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Is Learning a Full Body Experience? · Higher Listenings

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Your brain is not separated from the rest of your body.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Our thinking, our perception is an interesting mix of both our own prior experiences, the internal state of our body systems, and our environments.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so if we ignore the space, the room, or the energy of the bodies that are in it, and the present concerns of those learners, then we're working with this tiny fraction of their cognitive ecosystem.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Our understanding of how the brain works has come a long way, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from looking at the average college classroom.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: As Susan Rock argues in her book, Minding Bodies, How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning, cognition is anything but a purely mental affair.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when we design learning experiences for the whole person rather than just the brain?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Higher Listenings.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Susan, welcome to Higher Listenings.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's wonderful to have you with us.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for having me.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really happy to be here.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the things that intrigue me about the origins of minding bodies is your experience teaching abroad.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I have to imagine that reading Renaissance literature while walking the streets of Florence, maybe eating some gelato, that's gotta be a pretty different experience than maybe my experience with Renaissance literature sitting in a classroom in London, Ontario.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: So was there a moment when you realized students were experiencing the material differently because of where and how they were actually learning?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: There was not a single moment, but there was gradual dawning awareness over time.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: I was lucky to be in the frequent rotation of faculty-led study abroad courses for my university for a good 10 years or so.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I began to see less and less value in spending time in the assigned classroom spaces and more value in holding class on location wherever we were, our field trip that was planned for that day.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: But over time I started realizing we came all of this way.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we sitting in this room and not just doing the reading in the place that's being described or where it had been composed?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, we read the opening section of Boccaccio's The Decameron, which is about the plague.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: And he describes how this group of young people meet each other in Santa Maria Novello, and then they escape up to the hillside of Fiesole.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: So we did it.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: We started in Santa Maria Novella and we read the pieces of the text that were taking place there.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then we went up on the hillside and we read about how they had stumbled upon this glorious villa that was empty but stocked full of wine.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so yeah, it it was a completely different kind of experience.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that was contrasted to the very first study abroad I ever taught was a Shakespeare course.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we went to see this really great variety of performances that should have been the anchor for the whole class.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: But because I didn't know what I was doing, we spent time like laboriously discussing the text in this little room before we would go watch the play.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the backwards way to do it.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: The students always had the right reactions to what we were doing.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: It just took me a long time to figure out that I needed to flip the classroom.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: So far, Susan, this conversation is making you want to travel.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, most of us don't have the opportunity for study broad experience.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of your work is about the importance of the body in developing the mind.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to begin to explore this a little bit more directly.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have this wonderful image of educators and the industry really conceiving of students as essentially brains on sticks.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, what uh what are we missing when we think about learning happening primarily from the neck up, as it were?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's so interesting.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, all of that is a reflection of our changing understanding of cognition and cognitive science.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: So the traditional classroom manifests this older understanding of the way that the brain works as very linear and kind of um based on a little bit of the industrial model or early computing model, maybe that you know, you there's input that just has to get registered by this machine in our heads.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And now cognitive science is moving into models that recognize how embedded thinking is in both internal systems of the body and also the surrounding environment.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: So you can't really think like a computer.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, your brain is not separated from the rest of your body.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's one organ that happens to be in constant communication with all of the other systems of your body.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so our thinking, our perception, is an interesting mix of both our own prior experiences, the internal state of our body systems and our environments.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so if we ignore the space, the room, or the energy of the bodies that are in it and the present concerns of those learners, then we're working with this tiny fraction of their cognitive ecosystem.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: So if I accept this idea that I need to kind of enlarge my understanding of the body in front of me, it's not just a brain on a stick, but something more complex that I have to take into account.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: What might I start to see in my own classroom that that wasn't visible to me prior to that awareness?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think the the place I would start is asking yourself, what messages is this room sending?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like the room is another teacher.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: There's actually a book, it's focused on K-12 education, but it's called The Third Teacher, and it's about the environment.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so is that room a brain-opening space or is it kind of an autopilot space?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is it arranged and supplied to support collaborative thinking and building of ideas?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: Is it um welcoming?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna give an example of a lecture hall that I have have been brought to meet in with colleagues, and it's so counterproductive to what that meeting really could and should be.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like the faculty are not seated in a way that communicates to them that their ideas or their contributions matter at all.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're just an audience, and the dean is way far away on the stage, and it creates almost this sort of antagonism in the meeting.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I just think to myself, the room is totally ruining the purpose of this gathering.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And we're just so unaccustomed to thinking about the messages that a room sends and the way it might be shaping the interaction.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: But most classrooms on most campuses are in fact pretty traditional in their design.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: They are fixed chairs facing the front of the room.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's little or no natural light, institutional beige uh dominates the color scheme, you know.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: So is there an ideal classroom design in your review or non-negotiable elements that should be incorporated that people might not even be able to bring into the room or I mean we're we're coming out pretty strongly to say it's possible that those traditional spaces, especially for large enrollment classes, might actually be harming the learning.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: They're not just neutral, they're actually doing some educational malpractice because we know what works and we're not doing it.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: And even rooms that are not succeeding lecture halls are often because that's a norm, they're like mini versions of the lecture hall.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: Even if it's a classroom built for 24 students in a gen ed math class or an English class or something, everybody's still in rows facing the front because that's their model of a norm.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: But in order for a room to feel more welcoming and as you say, to sort of nudge you to interacting more and moving more, you need square footage to move around and you need writing spaces on as many of the walls as possible.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because when we're able to share our thinking as it's unfolding in a way that everybody can keep tabs on, this is a way to extend our cognition and it's a way that students are also more actively engaged in building their understanding.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think adjustable lighting that includes natural light in that mix would be to me some of the key elements.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So faculty are competing for student attention.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think most people would say that's gotten a lot harder over the last number of years.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Your book makes the case for a different approach that things like novelty, physical space, sensation, and movement can actually pull people back into the moment.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's happening with students when you change the sensory experience of learning like that?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what brains like to do is predict what they expect to happen based on prior experience.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's very energy efficient.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: And as you know, brains are our most energy intensive organs.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: So if they can save energy by just assessing where have we been in this situation before, what do we expect to happen, then that's what they're gonna do.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so asking students to just sit still and listen actually makes them have to work harder to override those predictive expectations.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so by doing something different, you're you're causing the brain to have to drop its autopilot and say, uh oh, something's different.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: We're now we can't predict what's next as easily.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a little bit more predisposed to taking in new information.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm curious about is there an example or something an instructor might try to leverage some of this stuff around sensation or movements to pull back into the into the moment?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: So um I'm gonna recommend something you said you were interested especially in in sensation, um, which is to think about any kinds of physical objects that you might bring.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And in my case, even as a literature professor, you would think, okay, well, you know, what sort of physical objects are we gonna deal with?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: But it could be even a passage of a text just enlarged and printed out on a piece of paper, and you can create some sort of a stations exercise with those paper texts or whatever would be relevant to your discipline, right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: It could be anything, maps, something to listen to, something ideally maybe to touch or manipulate, and then have the students move around those stations to study those objects rather than like sit in one place and pass them around.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: You can play some background music while they're doing it, and they can give them some sort of mystery to solve or a chance to talk together and record what they're noticing about these objects, you know, just think really analog, and that builds in a sensory experience as well as a little bit of movement.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, you have to get a little creative.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's a way in which I can imagine somebody listening to this conversation and thinking, oh, so what you're talking about is just getting students to move or have, you know, some sort of music or pause.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the whole point is just to just to reset, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone stand up and stretch, and then we're going to get back to learning, right?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: But you're actually arguing for a deeper point that movement is is actually, if not essential, frequently an important contributor to how we encode or how we learn and understand something.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, can you give us an example of where movement isn't just, you know, for the purpose of re-energizing or adding some spice to the classroom, but it's really essential to the learning or an important way in which cognition is advanced by incorporating the body in some way.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I can.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I want to um give you some specific terms that express exactly what you just put your finger on, which is that some movement might be task independent.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's where, like, well, we're gonna stretch, we're gonna take some breaths, but that's not connected with our objective for today.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: And others might be task integrated.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so task-integrated activities would be where, as I was I was just um thinking about this example, you might have students consider like a multiple choice for options that they take their best guess at an answer to a complex question.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it could be a poll, or you could have them move to the four corners of the room, each corner representing one of those options, and then talk with each other about why they think that's the right answer, and then have to sort of report out.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: So now everybody's really invested in what is the right answer, right?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so the movement is integrated into the the actual knowledge of the answer to that question.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: So that would be one example.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the idea is like, can you use your limbs, some, you know, objects?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: I've I also know people who do this really successfully with Legos, you know, they've got sort of a classroom set of Legos and they have students build conceptual understandings with Legos so that's object-based, or just using the space of the room to have to physically represent your understanding of something, would be all of those are examples of task integrated.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, in these kinds of moments, if I am pursuing a creative engagement of students in this way, I'm going to be concerned about making sure that I'm inclusive in my practice.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: So as I'm thinking through these kinds of opportunities to engage my students more fully, I how do I make that an equitable experience for my students in the classroom?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm really glad you asked this question.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is the one that I get asked most frequently.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, UDL, Universal Design for Learning, I think really has the solution and that you always want to offer options for students.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: I often ask students to spend 15 minutes discussing some question and coming back.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: But I send them out of the classroom and I encourage them to take a walk around the quad.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: But if they don't want to take a walk around the quad, they're welcome to just stay in the lobby closest to our room, or even just to stay in the classroom as they work with a partner, small group.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing I would recommend in addition to always providing options is to bring students into your creative experiments.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Get them to tell you, like, okay, is this working for you?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Is it not working for you?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And what could make it better?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's just too much variability and too many ways that a particular activity might not be great for 100% of the students to keep us from trying it in the first place.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: And and I would encourage people to remember that a really traditional mode of learning isn't working for 100% of the students either.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna open up kind of a bigger question here around this topic because I think we're clearly having a bit of a moment in our early years with AI, realizing as if for the first time that emotions might matter to learning.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: So could you maybe make a little bit clearer for those listening how you see the relationship between cognition, emotion, and movement?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, you can't separate emotions from thinking.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's the way that you've just described it.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: All of those elements are always present all the time.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: So what AI has revealed is what was always kind of transactional about teaching and learning, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so now suddenly the curtain has been pulled from this idea that we were going to hold up the hoop and ask the students to jump through it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so facilitating learning is a totally different kind of expertise than content expertise.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: And movement, I think, is inherently relationship building.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: It allows emotion to more naturally enter our interactions because you have to cooperate a little bit to move smoothly with other people.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: There's been interesting work about walking with other people where you tend to fall into synchrony because of your pace, even just moving around a classroom space together.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And this is gonna sound um, I don't know, self-evident, but it requires you to coordinate your movements with other people so you're not just bumping into each other.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you have to just cooperate enough to smoothly navigate moving around other people in a room, it primes your body-mind to want to pursue other cooperative activities.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, moving together is the way that your body's kind of leading your mind to want to be cooperative.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I meditate and my practice, like probably a lot of meditators, is actually quite simple.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I find a quiet space, I focus on my breath, and funnily enough, paying attention to those ordinary sensations makes me feel more present.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not suggesting you turn your literature class into a meditation retreat, but are there things educators can borrow from meditation practice to help students notice where they are and what they're experiencing?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: There are tons of free short one to three minute exercises on YouTube that you can offer to students as a way at the beginning of class to kind of help everybody be present for the the next hour, knowing that they have many, many, many things pulling their attention away from this moment outside of class.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, it's just completely voluntary, but it's such a short investment of class time.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: And in my experience, when you tell them, listen, I can see how stressed everybody is.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: I know that it's midterm week, that you're all under a lot of pressure.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Would it be okay if we just take two minutes to follow the instructions on this guided exercise?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then you can tell me if you liked it or not.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I I've had really great responses from students when it comes from a place of your genuine caring.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: About supporting them, but they they tend to appreciate that.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: So a transition into class is something that is an invitation as an educator to take as a design challenge.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: What do I do in the first thir 90 seconds of class time?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: I also like the fact that you're experimental in this very open way.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's try something and give me your feedback right here and now, and then I can incorporate that feedback into you know evolving my practice for your benefit kind of thing.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: Susan, you you're an advocate for what you call a pedagogy of discomfort.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and when I first encountered that phrase, I thought you were onto something that Eric and I have advocated for in developing our own novel teaching strategies.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he's a fan of fear-based pedagogy.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: My personal favorite is shame-based pedagogy.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Those both sound so great.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're not taking off.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: We've we've struggled to get this into print.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: It turns it turns out you're not really advocating for that, but you are advocating for a certain kind of discomfort.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain that and uh explain why that matters so so much?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: The source of the discomfort that I'm advocating for is educational norms that we need to move away from.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's always hard to do something that breaks a norm.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so many of the things that we've been talking about in this conversation are really just norms that we have developed over decades and they may not be serving us anymore.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's not comfortable to break a norm.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but um I think one of the distinctions I could also make that would be helpful is I have to give credit to my colleague Leslie Bayers for.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: And she just makes a distinction between uncomfortable and unsafe, right?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: And this is where we can model for our students when things feel uncomfortable for us and how we're gonna regulate our emotions about that, or how we're going to be upfront about the fact that we're trying something new and it feels a little scary.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that is being a full human being with your students together.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so if we're gonna ask them to, for example, treat failure as a learning experience, then I think they're much, much more trusting of the atmosphere that we're creating that makes it safe to fail when we also take risks that might fail and can be honest about the fact that something just seems like it was a big disaster.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so we learned from it and we're gonna do it differently next time.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I can say for me personally, even though I love just jamming out to music and dancing, it felt really scary to try that with a group of students.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I waited until later in the semester when we had kind of built a relationship together to say to them, hey, would you guys mind if we tried something silly, which is because we're all exhausted and we need to just raise our energy a little bit.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: Will you try just doing a three-minute let loose?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: Let's just crank up the music and dance with me.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: And we did it, and they were really fun and funny, and it was hard.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think they appreciated that like you have really have to let down your guard to dance in front of your students.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm extremely discomfortable.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: I felt a little uncomfortable there for a moment.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: So um I feel like that's really landing the um the pedagogy of discomfort that was uh helping.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: So so it's really about when you're when you're talking about a pedagogy of discomfort, you're really aiming at the educator that that they have to they have to um embrace norm busting in in you know in this really experimental way that that's that's right.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's about our discomfort.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I guess if you wanted to throw in our fear and shame, that would be bonus level.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we probably have another couple of questions here, but um, it's been a really interesting conversation, Susan.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder, has writing the book changed the way you see students when you walk into a classroom?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so um I'm gonna lean on um an acronym that uh I just learned from Guy Claxton and Emily Pohl's book that's called Bodies of Learning.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: And they describe humans as C A D S, complex adaptive dynamic systems.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I love thinking about any group of new students or new faculty or people that you're gathering together with as complex adaptive dynamic systems, because I mean, what that essentially captures is that this time and activity that we are going to embark on together is going to change all of us.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we're all contributing and exchanging the way that the experience goes.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, you know, I can think of being assigned a few different multiple sections of the same course that met maybe back to back in the early years of my career and being so mystified by why the classes were so different, even though I was the same, I was doing the same thing with the students, and yet those two sections back to back would be completely different vibes.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: And now thinking of people as complex, adaptive, dynamic systems, I think, why would I have ever even expected those two sections to be the same?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: They've got completely different human beings in them who are all affecting each other, affecting me.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm affecting, I'm interacting with them in a different way.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think I just have a lot more respect for the fact that we are going to have an unpredictable journey together.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not the one that's completely controlling where it goes.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I I love that.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: Having had the experience of teaching the same thing back to back and having mystifyingly and confoundingly different experiences.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'd like to say this has been a wonderful gathering of CADs.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so Susan, really appreciate this conversation.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for the opportunity.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's been really fun for me just to kick around some ideas with the two of you.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Susan.
• 29:13
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• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, Ace gives student learning a boost with personalized AI powered study support they can access anytime, any place.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Learn more at TopHat.comslash podcast today.