Embodied Learning

Time for Life-Wide Learning …

Compare the two photos below. On the left there is a classroom from around 1900 and on the right one from the year 2000.

Although the two rooms are separated in time by a century which arguably saw some of the most significant social and technological changes in human history, they are eerily similar. For some reason, we still prefer to group our pupils by age rather than by ability and then put them in a classroom for twelve years — expecting them to sit still, keep quiet and obey instructions — and believe they will be “educated” at the end of the ride.

In a 2006 talk on changing the education paradigms, educational advisor and creativity specialist Sir Ken Robinson criticised this idea of traditional factory education which, he argues, might have been suitable for the industrial age with its predictable career models, but is totally unsuitable for the unpredictable, ever-changing, world we live in today.

 

In the same talk, he also points out the fallacy of the perceived Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) pandemic of which so many children seem to suffer today. The question to ask here is if the disorder is within the person or within the system?

The short answer is within the system. In recent years, cognitive scientists and neurologists have made some breakthrough discoveries regarding the connections between the brain and bodily activity. Some of them have gone as far as calling sitting at a desk the new smoking, but all agree that children allegedly suffering from ADHD would benefit from fidgeting around a bit while learning as the movement would stimulate their brains. In other words, if they are allowed to move around and use their bodies, there’s northing wrong with their attention span. It is simply unrealistic to expect children who have as much input from multiple sources of information as are available today to sit still, look at the board and listen to one teacher without getting distracted.

There may be scientific proof now, but I think we’ve always known about the connection between thinking and bodily movement. If I asked you, for example, to imagine a man trying to solve a difficult problem, it’s very likely that the picture that comes to your mind is of someone stroking his chin, pacing vigorously up and down a room, i.e. using movement to think. Another example would be that people who sit down to solve a problem, tend to stand up when they reach their Aha! moment.

Science, practical experience and ancient philosophy all show that embodied learning improves understanding. Aristotle wrote, “we learn by doing,” while the Chinese sage Confucius said,

“ I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember,
I do and I understand.”

With the onset of the industrial age, however, we moved away from experiential learning and opted for the chalk-and-talk memorisation methods which have dominated our school systems ever since.

We are on a path to change though. In the US there are a number of schools who have moved away from traditional classroom settings and standardised testing to project-based learning, where the results of the projects count as the test. Meanwhile, schools in Singapore and Hong Kong have introduced the Life-Wide Learning concept. It’s a project still in its infancy, and not yet embraced by all schools, but it will have a great future if given time to mature.

[T]here you are.