Put yourself in this scenario.
You’re getting padded up: batting gloves on, helmet adjusted just right, box in, bat in hand … And now in you go: a walk down to the end of the batting lane where you take your guard. I’m waiting, ready, ball in hand, alert to that small clue that say’s ‘Let’s go’.
And I see it, and I’m off. You watch me build up speed; the run up has a nice rhythm, balanced as I get to the crease; and then I’m into my bowling action, leaping, arms rotating; the ball’s released and …
Let’s rewind a bit.
What did you feel at the start of that scenario, while you were padding up? Nervous? Scared? Intimidated? Confident? Excited?
As it got to the moment where I released the ball, what did your body do? Flinch? Flay? Dive? Jump? Brace? Manoeuvre?
Were any of these—the feelings or the movements—conscious decisions? Or, were they automatic, instinctive?
Let’s go back a bit more.
To what extent did the scenario fit your sense of self—did you feel it was a threat to it or something that would strengthen it? Were you aware of this consciously, and if so, at what point did it become conscious?
Let’s go a bit deeper.
Because what I’m trying to get at here is that our engagement in something, and ergo our performance, is not only a reflection of our conscious mind at work. There is something deeper that guides it, something more ‘primal’ and more closely connected with our idea of ‘self’.
Too much of the talk about ‘cognition’, and therefore how we get good learner performance, in the education world focuses on the conscious mind, positioning learning as a process of finding the best way to consciously get knowledge into long-term memory and being careful not to overwhelm the working memory—the mind-as-computer metaphor—with an emphasis on concentration and individual, quiet, targeted work, where learning is demonstrated through conscious demonstrations of skill, ie, how well someone can retrieve a memory. It’s a metaphor that allows us to pay no heed to feelings, for if learning is a conscious endeavour we can ignore the subconscious.
But that emotional undertow is real. I am sure you felt before you thought in our scenario.
The good news is the mind-as-computer metaphor has been left behind by neuroscience. Instead, what is now being understood is that we are at root emotional beings. Or, as neuroanatomist Jill Taylor says, we are not thinking beings who feel but feeling beings who think. It’s a nice heuristic.
Many neuroscientists also make a distinction between emotions and feelings, with the latter being understood as the conscious awareness of the driving emotional register or mode. In other words, feelings are the physical manifestation of the emotional state, in that moment, and so the emotional state precedes feeling; furthermore, while it’s impossible to not feel a feeling, we can be unaware of our emotional state.
Take our scenario: facing a bowler in the nets is commonly ‘felt’ in a particular way: increased heart-rate, narrowing field of vision, fidgeting, perhaps an urge to go pee. When we register these physical sensations we often feel scared, even if the most we’ll admit to is being nervous. The thing is, your body knew before your conscious mind did. Something about the situation led to that specific physical response being triggered, and once triggered your conscious mind could become aware of—could feel— your emotional state. Or not … Many of us learn to suppress paying attention to those feelings. In many classrooms, suppression is actively promoted in the name of learning and performance, especially when a learner has no control and a rush to ‘get through’ permeates.
And so, we can add another heuristic to the one above, and it’s this: the mind is the brain and body combined.
There’s a concept in psychology called ‘cognitive reappraisal’. The gist of it is that being able to ‘tune in’ to those physical sensations we call feelings helps us because we get to know what scared feels like, what excitement feels like etc. This helps us to interpret those physical sensations, and perhaps even label them in more constructive ways. I quite like this idea on one level, because I can see how it might work—after all, don’t those physical sensations I listed above seem very similar to the ones that come with excitement? It would be a nice little Jedi mind trick if we could get kids to say to themselves, I’m feeling excited, not scared. And yet, congruence … That label has got to reflect reality, at least eventually. There are only so many times you can say, I’m excited! and it end in tears before deep inside you know it’s not true.
And this is where my mind explodes a little, because sure, there’s an element of experience and familiarity at play here, where the more we do something the less likely we are to be scared by it. But even that comes with a qualification: it’s not ability dependent—a highly skilled, talented and experienced person can be scared of a familiar situation.
We can tie ourselves in knots chasing this line of thought, but I wonder … At heart, does it not come down to this: we subconsciously, continuously, ask this question: If I do this will I be ok? Could it be that how our subconscious answers it is what determines whether we feel an experience is something to fear or not, and thus whether we’ll venture fully into it? And could it be that our subconscious answers it based on past experience, where lived examples create patterns and congruence matters in helping it to make predictions about the best way we should act to make sure we’re ok? And could it be that, regardless of how good we are, if our emotional core senses there is something to fear here, like ridicule or excessive demands or exposure or comparison, then it will try to tell us we will not be ok.
The subconscious answers, not our conscious mind. And that means there must be things that are sensed before they are thought. And if you’re thinking, This is starting to sound like an argument for the existence of vibe, perhaps so.
We are feeling beings who think. The mind is the brain and body combined.
(And this mind and body has felt quite enough on this topic for now!)
So how do we deal with this in a classroom?
The arts, in all their guises, must help. They ask us to look within, become familiar with what’s there and express ourselves. The closer to truth that expression is the better the art; there must be a congruence there, which is only achieved through a form of artistic honesty.
PE must help. It connects us with our body, invites us to move in novel ways and gives us new ways to be in and think about the world. The more fluid and ‘in tune’ with the moment our movement is, the more beautiful it is to watch and experience. Again, there’s a congruence, a synchronisity between the inside and outside.
In both of these areas, where the learners do things ‘for real’, so much of what’s learned is subconscious. We should embrace that fact, for it’s where deep learning occurs: baked into a kid’s being. And so, they both are learning areas ripe with scope for introspection, which is how we tap into the subconscious and get a feel for what it’s saying to us.
And don’t forget this: there’s also you and the way you relate to the kids, which is comprised of what you tune into, talk about and highlight. This stuff is how you work on getting the the vibe right. Can you help the kids connect with how things feel and become familiar with those deeper emotional drivers? Imagine if you could help them say: Yes, I’ll be ok if I do this; it really is excitement I’m feeling, not fear.
It was lovely to catch up with Kath Murdoch for a coffee when she was in Wellington this week. Great chats about listening and the dynamic of observation, which should be just as much about what the teacher is offering as it is the learner. Plus, just the power of giving yourself time and permission to observe, and the small but powerful things that emerge when you do!
Anyway, she’s got a new book out, called From Agency to Zest, and you can buy it on her website.
Thanks for your attention.
See you next week,
Bevan.
Democracy Begins In The Classroom 