From Serendip

SCIENCE AS EXPLORATION INSTITUTE 2001

The Brain As Inquirer

Approaches to education, from the tabula rasa to diversity to ... ?

• Historical context
• From the brain perspective
• Problems/challenges

The learning experience ... having one

The brain's innate learning equipment ... (Learning as inquiring; all humans are born as scientists)

• A unique and valuable individual perspective
• An inclination to "make sense of things", to tell stories
• Intrinsic output variability
• The ability to see things in different ways
• The ability to learn both unconsciously and consciously, and to test one against the other
• The ability to update stories based on new experiences ... of one's own and of other peoples' ... and to share them with others
• Summary ... and update

Implications for educational practice (the neurobiologist's key to education)

• Students learn better if they're interested
• Students learn better if they're active
• Students learn better if they're engaged, with each other and with "teachers", in a shared learning/inquiring experience
• Students learn better if they know the task is not to be "right" but to continually become "less wrong"
• Student diversity and unconscious knowledge needs to be recognized and appreciated as an asset
• Science needs to be taught not as a body of knowledge to be mastered but as the natural process of "getting less wrong" that it is ... and can be used to support/encourage a similar renwal throughout the educational system.

Resources to support change

• You, your colleagues
• The web
• Serendip
• Bryn Mawr summer institues
• Project Kaleidoscope
• and ... (we're all in this together)