Thank you for an excellent week back at school. I hope that we can spend this semester learning more about positive education and how it can impact our own lives and make us all healthier and more energized. This article from Mindshift looks at the positive impact that advisory can have on student culture.
This weeks Food for Thought is a long(ish) essay that questions how much we really understand about how children learn. It questions why we collect data and generalize based on “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic," WEIRD, societies that were not representative of humanity as a whole. We then focus our research on learning in schools that could be seen as artificial constructs that might reduce learning rather than promote it. Hence distorting our conclusions. The essay uses different cultural backgrounds to discuss whether our western oriented opinions on this topic are actually valid whilst identifying what we can learn for wise thinking from different parts of the world.
"...Any Gikuyu mother in Kenya knows that you wait to give a child a task until you see that she is ready for it. Any Baiga father in the forests of India knows that if a child tries something and then backs away, you leave him alone, because he will be back to try again later. Any Yup’ik elder knows that young children learn better from story than lecture, from hands-on experience than direct instruction. Any Fore parent from Papua New Guinea knows that children sometimes learn best by emulating older children, not by being taught by adults.
People all over the world know these things about children and learning, and interestingly, they are as workable for learning how to design software or conduct a scientific experiment or write an elegant essay as they are for learning to hunt caribou or identify medicinal plants in a rainforest."
This video interview with a Maori teacher, Mereana, from the essay, is an excellent example of how we need to listen to other cultures to develop a deeper understanding of learning. So much of what she refers to in her short inteview links directly to what we heard in our Positive Ed. workshops and what positive psychology is discovering today.
The essay ends with this sentence that I am sure we can all empathize with:
"Watch your child’s eyes, what makes them go dull and dead, what makes them brighten, quicken, glow with light. That is where learning lies."
There is much we still have to learn from others about student learning.
Have a relaxing Sunday,
Yours
Adrian
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