Networks of Mind: Learning, Culture, Neuroscience

Kathy Hall, Alicia Curtin, Vanessa Rutherford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317913757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

This ground breaking book is unique in bringing together two perspectives on learning - sociocultural theory and neuroscience. Drawing on both perspectives, it foregrounds important developments in our understanding of what learning is, where and how learning occurs and what we can do to understand learning as an everyday process.

Leading experts from both disciplines demonstrate how sociocultural ideas (such as the relevance of experience, opportunity to learn, environment, personal histories, meaning, participation, memory, and feelings of belonging) align with and reflect upon new understandings emerging from neuroscience concerning plasticity and neural networks.

Among the themes critically examined are the following:

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• Mind and brain

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• Culture

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• Ability and talent

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• Success and failure

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• Memory

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• Language

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• Emotion

Aimed at and accessible to a broad audience and drawing on both schools of thought, Networks of Mind employs case studies, vignettes and real life examples to demonstrate that, though the language of sociocultural theory and that of neuroscience appear very different, ultimately the concepts of both perspectives align and converge around some key ideas. The book shows where both perspectives overlap, collide and diverge in their assumptions and understanding of fundamental aspects of human flourishing. It shows how neuroscience confirms some of the key messages already well established by sociocultural theory, specifically the importance of opportunity to learn. It also argues that the ascendency of neuroscience may result in the marginalization of sociocultural science, though the latter, it argues, has enormous explanatory power for understanding and promoting learning, and for understanding how learning is afforded and constrained.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

Making the case for examining sociocultural theory and neuroscience

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Rationale and orientation

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the book. It highlights the main themes and messages that will be developed throughout the chapters. It provides a rationale for the focus of the work and gives a flavour of some of the big ideas that will be fleshed out more comprehensively and critically later. It explains the background to the writing of the book and introduces the author team.

Some socioculturalists claim that sociocultural theorizing is on the rise and that culture is cutting edge, frontier thinking (Roth and Tobin, 2007). More recently, other researchers have made similar claims for neuroscience and for ‘cultural neuroscience’ in particular (Kitayama and Park, 2010). It is appropriate and timely, therefore, to open up such claims for scrutiny and to question their significance in the context of learning, teaching and human flourishing generally. How can we make use of culture as an analytic tool for our work as teachers, researchers, policy makers? How is culture understood by sociocultural and neuroscientific researchers? What are the assumptions and grounds underlying the sociocultural and neuroscientific perspectives and how, if at all, are they complementary? We hope this book will contribute to thinking and practice on such questions. It will examine ways of thinking about culture that can pay dividends for how we foster learning, for how we frame success, competence, failure, and so on, and for how we research learning.

As we write this introduction (17 February 2013), an article in the science section of the New York Times announces that President Obama's administration is planning a ten-year scientific project to examine the brain and ‘build a comprehensive map of its activity’. The project, to be called ‘The Brain Activity Map’, is expected to trigger some three billion dollars over the next ten years. In his State of the Union address, the President cited brain research as an example of how the government should ‘invest in the best ideas’. The designation by a previous USA President of the 1990s as the ‘decade of the brain’ had already greatly expanded research opportunities and funding streams in neuroscience, with media attention spiralling as a consequence. It is clear that the neurosciences and their sub-disciplines are growing in popularity, status and visibility. Witness the level of interaction on the Internet, TED Talks, TV programmes (e.g. Charlie Rose's Brain Series on Bloomberg TV and Susan Greenfield's Brain Story on the BBC). Because of the recent and rapid expansion of work in neuroscience and its claims about learning and development, as well as its popularity and uptake by educators, it is important to explore its permeation into understandings relevant to education. We set out, therefore, to review the emerging insights from this line of inquiry, explore its fit with established concepts and theories which have emanated from sociocultural science, and consider its utility for education.

Sociocultural ideas like identity, power and culture have salience for many researchers and practitioners but they are not dominant or taken for granted by educators, policy makers and researchers interested in learning. Why sociocultural theory has not enjoyed greater status and application among those seeking to understand and enable development is worth pondering briefly at the outset. There are, we believe, some possible explanations for this state of affairs. First, the ideas are complex, complicated and contentious and they draw on a range of disciplines and theories, including psychology, philosophy, sociology, education, history, semiotics and structuralism, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and cultural and discourse studies. Like all theoretical perspectives, sociocultural theorizing has evolved its own concepts, language and vocabulary which challenge dominant and powerful ways of thinking about and facilitating learning.

However, complexity and interdisciplinarity are inadequate explanations for the slow, if not absent, uptake of sociocultural themes in education policy making and practices. The second explanation, we suggest, is much more relevant. The distributed nature of human thinking, action and meaningmaking which is the hallmark of sociocultural thinking conflicts in various ways with Western individualism, intellectualism and rationality. The preeminence of the individual divorced from context, structure and institution, as the source and focus of development, has proved highly resilient and resistant to other ways of conceptualizing learning, ability and mind. Thus, an important explanation for the delay in uptake is historical and structural.

Our institutions of learning–schools, colleges and universities–are structured and organized in a manner that privileges personal responsibility and individual achievement. This applies as much to matters of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment as to the physical structure of spaces like rows of tables/desks and lecture theatres. A sociocultural perspective challenges a system that unproblematically attributes successes and failures to individuals and, as such, challenges the way schools function to categorize, select, differentiate and credentialize students without appropriate reference to opportunities to learn. The aspects of schooling that are deeply entrenched and accepted, and power dimensions associated with them, work to ensure the status quo endures. Yet, we know from sociocultural theory itself how practice is never entirely determined but is always open to revision and change.

A further explanation for the limited attention to sociocultural perspectives in learning is the role of traditional psychology in education, with its emphasis on systematically examining phenomena such as personality and self-esteem as if they are variables independent of the social world. Linked to this is another inhibitor–the dominant discourse of quality and effectiveness besieging pedagogy, together with the desire on the part of education policy makers and researchers for ‘scientific respectability’ based on objectivist notions of knowledge and evidence, and ‘what works’, orientations that deny the complexity of people's experiences. Indeed, psychologists themselves (Kirschner and Martin, 2010) have recently called for greater attention within the discipline to the ‘sociocultural turn’ lamenting the overly simplistic, reductive, excessively instrumental and market-driven approaches to concepts such as ‘self’, ‘mind’, ‘emotion’ and ‘identity’.

An argument of the book is that sociocultural theory has significant explanatory power: it offers a rich and fruitful set of theoretical resources for understanding and supporting learning, and if acknowledged by educators, could extend opportunities to learn across the lifespan and do so in more equitable and inclusive ways.

We draw on neuroscience in two key respects. First, we are interested in the way some ideas in neuroscience, though coming from a very different theoretical perspective and set of assumptions, appear to align with fundamental ideas in sociocultural theorizing: for example, the notion of opportunity to learn, lifelong learning and the role of emotions in learning. Neuroscience's emphasis on neuroplasticity and the environment are especially relevant and will be examined in some detail. The neuroscientific idea of how the brain regulates and produces a self, challenges the sociocultural notions of agency and intentionality, and we examine this from both perspectives. Additionally, emerging ideas from neuroscience on the ‘social mind’ and within its own frame of reference, on the social dimension of learning, will be compared and contrasted with sociocultural ideas about mind as distributed.

We are interested in how some aspects of brain science appear to endorse what sociocultural theory has promoted for some time. In particular, we examine the significance of experience and opportunity to learn arising from both perspectives. This is an important focus of the book. We are very aware of the allure of neuroscience, not just for educators and different professional groups, but for members of the public in general. As we prepare this book, a well-known sports broadcaster, Colm Murray, on the Irish national television station, is talking with neuroscientists about his recent diagnosis of motor neuron disease and the fact that he is participating in a drugs trial in search of a cure. As he talks (23 January 2012, RTE1) he refers to his brain as his ‘quintessential essence’, ‘soul’ and ‘identity’. Technologies such as brain imaging capture the public's imagination in their intimation that the mysteries and secrets of human consciousness could finally be revealed.

The second prong of our engagement with neuroscience, then, is more critical and can be illustrated with what might seem an unremarkable vignette from a ‘knowledge exchange’ project that two of us are currently leading. In one of its many discussions (on inclusion and learners designated as having ‘special education needs’) involving a group of teachers and project leaders, one particularly confident, senior teacher, who works in an Autistic Unit attached to a school, argued that children with autism are ‘hard-wired differently’. She argued that they are more creative than non-autistic people and that those closely associated with the technological advances of the computer industry, especially in Silicon Valley in California, exhibit a very high incidence of autism. As an example of the neuromyths which have not gone unchallenged from within the neuroscientific community itself (e.g. Dekker et al., 2012), this vignette is an illustration of how the language of neuroscience has permeated the thinking and undoubtedly the practices of teachers, with inevitable consequences for learners, communities and institutional practices. Because neuroscience has begun to transform understandings of ourselves as teachers it merits critical analysis and review. While we acknowledge and discuss in the chapters that follow the neuroscientific insights that enrich our sociocultural understanding of learning, we think it is also important to attend to how neurodiscourses are infiltrating and shaping the way learning, disability, selfhood, mind, environment, and so on, are talked and written about. In doing this, the book tries to explain why neuroscience is so seductive.

Our line of analysis involves elaboration of how education has appropriated neuro-discourses and how neuroscientists have appropriated educational and even sociocultural discourses. In this regard, we will show how neuroscientists position learning, the learner, knowledge, the teacher and learning contexts. How are the messages and concepts from neuroscience shaping teacher and learner identities and potential identities? We address this by offering an analysis of written and oral texts, performances and events of and for neuroscientists. We draw on published research and claims about neuroscience. As we explain in a moment, we draw on open-ended interviews conducted with neuroscientists, all of whom have published in peer-reviewed neuroscientific journals.

Whether the potential hybridity across the two different discourses proves productive for enhancing learning opportunities is debatable and awaits judgement. The different assumptions, often contradictory, underlying the two perspectives, suggest the need to exercise caution. The book will look closely at these assumptions and consider their implications.

In a recent doctoral seminar in which students were discussing the work of several socioculturalists, one student, keen to know if sociocultural theory ‘works’ in practice, asked the question: What evidence have you that the sociocultural theory works or is effective in practice? It is not an unreasonable question to address in this introduction. The question points to a number of pertinent issues about sociocultural theory that need to be acknowledged at the outset:

• it does not describe or enable some ideal practice and therefore is not the same as, say, ‘critical pedagogy’, whose ideal is social justice (although we believe that a sociocultural orientation on the part of the educator is likely to maximize inclusion and foster social justice in that it directs attention to how opportunities to learn are allocated and denied people);

• it tries to understand and explain human action and the social world, taking the person as an actor in the world and as inseparable from it;

• it offers a vocabulary and a perspective for the way the social world is;

• it provides a way of seeing and analysing social phenomena and has the potential to raise self-awareness and open up new possibilities for understanding and action in relation to the promotion of learning; and,

• it offers a framework for researching important questions and issues in education and in the social sciences more generally.

Context

Linking to our book title and the idea of networks and networking, one of our motivations, both for ourselves and for the reader, needs further elaboration. Not coming from a neuroscientific background, the body of neuroscientific research we draw on in this text derives from our critical study of relevant neuroscientific literature over the past several years and from our participation at the 2011 Wiring the Brain Neuroscientific Conference, during which we conducted interviews with eighteen neuroscientists.

Wiring the Brain is a biennial international neuroscientific conference, held in 2009 and 2011 in Wicklow, Ireland and held at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York in 2013. We attended and presented at Wiring the Brain: Making Connections from the 12th to 15th April 2011 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Powerscourt, Wicklow, Ireland. The goal of that particular meeting was to stimulate cross talk between scientists approaching questions of brain connectivity from traditionally separate disciplines. In an online publicity blog post, organizer Kevin Mitchell, from Trinity College Dublin, writes:

It will bring together world leaders in the fields of developmental neurobiology, psychiatric genetics, molecular and cellular neuroscience, systems and computational neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology. A major goal is to break down traditional boundaries between these disciplines to enable links to be made between differing levels of observation and explanation. We will explore, for example, how mutations in genes controlling the formation of synaptic connections between neurons can alter local circuitry, changing the interactions between brain regions, thus altering the functions of large-scale neuronal networks, leading to specific cognitive dysfunction, which may ultimately manifest as the symptoms of schizophrenia or autism. Though the subjects dealt with will be much broader than that, this example illustrates the kind of explanatory framework we hope to develop, level by level, from molecules to mind.

(Mitchell, 2010)

Over the four days, presentations from speakers were divided into six sessions: Making Connections, Circuit Dynamics, From Genotype to Phenotype, Activity Dependent Development and Plasticity, Connectivity and From Brain to Mind. Of particular interest to us were Circuit Dynamics (network-level and experience-dependent brain mechanisms), Connectivity (the structure and function of large-scale brain networks, their development and the development of new methods to visualize them) and From Brain to Mind (understanding how brain mediates perception, cognition and behaviour). Three keynote presentations were given by Christopher Walsh, Harvard Medical School (Genetics of Human Cognitive Disorders), Gyorgy Buzsaki, Rutgers University (Brain Rhythms and Cell Assembly Sequences in the Service of Cognition) and Carla Schatz, Stanford University (Releasing the Brakes on Synaptic Plasticity: PirB, MHCI and NgR).

The conference was held in association with Neuroscience Ireland and BioMed Central, and boasted a number of public institutions and large corporate sponsors such as: Science Foundation Ireland, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Genentech, Institute of Neuroscience: Trinity College Dublin, Roche, Philips, Hussman Foundation, Novartis, irelandinspires.com, Health Research Board and Pfizer. Exhibitors (placed nicely in the tea/coffee area) included: LaVision BioTec, Brain Vision UK, Integrated DNA Technologies, Agilent Technologies and Molecular Devices. Nature and Neuron helped publicize the event, and a follow-up series of review articles based on the conference were to be published in several of BioMed Central's journal titles, including: BMC Biol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: making the case for examining sociocultural theory and neuroscience
• 2 Defining brain
• 3 The making of minds
• 4 The making of culture
• 5 A heuristic for avoiding a totalizing concept of culture
• 6 Making connections: learning and pedagogy
• 7 Constructing success and failure
• 8 Explaining talent: opportunity to learn
• 9 #Language
• 10 Emotion: my many coloured days
• 11 Coming to mind: telling the story of memory and identity
• 12 Sociocultural and neuroscientific metaphors for understanding learning
• 13 Tensions and struggles over explanations for learning: resisting a neurobiological take over
• 14 Conclusion: claiming science
• Appendix A: A brief illustrated guide to the brain
• Appendix B: Neuroscience glossary
• Appendix C: Sociocultural glossary: a social history of sociocultural theory
• References
• Index