How does Embodiment Science shift how we think about Learning? (with Guy Claxton & Emily Poel)

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast. Hi everyone, thanks for joining me again this week. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and after last week's inquiry into Guy Claxton and Emily Poole's theory of real-world intelligence, this is the second of 4 short episodes exploring the fuller implications of embodiment science to our core concepts and deep grammars of schooling and education. Today, we're exploring the concept of how learning might be described differently from an embodiment science perspective, and how it's an integral part of the process of making our way in the world intelligently, balancing concerns, capabilities, and circumstances, as we explored last week. I started by asking Guy about the way that embodiment science might shift how we think about learning.

Well, the concern with learning drops naturally out of what we've been saying about intelligence, because a huge part of intelligence is checking whether your good idea about what was the best thing to do next, whether it actually worked out. So it's stupid to have made up your mind how things are going to turn out. It's stupid to think that you've arrived at some kind of final conclusion. Because you are always changing. The world is always changing. Different people, different influences, different temperatures, different political occurrences. So, you know, it's absolutely fundamental to our intelligence that we adapt. And the way we adapt is by noticing how well our best guess action went down and adjusting our beliefs and our intentions accordingly. If it worked well, then we strengthen those connections. We dig that rut in the neural jungle a little bit deeper. We create it a bit stronger. If it didn't work very well, there may be some automatic process of changing the weights of the different neural gates inside your head and then trying that out to see if that gives a better solution. Or there may be a moment where you have to give up that more sort of automated type of processing and go into a more reflective, more conscious, more deliberative kind of mode. But all of these things are ways of trying to increase the fine-tuning to make us less likely to be caught napping the next time something similar happens. So learning, my working definition of learning these days is learning is what churns experience into competence. The experience you have, the learning is the residue of that sediment. People sometimes use the word, the way in which that sediments into the way you meet the world the next time. It's somewhat similar to that event. So learning is the constant modification of the synaptic connectivity, of the ease or stiffness of the different gates through which the neural Messages are flowing inside the brain, and that's what learning is. So learning, if you like, is always a response to how it turned out. And the most important of those is how did it not turn out as I expected? In other words, the triggers, the occasion for learning of a more thoroughgoing kind or a more challenging kind is always some kind of emotional reaction. I'm surprised. I'm disappointed. I'm shocked. I'm confused. I'm frustrated. That's the way in which the system as a whole signals to consciousness, aha, there's learning to be done here. Yet under the old dispensation in schools, people were often trained into believing that to feel confused or frustrated was a sign of lack of intelligence. Well, how stupid is that as an idea to feed into young brains?

It was quite interesting to me because one of the things I felt reading the chapter on learning was that it was the least controversial in the whole book. Because in some ways it's quite interesting. A lot of educators of all stripes will agree with a lot of the things you're saying there. Learning has become this almost like a truism. All of the things you're saying in a way are kind of truisms that get bandied around in educational circles. But I don't know that, well, I'm almost sure there is not the depth of understanding as to why those things are true as you lay out in the book more generally.

Absolutely not. I mean, you can stymie this form of intelligence, this willingness to look at what you've done and think, I may be wrong. Maybe it wasn't the best way of doing it. That's the intelligent attitude to have. Or were there things there that I didn't notice or that I needed to give more weight to or less weight to? It's like to come at life with that kind of mindset. That's called curiosity, isn't it? That's inquisitiveness. That's adventurousness to have that mindset. Yet whatever people sign up to, the cultural messages of the traditional classroom are your curiosity doesn't matter here. It's not functional. It's not welcome. Your job is to learn what I'm telling you. regardless of whether it meets any need or connects with any prior beliefs that you have, that we can forget all that. So what you say, Tim, may be right, but it's very far from being embedded in the kind of the functionality of classrooms. The whole structure of education is about predetermined learning.

Absolutely.

Rather than responsive learning.

Can I ask then, related to that, one way I feel like that has been addressed by certain people is to talk about this biologically primary and biologically secondary types of learning. The way you lay out in that chapter, obviously you do it in a slightly different way with this kind of learning operating system metaphor, but how do you see that idea that a kind of folk psychological idea that certain kinds of the ways you're talking about learning are innate and we have as young children and then others actually, we don't want to follow the supposedly natural order. We want to impose this more biologically secondary. That's the justification for the need for direct instruction, et cetera. Yes.

I don't find that David Geary form of thinking at all satisfying. I think it's the kind of bifurcating thinking that doesn't get us anywhere very far. But you can have a much more sophisticated way of thinking about what it is. You know, it's a perfectly good question to ask yourself, what makes someone a good learner? Can we get better at learning? So instead of thinking about, you know, just putting things in 2 boxes and contrasting them in the way that some of the cognitive load people do, I prefer to think of our development as the gradual evolution starting from a kind of biological basis, if you like, the equipment that we're born with, which is basically highly sophisticated pattern recognition or pattern forming, pattern detecting mechanism that's built into the neural networks. And then gradually we evolve. Some of these are, as it were, experience sensitive. If you get the right kind of experience, Various augmentations to this basic learning operating system 1.0 that we are born with. So there's still some doubt about whether imitation, for example, is inborn or whether imitation itself is an acquired prosthetic device for enhancing your own learning.

Interesting.

It's like, you know, one of the most important things about learning is if I don't know what to do, how do I come up with a good idea of something to try? Answer, look around and see if there's anybody around me who might be doing something similar, and that might give me an idea about something I could do. So a lot of things like imitation and imagination can be recast in a learning-to-learn framework. You could say, you know, the development of imagination is the ability to take imitation underground, so to speak, to take it internally. And create an internal theater of characters and situations and scenarios within which you can play out possible scenarios, possible consequences, possible roles that you might undertake in the privacy of your own mind. Because if you did it in public, someone else might steal your good idea, which is evolutionarily quite a useful thing to be able to keep that private. So imagination itself becomes another augmenter, another amplifier of our learning capacity, if you like. So one way of thinking about what the process of growing up is that we grow in the range of tools or attitudes or insights that we have about what might work in this complex situation. In other words, they feed the learning process itself.

Yeah.

And then maybe just to add to what I felt there and reading the chapter is that culture is also an augmentation.

Absolutely.

And so there's no binary distinction between culture and biology because there is this flowing movement of, as you said in our previous conversation about intelligence, You know, the kind of concern and capability and circumstance, they're just moving in different ways. And culture is part of that mix and augments your learning.

Absolutely. The attempt to try and segregate, you know, it is no longer permissible. It's certainly no longer intelligent to ask yourself crass questions like, how much was nature and how much was nurture? It's always an interactive process. You know, we are responding to the environment. So to take a very common example in education, quite a lot of people pick up the idea other people's expectations that you ought to be able to do something lead you to believe that if you can't do it quickly or smoothly, that means you're not smart. So to be in learning mode becomes almost identical to be not, if not very intelligent. In other words, now that's a really stupid notion of intelligence. Yet schools often still trade with the idea that our bright pupils are identified by being people who can come out with right answers quickly, always without error. If you're bright, you don't make mistakes, you don't take time, you don't have to ask for help. The flip side of that is the deep stigmatization of learning.

Yeah.

Like, how stupid is that? You know, this is not sentimental. This is not some kind of, you know, new agey woo-woo thing about learning. It's just, if you are a teacher, do you want maximum learning in your classroom or not? If you do, you need to make your room a safe place for people to not know, not be very good, fall over, not have a good answer, need to ask for help. You need to make it— I mean, this is just basic common sense. that emerges from and is underpinned by embodiment science, but it seems to be quite uncommon common sense in mainstream education.

Yes. Anything you wanted to say about learning?

What this discussion points to is how much sense it makes to understand the value of cultivating learning dispositions, that the time at school is about practicing being curious or practicing being confused, or that I can intentionally shape those habits of body-mind, and that that's more the point than memorizing content to give a right answer, that I can actually practice being resilient or I can practice being collaborative, and then I can apply that to any other situation that comes down the line because I have that in my body-mind and it's working and it's ready as patterns that I've learned. Again, it just for me points to this, the difference between teachers focusing on cultivating dispositions as much as, if not more than, these kind of memorization of content.

So the whole learning to learn thing becomes, you know, you can develop that as we do in the book into the idea of school as this, what we rather grandly call epistemic apprenticeship, which is a kind of 12-year process of building strong, flexible, learning-oriented minds that are grounded in a sense of what is valuable, what's important, what matters to me, how should I take care of my habitat, whether by that I mean my own living room or the planet. And that it is open to us. Embodiment science, I think, says it is open to us to think about exactly as Emily was just saying, how do we configure what's going on in schools So that schools become a training ground for everybody, not just for some intellectually oriented elite, but a training ground in which everybody can come out knowing that they are capable, competent, and confident engagers with difficult matters that matter to them in real life. So you have a shift in the methodology of education. Coupled with a shift in the function of education, we can hopefully develop people. Some people refer to them as solutionaries, people who are good at coming up with smart, workable answers to problems, whether they're in their own life or wherever, that they're capable of that, the kind of thinking, you know, the kind of people that we want and the kind of people that young people themselves want to be.

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