Recently I sat down with Hectalina Donado, my former principal where I taught second and third grade at Colegio Karl C. Parrish in Barranquilla, Colombia. The following reflections are from my notes on this interview, part of a process in constructing a human centered learning design.
Schooled Minds
Harvard graduates and professors were asked about basic scientific concepts, for example “what causes the seasons”, and an overwhelming majority expressed gross misconceptions, citing the earth moving further from the sun in winter as opposed to the tilt of the earth’s axis exposing different hemispheres to the sun for more hours than other phases of the yearly rotation. Probing deeper, the study revealed high school student misconceptions developed from lack of dimensionality in learning. They developed false constructs from graphic representations of abstract three dimensional phenomenon. Two dimensional drawings of an elliptical orbit with an earth seemingly much closer to the sun during its orbit led students to create a “personal universe”, something akin to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.
This recent conversation with Hectalina unpacks how theories of knowledge as a representation system within the brain continue to influence learning design, reflected in the apparent simple efficiency of two dimensional representation over the complexity of embodied experience. Much of what we call “schooling” deals with the development of representational systems often far removed from a real world context.
Circles and Lines
Hectalina tells two stories of circles and lines. Students had been observing fish in an aquarium and decided to create a mural. They had shown curiosity about the bubbles and to create bubbles in two dimensional form, went in search of a tool to create “flattened bubbles”. They brought in cardboard cylinders from toilet paper and paper towel rolls, which they dabbed in paint to stamp circles on paper. Moving from three dimensional observation of bubbles to two dimensional paper, after seeking out the proper tool in the world to create this representation, students then transferred the concept of circle back upon the world - a light bulb viewed from below, a looped earring, a pupil, a running pattern, a seating arrangement.
In another scenario, a teacher was going to have students draw lines across big cutouts of paper. In the Reggio Emilia approach, teachers plan collaboratively in the atelier, normally the central nervous system of the school, surrounded by artifacts of learning - each embedding a narrative of a process in constructing an understanding. The group talked about lines and how this activity might contextualize in students’ life. They began by having students identify lines in the world and then create two-dimensional representations with the tools at hand, paper and pencil. One student drew a zig-zag which almost prompted the teacher to correct. The student explained the zig-zag represented the mountains, which on a clear day you can see from Barranquilla. He had taken the idea of line further, breaking the idea of line to form a series of connected line segments, moving from line-land to flat-land.
Experiencing Color
The night before I talked to Hectalina I had been reading about the teaching methods of Josef Albers, student and teacher at the Bauhaus. Josef Albers later moved to the US, and after Black Mountain College moved to Yale where he created the first Art course on color. Albers designed his course around experiences, believing that students must sense properties of colors, understand their changes in relation to adjacent colors, essentially raising an understanding of color not as scientific fact, but as psychological experience. The color itself does not change but our perception of it changes as it moves over different background colors. Albers believed experience, reflection, and construct precede the teaching of theory.
Brenda Danilowitz writes…
“Albers's holistic view of the world and of life led to his classroom focus on context, contiguity, and relationships among elements as the key to understanding both the real world and the world the artist creates.”
Classrooms, I reflected that night, are our laboratories of learning, where we unlock meaning from the “tools” within the environment - “tools” being methods of experiences, social interaction, physical constructions, mental models, language… Like Albers’ colors, adjacent context is critical. Lines and circles on paper are invitations to reflect on embodied experience, or lead to future experiences. These two ideas, “tools” within a learning environment and the context of the laboratory to the extended world open big questions about how we construct knowledge. How do 2D representations connect to 3D experiences? Should 3D full sensory experience precede representational constructs, such as Montessori students “experiencing” geometric shapes before describing them with language? How might 2D representation frame embodied experiences and reflection? How is all of this bracketed by a larger cultural construct?
Extruded Plastic Dingus
In the Cohen Brothers’s Hudsucker Proxy three identical drawings appear, a circle with a line next to it, to represent three different innovations - a hoola hoop, a twisty straw, and a frisbee. Norville Barnes shows his two dimensional sketch to anyone who will listen and gets incredulous stares. They think he is an imbecile. But as the hoola hoop, or “extruded plastic dingus”, is released, the right kid picks it up and performs waist, foot and neck hoop moves. Mobs of screaming kids then run to the nearest toy store creating hoola hoop mania.
Norville’s sketch representation meant nothing to those he showed it to, they couldn’t extrude the shape from the page. And even when Norville demonstrated the hoola hoop before the board of directors, their adult skepticism blocked them from seeing anything useful or marketable. It took the children to create the culture within and around the hoop. The Cohen Brothers are playfully fictionalizing the story of the hoola hoop, which in real life became a cultural phenomenon. And in real life hoop culture predates the hoola hoop fad as hoops have been used as objects in trans media storytelling in which dance, gesture and hoop forms represent animals, symbols, and storytelling elements. Circling back to Hectalina’s teacher’s inability to decode the zig-zag representation of the child and the layers of experiences recorded that lay dormant, ready to be unlocked - three layers of understanding emerge, experience of the world as 3D mountains as seen from Barranquilla, representation on paper as 2D zig zags, and the surrounding brackets of a cultural context.
Ecological Psychology
James Gibson’s Ecological Psychology develops these two complimentary ideas in how individuals learn from their environments and engage with tools. First, it is not what is inside your head, rather what your head is inside of, the environment itself unlocks knowledge. His second idea is that of affordances, the ability to unlock knowledge from the tools within an environment will depend on the individual’s beliefs, experiences, goals, and abilities with that tool. The student who drew the zig zag mountain representation connected real world observation with the tools of paper and pencil in the learning environment. The Hudsucker board whose bodies no longer wiggled lacked these affordances, while the child’s beginner mind and body used to tinkering with the surrounding world could unlock the potential of the “extruded plastic dingus”. Zooming out, the Cohen Brothers are masters of playing with these cultural brackets.
Similarly the students studying bubbles took their embodied knowledge of bubbles, identified tools within their environment that would project a two dimensional representation, then extruded that form back out into the world exploring the multiple properties of circle, sphere, and movement. These examples illustrate how Gibson questioned the entire mental representational system as something within the mind, but rather as our senses interpreting information out in the world.
When one sees a table, he or she does not have to walk around it, under it, above it to construct a mental representation. The mind creates this simulation, combining information in the environment with that of collected schemata from previous experiences. The process proceeds in an ongoing loop, decoding surroundings, constructing further schema.
Meanwhile our standardized tests often prompt our ability to slide, flip, turn objects, to recognize patterns, but we humans also come equipped to unlock information from our environment making possible the illusions within two dimensional representation, the ability to imagine and build 360 immersive simulations as simple as “Empty” to immersive multiplayer games, to imagining movement through the fourth dimension.
Concerning is elementary students whose screen time on Fortnight far exceeds time spent jumping from boulders, climbing trees, running through the collaborative fantasy play constructed from their minds. They are learning three-dimensional thinking from Minecraft without Making with physical tools of construction. This is not to say that our digital environments should not play a role in developing 360 thinking, rather it should not take the place of physical world experience.
Concerning is elementary students whose screen time on Fortnight far exceeds time spent jumping from boulders, climbing trees, running through the collaborative fantasy play constructed from their minds. They are learning three-dimensional thinking from Minecraft without Making with physical tools of construction. This is not to say that our digital environments should not play a role in developing 360 thinking, rather it should not take the place of physical world experience.
decoding shape transformation #shapecision— Chris Davis (@chrisdaviscng) April 16, 2019
beyond slides, flips, turns, Picasso/Dali deconstructions, and Botero “fatties”https://t.co/8csSjb17HC #cognition #embodiedcognition #makerEd #createEdu #k12 #edtech pic.twitter.com/C0od1b2vse
Enacted Learning
Francisco Varela goes a step further building from three movements - cognitivism, phenomenology, and mindfulness. Appreciating the part of knowledge that is part representation in the head but negating the idea of the mind as mirror to the environment, Varela worked form the perspective of knowledge as experience, action with intent upon the world and reflection on the results of such action to inform further action. Knowledge, then is beyond just the brain but is build through this interplay between brain, sensory organs, and the context of environments. Our constrictions are set by what we cannot sense, what we do not believe in, what we have not formerly experienced, and what capabilities we have not developed. These constraints determine what we afford ourselves as goals.
Varela termed this theory of knowledge, Enactivism, setting groundwork for Embodied Cognition, and more recently Grounded Cognition. But what most differentiates Enactivism is attention paid to mindfulness. In the West, the ultimate goal of mindfulness is the Buddhist monk completely removed from the world. Varela clarifies that the goal of mindfulness is attuning oneself to the immediate world, to clear the clutter in order to focus on the task at hand. For education, this means teachers are designers of environments and experiences to facilitate students attuning to active engagement in the learning objective. Mindfulness in education then is not about escaping to this happy land of bliss, but rather to slow the mind into focus and flow, an embodied learning.
Context and Purpose
What happens when our learning labs only focus on learning as representational models? Early primary students may learn how to draw straight lines on a page but the lines have no meaning beyond the page. High school students may pass the test about the solar system but leave school with a misconceived private universe, unable to explain why it is hot in summer, cold in winter, or in the case of Barranquilleros, why the seasons do not change.
Freshman college students will balk at the idea of writing for an authentic purpose because they have only been taught to satisfy the metrics of a rubric in high school.
Grown professionals will solve the simplest of logic problems, working from rote memory examples without delaying the interpretive mind and work from a beginners mind to see the uniqueness of the problem.
Aging voters will respond with emotional reflexes to loaded media without thinking through a system for what is best for all.
Our “schooling” is much to blame in the removal of learning from an embodied context. In the case of international schools where I have spent most of my professional life, the import of curriculum and content extends this disconnect while the same concepts and skills can be learned through local context. Embodied learning explores this space between mental representation, enacted experience, and cultural context.
decoding #media as a #literacy goal has never been more obvious, #medialiteracy integrates w/ #reading and #writing— Chris Davis (@chrisdaviscng) March 18, 2019
otherwise we graduate illiterate victims of manipulationhttps://t.co/7MHfqRiy8H #k12 #education #edpolicy #writingproject #edtech #makerEd pic.twitter.com/s5c35cecog
Farr Out There
As Hectalina and I finished our tour of her learning spaces, I recognized a couple of parents from our former school, coming to pick up their kids. It dawned on me, the age of these parents - they had graduated out of her initial Reggio Emilia spaces, and now wanted their kids to have the same constructivist experience, the cultural brackets becoming more defined. I remembered our former director, Dr. Farr, someone I believe is a living, breathing proponent of embodied experience. An example, upon arrival, any new teacher who was interested in buying a motorcycle, Farr would personally take us all to the shop. In so many words, the instructions were, go out and explore Barranquilla and Colombia - something we should all do with our surrounding world to truly learn about it.
References
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