As the host mentions in this excellent conversation, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s work essentially provides the neurobiological basis for progressive education.
Excerpted below are selected quotes from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s work.
In short, learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
This and other evidence suggests that meaningful learning is actually about helping students to connect their isolated algorithmic skills to abstract, intrinsically emotional, subjective and meaningful experiences.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
The basic premise is that when learning and knowledge are relatively devoid of emotion, when people learn things by “rote” without internally driven motivation and without a sense of interest or real-world relevance, then it is likely that they won’t be able to use what they learn efficiently in the real world.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Without the appropriate emotions, individuals may have knowledge but they likely won’t be able to use it effectively when the situation requires. Emotions are, in essence, the rudder that steers thinking.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Neuroscientific evidence suggests that we can no longer justify learning theories that dissociate the mind from the body, the self from social context.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
People in the field of education often begin with a preconception that biology refers to traits that children are born with, that are fixed and unfold independent of experience, while children’s social and cultural experiences, including schooling, are at the mercy of these biological predispositions, somehow riding on top of, but not influencing, biology. However, current research in neuroscience reinforces the notion that children’s experiences shape their biology as much as biology shapes children’s development. The fields of neuroscience and more broadly biology are leading education toward analyzing the dynamic relationship between nurture and nature in development and schooling. A more nuanced understanding of how biology and experience interact is critically relevant to education. As neuroscientists learn about which aspects of experience are most likely to influence biology and vice versa, educators can develop increasingly tailored educational experiences, interventions, and assessments.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Instead of one brain area, learning involves actively constructing neural networks that functionally connect many brain areas. Because of the constructive nature of this process, different learners’ networks may differ, in accordance with the person’s neuropsychological strengths and predispositions and with the cultural, physical, and social context in which the skills are built (Immordino-Yang, 2008).
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
The brain is a dynamic, plastic, experience-dependent, social, and affective organ. Because of this, the centuries-long debate over nature versus nurture is an unproductive and overly dichotomous approach to understanding the complexities of the dynamic interdependencies between biology and culture in development. New evidence highlights how humans are fundamentally social and symbolic beings (Herrmann, Call, Hernandez-Lloreda, Hare, & Tomasello, 2007), and just as certain aspects of our biology, including our genetics and our brains, shape our social, emotional, and cognitive propensities, many aspects of our biology, including processes as fundamental as body growth, depend on adequate social, emotional, and cognitive nurturance. Learning is social, emotional, and shaped by culture!
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
In addition, it is now becoming increasingly evident that emotion plays a fundamental role not only in background processes like motivation for learning but also in moment-to-moment problem solving and decision making.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
In the past, techniques and ideas from so-called brain-based education have led to the formation of neuromyths—oversimplified, misunderstood, or misapplied notions whose integration into educational contexts is unjustified and, in some cases, detrimental or even dangerous (Goswami, 2006). Instead, findings from neuroscience must be carefully implemented and evaluated, starting in educational microcosms such as research schools, where students and faculty partner with cognitive neuroscientists in the design and assessment of research.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Although our coordinated neuroscientific and classroom studies are still in progress, educating for dispositions of mind is not new—in fact it is highly consistent with a century of educational research and theory (for example, Dewey, Montessori, Bruner, Perkins, Gardner), as well as with Doug’s decades of experience working with successful progressive public secondary schools. But tying these dispositions to neural development, life success, and mental health gives this effort new urgency, and points us due north in an attempt to reimagine adolescents’ schooling. Evidence suggests that educators can learn to recognize, model, and support the development of these dispositions if they know what kind of narratives to listen for and what kind of learning experiences lead to these patterns of thinking.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Why is the narrative building process so compelling to teenagers, and so tied to their growth and well-being? In adolescence, the emotional engine that drives the hard work of learning comes from connecting the goings-on, procedures, and tasks of the here-and-now to newly emerging big-picture ideas that, in essence, become a person’s abstract narratives. Crucially, these stories are connected to individuals’ sense of self and values, and to their scholarly skills, resulting in agentic scholarly identity, durable understanding, and transferable capacities. To get a sense of why, we return to the brain.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Today, there is a renewed focus on whole-learner approaches in schools, districts, and philanthropy, though now with explicit commitments to cultural responsiveness, trauma-informed practices, and restorative justice. Our findings reinforce the importance of these efforts, which focus on pedagogies that support youth in reworking the kinds of abstract narratives they create to affirm their lives, experiences, identities, values, decisions, and possible futures. By situating daily happenings in systems-level contexts with bigger, personal meaning, these pedagogies support youth learning to engage with, but also transcend and eventually reinvent, the here-and-now.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
New research on the connections between adolescents’ narrative building and brain development aligns closely with old lessons from progressive practices. Adolescent learners thrive when provided an environment conducive to building strong, personal narratives that leverage the emotional power of big ideas and abstract meaning-making in the service of motivated work on concrete tasks and skills. Presently, our public school system undercuts much of the approach we outline here, typically focusing on the here-and-now, the what-can-you-recall. Though student-driven approaches are often employed well in extracurricular activities and nonacademic spaces like the arts and afterschool clubs (Mehta & Fine, 2019), success in academics overwhelmingly relies on fast and rote activities. Students build narratives anyway, of course—but these, sadly, do not usually point kids in enlivening and healthy directions.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
The thing is, learning is essential…but it is essential because you need fodder to be able to develop around, not because it is the end point, but we call learning the ‘outcome’, ‘learning outcomes’, and then we’re done! That’s what school’s about: it’s about producing learning outcomes. But it’s not. The learning outcomes are just the midway to what you’re really supposed to be working on, which is: how did learning these things, how did engaging with thinking about these things develop you as a thinker, as a person, as a citizen? Those are the outcomes we should be caring about but we think about them as on a separate track from the learning. There’s the math, and then there’s the other stuff…which is kind of ridiculous.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Future Learning Design Podcast – The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
You have to be safe. You have to have time.
Safety and time.
Future Learning Design Podcast – The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
…human nature is to nurture and be nurtured.
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
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