Category Archives: Youth Education and Dancing

The New Education: Digital Media Enables Whole Bodies[1]

Posted on by

The New Education:

Digital Media Enables Whole Bodies[1]

August 10, 2009

Sam Gill, PhD

The day that digital media will replace paper textbooks is rapidly approaching as financially distressed States measure the cost savings of digital delivery of information to students.[2] The issue is setting off a debate about the dangers, values, and costs of going digital.  I suspect that the debate will grind on for a few years, yet can anyone doubt the outcome?  Just think of the shifts in the last few years that have quickly been absorbed by society.  Hang out with a six year old (like my granddaughter) and be amazed at the skill and acumen he or she demonstrates at engaging electronic forms of learning and you will glimpse the future role of electronic media in education.  This much is clear, there will be rapidly increasing use of digital means in education at all levels.

The future of education at all levels is changing, yet I believe few school systems are taking bold enough steps to positively embrace the challenge this shift offers.  It is my impression that society simply assumes that, even with a shift to digital media, schools will remain otherwise pretty much as they are now and as they have been for the last century or so.  In this narrow-minded frame the debate is limited to the merits and dangers of digital delivery of textbooks.  This isn’t really a significant issue because the result of this debate is a foregone conclusion.   On this issue it is only the time frame for the transition that remains in question.

Embracing digital media must quickly lead to a New Education, should we imagine it, that might be characterized in these terms:

  • Young people will learn much more and do so faster and more effectively
  • Computers will track the progress of individual students on a real time basis and adjust teaching programming to assist individual student needs and personal interests
  • Based on public expectations for learning, computers will evaluate the whole population and any relevant population segments on a real time basis so that adjustments can be promptly made
  • Students will cease to be grouped with conglomerates of students based on broad age groupings and crude measures of educational progress
  • Students will progress at individual pace rather than an average pace for a group they are somehow identified with
  • Students will learn from internationally renowned teachers and constantly updated methods and materials delivered to them electronically
  • Student learning will be constantly interactive and demanding
  • Students will receive real time evaluation of their work so that mistakes and errors will be immediately identified
  • Student will receive constant positive reinforcement
  • Students will learn in comfortable informal learning environments so that the traditional classroom with aligned chairs and a formal division between teacher and students will disappear
  • New educational furniture and architecture will be designed and built
  • Teachers’ roles will shift in many ways.  Some teachers will be devoted to designing and preparing electronic materials.  Some teachers will serve as local mentors and can be electronically directed to students who need individual personal assistance.  Many teachers will be involved in activities that are not present in current educational environments providing educational and developmental activities that are not currently part of the school system.  I will describe these below.

While the New Education does not presently exist, the technology to accomplish all of this does.

This is but an imaginative sketch of what I believe will unfold in educational environments over the next few years and decades.  It describes what might be called the New Education.  What need be recognized is that education has already shifted as it is practiced by most students of all ages from pre-school through university.  Most students are learning much of what they learn through such media as YouTube and social networks, through games and gaming sites, through blogs and chat rooms.  Students use computers, iPods, cell phones, and gaming devices to learn.  Unacknowledged is the proportion of students in college and university classrooms who spend their time during lecture on such digital media activities rather than taking notes on the lecture.  These students usually do as well as any in their course performances.  Also unacknowledged is the educational importance of these activities, even though they are rarely acknowledged as playing any educational role at all.

Rather than debating the current concern with the use of digital materials and methods, we must boldly and imaginatively accept the challenge to embrace these media and materials and take this as an opportunity to re-invent education at all levels, to create a New Education.  The cost of avoiding the challenge or even delaying our action will result in increasingly ineffective and irrelevant educational systems.  Most current educational institutions have, in my view, already been left behind.   The goal should be “No school left behind.”  So we might embrace an educational system that incorporates the elements I have included above.  But is that enough?

The use of electronic media to deliver content and theoretical materials and ideas to students will free educators to take on a currently little known and broadly ignored, yet absolutely fundamental, dimension to human development and learning, learning and development based on movement, touching, and fun.  Over the last thirty years there has been an increasingly powerful stream of scientific research documenting the importance of these aspects of human development and education.

Research indicates that human development depends on self-actuated movement.  From birth throughout life we realize ourselves in movement.  Research indicates that human development depends on healthy and appropriate touching.  From birth throughout life we respond to healthy and appropriate touching by growing and developing empathy and feelings.  Research indicates that human development depends on bodily personal experiences of community, human relationships, play, and fun.  From birth throughout life we develop along a trajectory of interest, feeling, emotions, and play.   See www.SalsAmigos.org lecture series for some information on this research and how it might be incorporated in education.

In current educational environments there is little opportunity for or encouragement of self-actuated movement, appropriate and healthy touching, emotion and play.  Indeed, the current traditional approach to education actively prohibits these human actions and experiences.  School furniture and architecture inhibit most bodily activity.  Touching is commonly strictly forbidden.  The limitation on movement and touching commonly results in fostering student emotion related to education that might be described as flat or boredom.  Intrinsic motivation associated with words like play and fun are uncommon.

Currently these important developmental elements have been increasingly marginalized for a number of reasons:

  • failure to understand and acknowledge the importance of these elements to human development
  • an antiquated theory of education that focuses on brain/mind paired with the exclusion of the whole body
  • the view that bodily activities are limited to reward for good behavior and extracurricular activities that are secondary in importance and dispensable
  • a practice of the progressive decrease and distance of bodily activities correlating with the advancement of education
  • the embracing of an objectivist understanding of knowledge and reason that eliminates any place for emotion, feelings, empathy, subjectivity, personal engagement, passion
  • increasingly limited funds for extracurricular activities, so that even those in the current educational system who recognize the importance of these elements have decreasing funds to do anything about it

These reasons must be eliminated, giving way to the New Education.

There is no question that with the development of electronic media we are increasingly becoming a sedentary society.  Children play outdoors less than ever before.  Children and adults socialize electronically rather than physically.  Students in schools “text” one another even when physically close enough to speak with one another.  “Friends” has come to be a term almost universally understood to refer to electronic social contacts on Facebook and other social networks.  In light of all the research on brain development and human development these forms exclude elementary features essential to human development, even to being fully human;  these are movement and physical touching contact.

An enormous opportunity exists in embracing the electronic delivery and educational processes.  The efficiency and effectiveness of these media can allow us an opening to reinvent education, to create a New Education that will support fuller human development including human movement, healthy and appropriate touching, and intrinsically motivated (fun and playful) activities.  Electronic delivery and processes should also be complemented by embodied experiential learning experiences where students have challenges to apply and engage their knowledge in actual, rather than virtual, actions and environments.  Freeing up resources currently devoted to traditional delivery of education will readily be used in these bodied experiential activities that will greatly enhance what we understand as educational.  My experience with and development of the dance form SalsAmigos is an important example of the type of activity that must be included in the New Education (see www.SalsAmigos.org especially the six-part flash video lecture presentation series).

The New Education will produce highly educated and broadly developed people more physically and mentally fit than we can perhaps currently even imagine.

[1] Copyright © by Sam Gill

[2] See Tamar Lewin “Moving Into a Digital Future, Where Textbooks Are History” in The New York Times (front page, August 9, 2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=moving%20into%20a%20digital%20future&st=cse .

Children, Imagination, and Philosophy[1]

Posted on by

Children, Imagination, and Philosophy[1]

Blog – August 2009

Sam Gill

Philosopher Anthony Gottlieb spoke about children and philosophy, as reported by an interviewer, “Philosophy is the human mind at play and we all have a deep hunger for it, Anthony Gottlieb believes. Just look at how children pose philosophical questions to the point of being tiresome, he says, confident any parent knows whereof he speaks. But children’s questions are tiresome in the way all philosophical questions are, Mr. Gottlieb contends. When we grow up, too many adults underestimate themselves, shy away from addressing those big questions.”[2] In a, to me, occasionally mean-spirited and insensitive, review in The New York Times[3] of Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life[4] he has more to say of children and philosophy, “perhaps children have been left out [of consideration by great philosophers] simply because they are on the whole not all that relevant.”  And he ends the review with these words, “the notion that children’s minds have much to tell us about the meaning of life seems rather a fond exaggeration.”  Speak of tiresome.

The review however got me to thinking about the role of imagination during a period of critical brain development.  I have done a lot of reading lately about research that has demonstrated—contrary to long held views that the brain is fixed by the age of seven or so—that the brain continues to physically and neurologically develop throughout the teen and early adult years.  I have also been interested in the studies of neuroplasty that show that throughout life the adult brain is capable of change and development.  These studies have raised the question about the impact of environment on the continually developing brain.  In other words, what is the best way to care for and feed the brain in its ongoing development?  Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Health wrote, “What if we find out that, in the end, what the brain wants is play, that’s certainly possible. … What if the brain grows best when it’s allowed to play?”[5] As a long time student of play[6] I take this seriously.

But the question that Gottlieb’s review raised for me is the role of play and imagination in brain development.[7] Apparently Gopnik’s book (which I have yet to read) shows that “when children are playing, they know they are just playing.  … that playful immersion in freely conjured hypothetical worlds is what teaches us how to make sense of the real one.”  Gopnik discusses in this context the crucial role in human development of imaginary friends, pretend play, and active imaginations.  I will be curious to see if Gopnik correlates the age range of the most active imagination, 2 to 6, with the traditional critical period of brain development.  I wonder why after age six the playful imagination including make believe friends and pretend play gradually dissipates to become markers of pathology in adults?  How remarkable!  How awful really.  Why don’t adults have imaginary friends or admit to them if they do?  For adults pretend play and imaginary friends must be framed in terms of work rather than play.  We produce novels, paintings, musical scores or recordings, movies or films, plays, and stuff.  Jean Baudrillard made an important distinction between seduction (the pure play of signs) and production, arguing that the meaninglessness of seduction is always stronger and more enduring than production.  Seduction aligns with play, the feminine, and children’s imagination.

The realization that there is a correlation between the level of imaginative play and physical brain development, may offer clues to the question regarding the most affective environment continuing brain and human development during the teen years and throughout life, that would be to cultivate and sustain the playful imagination.  It is well known that our greatest and most creative people are those who continue throughout life to be childlike, by which I think we mean that they are open, imaginative, and allow themselves to ask those huge questions adults have learned are somehow inappropriate to ask or impossible to answer; or to ponder and delight in things that seem obvious to everyone, but are anything but obvious.  As Gottlieb himself noted, children have an uncanny ability to come up with the most profound and confounding questions, the very sort of questions that endlessly occupy philosophers.[8] So too should the playful imaginations that characterize children’s minds perhaps hold a greater place in all adult minded bodies as well.  There is much to ponder here.

What accounts for the origination of imagination in young children?  It is not something that parents dutifully and consciously teach children.  It is not something that children gain from adults by imitation.  It seems a strong candidate for a natural process in the healthy developing child.[9] It would seem that it is of our nature to have an active pretend play imaginary-friend-creating imagination and, if this is so, how can it not be powerfully interconnected with not only brain, but our human development which is raging during this period.   Is not then the imagination a key to what distinguishes us as human beings?  Is not the very structurality of imagination and play—that is, knowing that something is not what we say it is—also the structurality that is essential for the acquisition and use of language, symbolism, metaphor, art, and ritual?  Is not the question of how human beings are capable of living their lives in this reason-defying way, something of immense importance?  Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of this structurality, which he termed “ontology of flesh,” in his study of perception, declared it to be “the ultimate truth.”[10] Isn’t this structurality is also what Jacques Derrida approached in his discussion of “différance” and Friedrich Schiller in his consideration of “play?”

[1] Copyright © by Sam Gill 2009

[2] http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/gottlieb/index.html

[3] August 10, 2009.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Gottlieb-t.html

[4] Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009.

[5] As quoted in Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 44.

[6] See a range of my writings on play at www.Sam-Gill.com.

[7] I find that much brain research tends to divide brain/mind from body and movement, a division that I think impossible and irresponsible, or at least narrow-minded.

[8] Given that Gottlieb’s recent book is titled “The Dream of Reason,” it makes sense that he might be motivated to put away childish things like imaginary friends.

[9] Gopnik apparently indicates that “autistic children almost never create imaginary friends or engage in any kind of pretend play.” Gottlieb’s review.

[10] For my further comments on such a declaration in the postmodern period see my “Play and the Future of the Study of Religion … and the Academy” www.Sam-Gill.com and other discussions of his work in my Brain, Body, Movement Lecture Series.