenship program.

Citizenship is compulsory as part of the National Curriculum for all 11-16 year olds. Yet, in late 2006, Ofsted published a report stating that current provision of citizenship education was seriously inadequate, and that “Citizenship is still seen as the poor relation of more established subjects”. The continuation of this inadequacy of citizenship provision to the present day is outlined here.

The advantages of greater emphasis being put on citizenship and right democratic process are not just simply for society. Lawrence Kohlberg, the late developmental psychologist, found that involving students in the democratic processes of running their schools, in a manner that allowed them genuine efficacy in the day to day functioning of the schools, significantly promoted moral development. For Kohlberg, it was the very process of collaborative democratic engagement in the running of a school that fostered students’ development. To understand the depth of this point requires some elaboration of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.

This theory entails three stages of development – pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional – though each of these stages incorporates two sub-stages. Pre-conventional moral reasoning has yet to adopt the values and to understand the reasoning entailed in conformist-conventional, status quo driven morality (e.g. it I wrong to hit someone). Its first sub-stage entails an ‘obedience and punishment orientation’, which relates to an egocentric point of view that doesn’t truly consider the rights of others or recognise that they differ from one’s own. One simply acts to maintain one’s own wellbeing. The second substage entails a ‘self-interest orientation’, and this relates to a more sophisticated but yet sill very individualistic perspective that recognises that everybody has their own interests to pursue, but that these differ, and one must act to satisfy one’s own. That which is ‘right’ here is relative, and involves a ‘deal’, or whatever is deemed a fair exchange.

Conventional reasoning is fundamentally conformist. Its first sub-stage relates to an ‘interpersonal accord and conformity orientation’. This entails a perspective of the individual in relationship with other individuals where the emphasis is on living up to other’s expectations and conforming to the norms of the role one assumes. The second sub-stage is an ‘authority and social-order maintaining orientation’, and this relates to a stage of reasoning where ‘right’ is considered as a function of an act’s utility to the system in which it is affected. As such, the status quo is preserved in order to keep the system running, and is only challenged when it conflicts with other already fixed and established modes of systemic regulation.

Kohlberg’s third stage – post-conventional – involves the capacity for holistic critical thinking, the type of which is able to challenge assumptions and forge novel connections. The first sub-stage is the ‘social contract orientation’. This stage begins to understand that the value of a moral perspective is a function of it’s inclusivity, and this leads, potentially (though there is less evidence for the existence of the 6^th and final of Kohlberg’s stages) to the stage based in ‘universal ethical principles’. Here one follows one’s own self-defined ethical code of conduct, and while one is able to integrate and abide by the norms and values of the system of which one is a part, one is able to challenge those norms where appropriate, based on a capacity for impartial, yet ethically mature critical analysis of the situation of note.

As said, Kohlberg’s theory was established through research conducted in schools where it was the crucial act of democratic engagement, dialogue and collective problem solving that was found to be key to movement through these stages. This ties in also with Vygotskian ideas concerning the importance of collaborative learning.

This type of political/democracy education and engagement empowers the individual. Through it, they are able to assert their right to autonomy in contributing to and influencing the whole of which they form a part, and as such, gain a powerfully important sense of self-efficacy in being able to affect change where needed. This surely a massively important part of the educational system’s overall remit. I appreciate that there have been challenges to Kohlberg’s theory, but yet regardless of all the theoretical baggage of stage models and Piagetian constructivism, it is my feeling that something important has been captured here in terms of the manner in which schools may turn out fully rounded, politically literate and morally mature citizens.

Research has shown that levels of political engagement in the UK are at woefully poor levels. Yet, I wonder whether some of this could be changed at the grassroots level if students were given the opportunity for such democratic empowerment and autonomy as was involved in Kohlberg’s research in the school setting more widely? In such a situation, the student’s experienced sense of self-efficacy in influencing positive change, and their experienced maturation in moral reasoning could obviate the less than perfect example set by professional politicians, as students would no longer be relying on that example as their sole exposure to socio-political process. This seems to be something that is being discussed widely in the contemporary research literature, and I would be interested to hear any thoughts people have on the topic.

Mindfulness and PSHE in schools

I would like to use my blog space this week to discuss a phenomenon that I find very interesting. This is the introduction of mindfulness practice into schools and education. More broadly, this relates to the degree to which we believe schools and the educational establishment have a role to play in a student’s wellbeing and personal development.

Mindfulness has been defined as the “application of pure, nonreactive awareness to immediate experience” (Brown, 2006), and as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment” (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145). You can find out more about mindfulness from our very own Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice.

Mindfulness has been the subject of extensive interest in the scientific literature over the last decade or more, in large part, owing to the relative ease with which this traditional Buddhist practice has been able to be translated into a secular tool of demonstrable clinical utility. This initially emerged in the form of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an intervention originally formulated for the treatment of chronic pain (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).  Since then, with the emergence of randomised controlled trials, the practise has been shown to bring about significant improvements in a wide range of areas of clinical interest (Baer, 2003).

These benefits exist across a number of dimensions, from cognitive function, in terms of improvements in focused and selective attention (e.g. Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007; Tang et al., 2007); to mental health, such as the reduction of symptoms of distress as demonstrated in both clinical and non-clinical populations (e.g. Jha et al., 2007; Ma & Teasdale, 2004; Speca, Carlson, Goodey & Angen, 2000; Williams, Kolar, Reger, & Pearson, 2001); the enhancement of wellbeing, in terms of positive mood (Nyklicek & Kuijpers, 2008; Shapiro, Oman & Thoresen, 2008), self-esteem and optimism (Bowen et al., 2006) and self-compassion and empathy (Shapiro, Schwartz, & Bonner, 1998; Shapiro, Brown, & Biegel, 2007); and also in the realms of physical health, relating to improvements in the capacity to manage chronic pain (e.g. Grossman, Tiefenthaler-Gilmer, Raysz, & Kesper, 2007; Morone, Greco, & Weiner, 2008), improved neuroendocrine and immune functioning (Davidson et al., 2003; Tang et al., 2007) and improvements in health-related behaviours such as reductions in binge eating (Kristeller & Hallett, 1999) and substance misuse (Bowen et al., 2006).

Now, a project has emerged in the UK, directed by the Oxford Mindfulness Centre at Oxford University and the Cambridge Wellbeing Institute at Cambridge, to consider whether mindfulness practices could be of benefit in the educational setting.

To my knowledge (let me know if you are aware of any others), only one study has been done looking at the efficacy of mindfulness to produce the kind of benefits in the educational setting as it has done in others. The principal finding of this study was a positive correlation between the amount of mindfulness practice time, and the experienced improvement in subjective wellbeing.

As the authors discuss in the above paper, though there have been efforts made within schools to place an emphasis on the wellbeing of the student as a whole (such as with the introduction of ‘Personal, Social and Health Education’ (PSHE) classes into the curriculum in 2008), the idealised outcome measures of these interventions are usually negative (i.e. the reduction of a particular variable, such as depressive symptoms or bullying). Common sense dictates, however, that preventative interventions in the PSHE realm, ones that focus on the enhancement of those variables (wellbeing, self-efficacy, improved attention, empathy, prosocial behaviour, for example) that are likely to obviate the emergence of others that might later be the necessary focus of reduction efforts, would surely be the optimal approach to kids’ wellbeing and personal development (obviously, in company with retained interventions aimed at the reduction of negative behaviours if and when they might arise).

Mindfulness is definitely the kind of intervention that takes this positive approach. That is, it focuses on the enhancement of a range of positive outcomes, yet also has been shown to hold significant benefits in the reduction of problem behaviours. Perhaps then it might be considered as having a potentially significant contribution to make to the PSHE agenda?

Another factor that rises in my mind around all this is dual, and relates to the fact that a large number of parents might place little or no emphasis on the child’s sense of wellbeing, personal efficacy, empathy and prosocial behaviour, nor on their capacity to institute proactive methods in their daily life to improve them. This, when tied in with the amount of pressure we put on kids to perform in the current educational context, and the inevitable stress and anxiety this causes them, makes for a situation where kids might very well experience a significantly lower quality of life than otherwise possible, and might significantly underperform owing to their relative inability to positively respond to the challenges they are faced with.

The introduction of mindfulness into schools allows the educational system to efficaciously extend the significant role it has taken on with the introduction of PSHE in the positive promotion of greater wellbeing, personal development and a higher quality of life, as well as the more traditional functions of the present system. This has the power to negate some of the disadvantages shared by kids coming from homes where their sense of wellbeing and their overall quality of life (rather than just what they are ‘doing’) are not valued. It therefore strikes me that mindfulness, or similar practices/techniques, might have an important role to play in the educational setting, and I would be really interested to hear other people’s opinion on this.

Arithmetic processing and mathematics education – a whole new ball game?

In my blog this week I would like to explore some issues involved in mathematics education, and arithmetic processing. This was inspired by Samantha’s talk last Monday, and it set off a train of questions for me. Firstly, I started wondering about how the 25 learning principles, especially those focusing on such effects as perceptuo-motor grounding, the use of stories, explanation, the asking of deep-questions and cognitive flexibility, could exist in as powerful a form in a subject with such apparently little semantic content as mathematics? This question stems from a belief that has been building for me over the course of this module so far, that one of the fundamental mechanisms underlying the above named facilitatory effects on learning, is variously engendered deep-semantic rather than shallow-perceptual processing. In order for deep-semantic processing to be possible however, the code-variable with which one is working must have semantic, or meaning value. Words have semantic value because they mean something. But, I asked, to what degree do mathematical equations have semantic value, in a traditional sense, and what does this mean for the efficacy of the principles above mentioned in mathematics tuition?

I started off with some neurocognitive literature on arithmetic processing. I found that it has been documented that numerical values, both in Arabic numerals (e.g. ‘1’) and depicted in language (e.g. ‘four’) do hold semantic value, and actually elicit a greater magnitude of the N400 component on ERP measures, a component that is specifically related to semantic integration processes, when the presented equations or sums are incongruous. This is the same as one would expect as with the traditional N400 effect when incongruous words are incorporated into an otherwise meaningful sentence. However, it has also been shown that numerical information is neurally represented in an area of the brain, the bilateral intraparietal sulcus, which is very much distinct from the traditional locales (temporal regions) that show activation for lexical access. So, numerical information does have semantic value, but in a way that is different to regular word processing. What does this mean for mathematics education? Is its still reasonable to communicate numerical information to students and expect them to be able, if sufficiently interested, to process semantically and with the same facilitatory effect as they would if it was just purely linguistic information?

I found this not to be the case. In fact, I found some great stuff on just how massively important process such as self-explanation, elaboration and deep-questions are for mathematics education. Cifarelli conducted a study looking at the development of mental representations in arithmetic problem solving situations. In a manner that challenges the classical conception of cognitive representations that learners form in particular problem solving contexts, as static containers of information that are simply transported across different learning scenarios, Cifarelli notes that a new and more dynamical approach to understanding such representations is emerging. In this sense, mental representations are understood to be capable of malleable (re)organisation, development and increasing structural sophistication as the learner attempts to make sense of the problems they are faced with. This was supported in Cifarelli’s experiment, which found learners to progress through three stages of increasingly sophisticated representation construction and organisation, as they attempted to work through arithmetic problems. Crucially for our current considerations, each of these stages was supported in their development by processes of verbal self-explanation, description, and elaboration, all of which are key to deep-semantic processing.

The first stage involved ‘recognition’, and this occurred when learners had organised their conceptual structure in relation to a particular problem sufficiently to recognise its similarity with other problems. They were thus able to recognise and apply the usefulness of previously learnt problem solving skills. As Cifarelli notes, however, this still remains a relatively primitive strategy.

The second was ‘re-presentation’, and this involved learners’ ability to perform cognitive operations on the previously learnt problem solving skills in a manner that was verbally carried out, so as to anticipate inconsistencies in its application to a new arithmetic problem. This allowed them to hypothetically explore the problem’s contours before judging whether this was something they had encountered before.

The third level was described as ‘structural abstraction’, involving learners being able to perform abstracted cognitive operations on their representations of problem solving hypotheses, so that they might be malleably adapted to the situation in hand, prior to their implementation. This obviously involves a much more sophisticated capacity to flexibly perform operations on operations, through a procedure of verbal elaboration and exploration of the problem considered.

This led me to see to a point that was actually already implicit in my mind from the beginning of exploring this issue. That is that mathematics is a subject where it is perhaps MOST important to engage students in elaborative processes of problem consideration in order for that deep-semantic processing to occur, that so facilitates understanding. This is the difference between those maths or stats classes – we’ve all had them – where the teacher can either make or break your resonant understanding of a mathematical process (such as an equation), through its explanation and exploration in the form of a perceptuo-motor grounded story or through the use of semantically-rooted examples. As Cifarelli shows, however, this then must be a process that students take upon themselves, in order to be able to form the increasingly sophisticated, informed and malleable conceptual representations needed to solve progressively challenging arithmetic problems.

I found this a really interesting issue to consider, and would welcome any thoughts anyone may have.

The educational revolution and the question of intelligence – a response to Sir Ken Robinson

Thanks so much, Jesse, for putting up the Ken Robinson talks from TED. I had seen them before, but it was great to see them again and consider Sir Ken’s message in light of our present educational contemplations. A few points came up for me as a result of watching, and I would like to share them here.

A powerful thread running through both talks is Sir Ken’s point that our educational systems have focussed their attention on a very specific commodity – the evocation of our best performance-based output. This, he rightly says, is very likely the result of the continued momentum established within the educational establishment after its initiation during, and to meet the needs of, the industrial revolution. Very aptly, he makes the point that this emphasis “no longer serves us”.

An important point tied into this is the idea that we must begin to consider intelligence as much more of a multifaceted phenomenon than the previous “singular conception of ability” has allowed. In this connection, he suggests that one of the reasons that so many people today pass through our educational systems without ever really being able to access and then explore the talents they inevitable have, is that our educational emphasis is so one-dimensional, focussing just purely on a core group of subjects – mathematics, language and the sciences – and that performance in these subjects is considered an index of intelligence itself.

This resonated with me in a manner that brought up both points of agreement and qualified disagreement. In relation to the former, it has long been my opinion that a clear difference between the poor, moderate and very best quality higher educational establishments lies in the fact that in the poor and moderate quality institutions, a student’s (perhaps unconventional) areas of passionate interest will so often be rejected with “But what job are you going to do with that?”, whereas in the high quality establishments, such interests are encouraged with injunction, “Ok, great, do it, we will support you in this to be one of the very best”.

Anecdotally, I find this to be supported by the story of a good friend of mine who studied Medieval Languages at Cambridge. I have no doubt that had she gone to so many other universities, her passion and interest would have been met with the response, “But what job are you going to do with that?” This friend of mine is now finishing a PhD at Bristol in Human Geography (an area of interest very much inspired by her language studies), where she has been undertaking qualitative research on the challenging realities of life for refugees attempting to illegally cross international borders to find asylum. This is a story of someone whose unconventional interests in language and diversity in human populations were encouraged and supported, and that have now blossomed into a new form as a result of her educational journey. How much of a shame would it have been if she had been met with “But what job are you going to get with that?”

I do have a couple of qualified reservations about Sir Ken’s talks, though. It is true that research is increasingly documenting the reality that intelligence is NOT a unitary construct, and we actually have a number of different ‘lines’ of intelligence. Howard Gardner at Harvard has been researching this for quite some time, and he now posits that we have eight forms of intelligence – linguistic; logical-mathematical; spatial; musical; bodily kinaesthetic; interpersonal; intrapersonal; and naturalist. This ties into Sir Ken’s point on the idea that for so long, our educational establishments have considered intelligence only in terms of the linguistic and logical-mathematical lines, and that large numbers of students demonstrating more diverse talents have been marginalised. All of this I agree with.

An area where I think sir Ken may be wading into more complicated water, however, is when he suggests that all of these difference forms of intelligence are equally valid. Now, my argument against this is not value-based (at least not explicitly), but is functional. The difficulty rests in the degree to which any one or more forms of intelligence may be supervenient (that is, asymmetrically dependent on, so that A is dependent on B for its development, but B is not dependent on A) on any other form or forms of intelligence. I raise this issue as models of cognitive development have, and still do suggest that not only is our capacity to understand the world and the amazing systems of dynamical relationships that constantly surround us dependent on our capacity for increasingly sophisticated cognitive operations, but that these forms of cognitive development are themselves dependent on the kinds of learning and problem solving skills only really learnt in subjects that focus on the linguistic and logical-mathematical forms of intelligence. Additionally, in a manner that has been surprising to many, research also supports the strong form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: that our linguistic capacity actually constrains and limits our capacity to understand the world. Thus, it may be that in some strong or weak form (I remain open to both), our abilities in the linguistic and logical-mathematical lines of intelligence development constrain our abilities within the other lines of intelligence development.

Naturally, in some situations this may definitely not be the case. Kinaesthetic intelligence may be very much distinct from linguistic intelligence, for instance, as the former is ‘written’ in motor codes, and the latter in semantic codes. Still, though, I find it somewhat rash to suggest, at this point at least, that if a child loves dance and music (kinaesthetic and musical intelligence focus), but simply does not resonate with the linguistic and logical-mathematical based classes, then they should be allowed to focus less on the latter. Of course this is a choice that an adolescent should have the opportunity to make once they are beginning to specialise (though the degree to which that starts WAY to early in the UK is a whole other issue!), but while the incredibly important process of cognitive development is occurring, which is one that constrains our ability to understand the world at large, I would be wary of allowing such a thing to take place.

This does not mean that other forms of intelligence should not be valued, supported or nurtured. They absolutely should, though I still feel that does not mean devaluing the centrality, at least for a portion of a child’s educational experience, of the more linguistic and logical-mathematical-based subjects that are so crucial for development. Who knows, perhaps with such a broadening of focus, we might actually find that human beings’ capacity to relate to and interact with the world is greatly enhanced when such other lines of focus are given more emphasis. I think this is very likely.

This is all part of what Sir Ken is getting at, I think, when he contrasts the narrow-focus, performance-based educational system that arose from the demands of the industrial revolution and that we have inherited, with the type of broad-focus psychosocial-development-centred educational system we have the opportunity to build at this time. Such a system would necessarily be founded on new holistic values that integrate the importance of psychosocial development and deep learning with empirical research findings, and this is a great focus of our class.

Deep questions and the Socratic method – a response

So, I would like to use my main blog contribution this week to discuss a couple of points from Abigail’s talk on Deep Questions and the Socratic method. I really thought this was a great talk, as it managed to maintain the integrity of the question’s scope (that asking large-scale questions is deeply important within educational learning environments – and the world at large), whilst simultaneously considering some of the practical implications and specifics of the issues involved.

Something that figured for me strongly throughout the talk was the relation between the depth of the questions asked and the depth of processing that is then evoked in their consideration. Specifically, when one asks a ‘deep-level’ question on a topic, it necessitates the elaboration of the relevant information and its processing on the level of meaning; that is, on the level of semantics. This reminded me of some of the points made by Bjork, and also of Craik and Lockhart’s Levels of Processing model of memory retention. This model demonstrated experimental evidence that people’s retention of information is significantly improved when it is processed semantically (“yes, but what does that mean?”), rather than just perceptually (simply reading the words, or hearing them spoken by a teacher).

From a neurocognitive perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Cognitively, our entire mental world is considered to be composed of vast semantic networks of informational ‘nodes’ arranged in constellational forms – “this piece of info linked with these pieces of info, which are also linked with these pieces of info, which are…”, and so on. Necessarily then, when a deep question is asked, processing has to occur at the level of semantic meaning. Additionally, when we ask “but what does that mean?”, we are then initiating an integration process, where this new question (and all the initially ‘freefloating’ pieces of information associated with it) are progressively integrated and cognitively organised into our semantic networks.

From a neural perspective, the efficacy of this process in producing greater retention and better learning also makes sense. ERP studies have shown that while perceptual processing can occur as quickly as 100-200 ms after exposure to a stimulus (the collection of a set of words from a teacher’s mouth, for instance – remember the teacher’s voice in the Charlie Brown cartoons?!), semantic processing (processing at the level of “but what does that mean?”) doesn’t occur until around 400 ms subsequent to exposure. Though virtually all stimuli in our environment are likely to be processed perceptually, far less are processed semantically, and the N400 component, which is the neural signature of this semantic processing, is said to involve the beginning of information being processed on ‘higher’ cognitive levels.

So, coming back to Abigail’s talk on the asking of deep questions and the Socratic method, I wonder whether this could be seen as a method for evoking such a depth of processing in students? In terms of the practicalities of how this could rightfully work in an educational setting, I am very mindful of Jesse and Aaron’s points on how the kind of open discussion of information that could be entailed in such deep level processing may be quite challenging for more shy students. I feel that this could be where small group seminars could play such a great role, if, and this is coming back to a point made on my first blog, they were conducted in a student-centred fashion by a teacher who is able to create and hold a space in which students feel comfortable to throw thoughts out there and to get stuff wrong from time to time. The point being that in such sessions it would be the depth to which a question has been considered, and the degree to which students attempt to integrate that info into their already extant semantic networks so that novel informational connections are considered, that would be of value – not just getting it right!