A posting on Facebook by Andrew Sutton and Comments that followed prompted the following loose thoughts.
As an account of the functioning of the brain, neuroplasticity demolishes two strong and long-held learning and teaching positions: that, with ageing, the brain somehow seized up and that certain children were born ‘ineducable’. As illustrations, the former is neatly expressed in the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and the latter in the persistence in the UK until the early 1970s of schools for the ‘educationally sub-normal’.
As far as this lay person can tell, until as recently as the 1980s the typical neuroscientist shared that view - that brain functions were fixed and that new neurons were not created after birth. As far as education and educators were concerned, this according comfortably with the notion of IQ as fixed (and, in so far as that was so, undepinned assumptions then about teaching and learning) and with the wilder notions (and not so wild) of the eugenicists (brain capacity, intelligence, educability and race, for instance). In such an intellectual landscape (scaffolded by “research”) I, and whole generations of teachers then and later, were trained and practiced. All this, I found then and I find even more so now, a dispiriting and defeatist view of humankind and human potential.
We now know that the brain continues throughout life to change and adjust and can do so, for example, through teaching. But that takes us from neuroscience to pedagogy. I heard something of Vigotskii and Luria at Goldsmiths while a post-graduate training to be a teacher in 1969. I read something of Ivan Illich around that time too when I taught in Kenya. Nearly 25 years later I came across conductive education, Andras Petö and Dr Maria Hari. Whilst on that particular late journey, I read “Changing Children’s Minds” by Reuven Feuerstein. In these glimmerings, was a vision of human potential cast in Hope, the possibility of transformation, given appropriate teaching.
I doubt, somehow, that Andras Petö was aware in the 1950s of brain plasticity, albeit that I have read that the concept was first proposed as long ago as the 1890s. I suspect that conductive education grew out of observation, trial and error, operational practice, hard work and experience.
It would not be correct, therefore, in my view, in any effective sense, to say that conductive education is based on brain plasticity. Rather, conductive education is based on, or in or is, a pedagogy, the practice of teaching and learning, both formally and informally.
There is certainly no straight line even now (despite the assertions of the ‘brain gym’ people) between brain research and the practice of teaching and learning. Yes, the huge advances in the understanding of the functioning of the brain, such as plasticity, can help others understand, as a possibility at least, what conductive education asserts – that transformation is possible. But it cannot, perhaps one should add “as yet”, offer much to pedagogy or to the every day business of teaching and learning conductively.
That is not to imply, in any way, that educators, conductors or teachers, should ignore neuroscience. Far from it. In 2002, the OECD published “Understanding the Brain: Towards a New Learning Science”, a collaboration between “the two research communities” of brain research and the learning sciences. The work is already ‘dated’ in some respects. One wonders what collaborations elsewhere might have been reported since? It would be very interesting to know.
Next week, on Tuesday 21st October, Action Cerebral Palsy's 4th oral evidence session of the Parliamentary Enquiry into Cerebral Palsy at the House of Commons will include evidence from neuroscientists. I shall look forward to reading the report of it.