It is mooted that the only reason we have a brain is so we can find our way around, and remember where to go. Back in the day before cars, it helped us strike the essential balance of energy: we could find food before we ran out of steam to keep looking. It was about survival. So, the way the argument goes, memory is inextricably linked to our sense of place and the paths we follow to get there.

There’s a fair bit of evidence to support this, for example, the findings of brain researcher Eleanor Maguire (Foy, p.34). Focusing her attention on the place cells that remember landmarks and the grid cells that remember margins and pathways, her work demonstrates our allocentric and egocentric ways of viewing the world. Allocentric is when we know where we are in the landscape, can identify a place where we want to go, and in which direction to move to get there. These are our abilities (or in some people a lack of them) to read a map; to navigate. Egocentric is when we know where we are by recognising a view, and by remembering that, if we turn right when we get to the river and follow along its course, we will come to another view we remember and can picture in our mind’s eye. This is the way the ancients got along down song lines and along burial paths, handing down the waypoints orally. Many sea shanties, too, listed headlands, rocks, and safe harbours remembered in the verses of songs that were sung repeatedly.

Do some exercises in your mind’s eye to cement these ideas.

Shut your eyes and sniff an open jar of Vegemite. Does that take you back to a place and time? Can you see the people who were there? Can you remember their names?

Going back to the place where you were born, do your eyes quickly scan for familiar landmarks? Do you notice small changes? Do you know that feeling of well-being like all your molecules just fell into place?

Walk through the Christchurch CBD. Did you know the city before the earthquake? Have you experienced the deeply disturbing feeling when landmarks you knew are gone? In my own hometown of Timaru, historic buildings were demolished to make way for a Mitre 10, completely changing the cityscape. Senior citizens especially felt real stress.

We are blessed, or cursed depending on how you see it, with a brain that can do so much more than just act as a navigation system. We can do abstract things, like appreciate music and encode it on paper, like explain phenomena using mathematical models. We might have lost some of our navigational powers compared, say, to homing pigeons, but essentially our brain remains, at least in part, a built-in Tom-Tom.

The latest craze is VR. Virtual reality struggled for years with bizarre helmets, visual lag, and low resolutions. Then two things changed all that: Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard. In Maguire’s terms, VR plays on an egocentric view of the world. It gives us landmarks and pathways we have not actually experienced, but, which we can experience vicariously in a computer-generated environment. Five years ago, Ayumu, a 7-year old chimpanzee was getting to grips with a touch screen and surpassing human capability, and parents were struggling with the concept that their children needed an iPad just to do their regular schoolwork. Now, VR, Google Cardboard, Google Expeditions, and Samsung Gear are being heralded as the new essentials for the modern learning experience.

OK, I have set the scene. Now it’s time to get to the guts of the matter. Is learning about memory? Is it about recall?

I think it is, but then I admit to being old school. I, like you, maybe, learned my times tables, and have found mental arithmetic a really useful life skill. I do not need to reach for my calculator to work out journey times or the likely cost of the fuel. I have enough French to travel independently in Africa. I have domain knowledge and skills that I can draw on in an instant: in the rain, in the dark, when I’m feeling ill. These are things I would say I have learnt; that I have internalised.

I believe the younger generations — not to discount the value of Wikipedia and Google — need this too. Some knowledge really has to be learnt if we are to use it to think with. There are extrinsic motivators too: for many professions closed-book examinations are not going away any time soon; you can’t jam if you don’t know your chord progressions; you can’t present convincingly unless you really know your stuff and can speak from the heart. An expression you hear used less these days: knowing it by heart.

The memory palace will be a technique known to many. Think of a house you know. In your mind’s eye, put the things you need to remember in the rooms. Picture yourself walking through the house retrieving the things. Do you see how memory is linked to place?

My challenge to educators is to use VR to give students places where they can put memories, and to give them pathways along which they go. By all means use the Wow factor to grab their initial attention, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that that is enough. Instead, aim to engage them at a much deeper level. Use it to deliver rich learning narratives, and attach those stories to vivid imagery, and an immersive sense of location.

Don’t let us allow this exciting new technology, VR, to get hijacked by the big players for edutainment. As educators, let’s get creative to use it as a tool to embed powerful learning in the minds of our students. Oh, and let’s have heaps of fun doing it!

References

Foy, G.M. (2016) Finding North: How navigation makes us human. Kindle Edition.

Image source:

Nan Palmero from San Antonio, TX, USA, from Wikipemedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

Has anyone else noticed how many reality shows occupy space on televisions at present? They claim to provide us with a microscopic view into what goes on in the ‘real’ lives of people who bear very little similarity to ourselves, or those we hold close to us, and the lives that we lead. And yet, despite this, we get sucked into this ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style viewing, and so they keep going. Although I question and can happily analyse such programmes for their authenticity and meaningful viewing, I do believe there is something we can learn from them when we come to working with children. If we were able to be an observer of those we work with, would we, first, have a better understanding of their lives, and secondly, be able to support them more effectively as a result?

As a passionate Junior School enthusiast and educator, this is something for which I am always advocating, particularly when thinking about how we best support our young learners by considering the whole child. And, if I put my hand on my heart, I can honestly say that is something that fell off my radar from time-to-time whilst feeling the pressures and reality of everyday teaching. However, as many of my colleagues and friends are currently experiencing the reality of their own children starting school, and watching their babies either thrive or shrivel up in their new environment, my thought processes have begun whirling yet again, particularly as many of these children thrive in their ECE environments prior to starting school.

So, what is happening between early childhood and primary education? My experience and discussions have shown that starting school is one of the major events in a child’s early life (Aimes, n.d.). It also tells me that each child is unique and responds to this transition in different ways. Some take it in their stride, whilst others fall at the starting block. This is what we see happening and what I have been left wondering is, what is happening internally for these learners? We know that change/stress can have a huge impact on the brain; its ability to process new information and hold on to that which is already there. In fact, when we experience stress, our bodies as a whole prepare to either fight or flight. Just imagine that level of cortisol coursing through their wee veins. What impact does this have on their ability to learn?

I believe that there are several layers to delving deeper to the root cause of this. Firstly, the role teachers play and, secondly, the development progressions of each child. What we do know is that the things teachers say and do have a huge impact on children’s learning through the way they connect and communicate with learners. Piaget’s work (as cited by Anthony, n.d.) demonstrates how what teachers say and do is taken literally by young learners. Now, put that into the realm of learning, and you can imagine the number of things that get lost in translation along the way, which, as you can imagine, can be rather unnerving to anybody let alone a five-year-old.

Another aspect of this is the processing learners go through in development stages. With children often talking to themselves or speaking out loud to complete activities. As educators, we can often miss this and pass it off as being disruptive, when, in actual fact, according to Vygotsky, this is the vital foundation of their executive function skills (as cited by Anthony, n.d.). These are the very skills we want our children to strive for in an agentic environment. If we line this up with Graham Nuthall’s (2007) work on the hidden lives of learners, it shows just how vital the level of social development is — including building relationships, negotiating social norms, and problem-solving. As educators, do we make time for this, or, are we asking too much of them to gain academic scores as well? And should we be more understanding when seemingly simple things appear to fall off the memory bandwagon?

Finally, the thing that I believe is missing is the inclusion of play. Play and freedom to explore has a much more vital role in development and learning than we can ever imagine. Thinking as an adult, I will quite often tinker with things to work out how they work and what they are about. As a child, you play to explore the world and its social realms. Kids tend to play roles that are familiar to them and have a persistence to completion when they have achieved something just as we do through tinkering. This is embraced through Te Whāriki the New Zealand early childhood curriculum (1996), but seems to get lost when learners turn five. Maybe it is about us rethinking about what play is. It is purposeful and meaningful. The times when children are left to explore seem to be when they walk away with the biggest learning, whether it be jumping in the mud or pretending to be the prime minister.

I can’t help being left with a feeling of discomfort in the pit of my stomach when I reflect on what I have seen and observed from recently transitioned learners, both in new entrant classes and in their lives outside of school. Instead of embracing the individuals that they are and the learnings they have acquired, we tend to fall into the trap of ‘preparing’ our young children for a formal education and to learn the ‘rules of school’. This feeling has only been heightened by recent research that informs us that when formalised teaching is introduced too soon, the impact on learners can be negative in the long run. For example, the results of a worldwide study by the University of Cambridge (2013) showed ‘…that the early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children’s reading development, and may be damaging’. Also, those ‘children started at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later’. Is this really what we want for our learners? My gut response is a massive NO!

Now, the good thing. It is never too late to make a change and empower our learners right from the moment they walk in the door. Here are my top 5 suggestions to help you embrace the hidden lives of your learners today, for a better future for them all:

• Embrace the front part of the New Zealand Curriculum (2007) — this is what learning is all about: values, key competencies and principles.  Also if you look closely, it builds on from Te Whāriki (1996) nicely:

Image credit: nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz

• Develop strong relationship with family and whānau; utilise their expertise around their children, such as this education gazette link indicates. Check out this link from the inclusive education site for ideas of how you can do this.
• Get to know your learners; sit back and watch them; take meaningful interest in their lives, not just their ability to count backwards from 10. You can do this by spending 10 minutes a day sitting down with a child and talking with them. Let them lead the way and then use the knowledge you gain to reconnect throughout their time.
• Build on each child’s learning from Early Childhood Education to make the transition as seamless as possible. This is something that was identified in the ERO research publication about successful transition. Have a look through it and see what you can do to make your New Entrant programme ECE friendly.
• Place more emphasis on play-based education. This earlier CORE blog post on powerful play goes into more detail.

So go on, get out of their way; let our young learner explore and learn!

References

Anthony, M. (n.d.). Cognitive Development in 3-5 Year Olds. Retrieved from: http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/article/stages-milestones/cognitive-development-3-5-year-olds

Amies, N. (n.d.). Preparing for starting school: All you need to know for a smooth transition, Ready for School: Bright Horizon: UK

Ministry of Education (1996) Te Whāriki: He Whāriki Mātauranga mō ngā Mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early Childhood Education, Wellington: Learning Media.

Ministry of Education (2007). The New Zealand Curriculum, Wellington, Learning Media.

Nuthall, G. (2007). The hidden lives of learners, NZCER Press: New Zealand

University of Cambridge (2013). School starting age: the evidence. Retrieved from: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/school-starting-age-the-evidence.

Feature image source

“Looking for gators”, by katieb50, sourced by Creative Commons on Flickr.