CENTER FOR TEACHING, LEARNING, AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

2011-12 Distinguished Teaching Award Recipients

Will Cantrell Physics Associate Professor/ Professor Category	Roger Woods Business and Economics Lecturer/Professor of Practice/ Assistant Professor Category

Education and Evolution

by William A. Kennedy, Director

Darwin observed that variations which improve an organism's ability to adapt to change tend to be conserved in the natural world. One such stream of variation resulted in the large brains that we carry about. These brains--and their extensive network of associated input, output and support systems--give us the possibility of rapidly adapting our future behavior based on our past experience.

Prior to the emergence of organisms with brains capable of being constantly "rewired" by the processing of sensory inputs, "learning," as we think of it today, was largely a matter of being initially advantaged by the "genetic wisdom" of those organisms that had survived long enough to contribute to the ongoing gene pool.

Human brains share many of the physiological features of the brains of animals that preceded the emergence of our own species by millions of years. Roughly speaking, the inner part of our brains represents the most ancient elements of this inheritance, while the outer layer, the cerebral cortex, represents the most recent. Elements of the middle layer of our brains, which we share with many other animals, contain structures that are responsible for the production of what we experience as thoughts and emotions.

Though Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and their intellectual descendants would shun the notion, those portions of the brain responsible for the production of emotion are inextricably interwoven with those areas of the brain essential to conscious learning, as well as the formation and retrieval of unconsolidated memories. Like it or not, our feelings play a key role in determining what we are interested in and what we will be able to learn and use.

If the processing of emotionally and intellectually engaging sensory experience initiates profound and lasting neural change (learning), perhaps we should see ourselves more as the designers of a series of impactful intellectual/emotional experiences rather than as purveyors of purely intellectual content.

Entrepreneurs, politicians, physicians and artists all know that appealing to reason without simultaneously engaging the emotions is nearly always a losing proposition. One can't help but wonder how long it will take for members of the academy to recognize that some portion of student failure is clearly due to the lack of emotional engagement rather than a lack of intellectual ability.

Instead, I fear, we've clung onto a bit of dualistic reductionism that assures us that students who fail to succeed at the "talk-then-test" or "read-then-bleed" games are not worthy or able of achievement that deserves our imprimatur. Instead of citing us for a wanton "failure to engage," too many of those who fail to connect with compulsory schooling practices walk away thinking less of themselves.

Meanwhile, those students who choose to rise to the occasion become the next generation of educators perpetuating the system which succeeds for so few. A child entering kindergarten today has a one-in-four chance of completing a two- or four-year degree or certificate program at some point in the future. That's a tremendous waste of evolutionary potential.