Mirror Neurons, a fairly recent and very exciting discovery within the brain, addresses the ability of the brain to interface cognition and affect in the service of "learning, attention, memory, decision-making, and social functioning". The fascinating work of Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino Yang offers insight into the workings of these "as if" neurons and their connection to emotional thought. Their theories push the envelope by offering an exciting model of learning where the learners feelings about what they are learning are as relevant as what they are learning.
As teachers of art and artists we know that learning is not divorce from emotions, mind is not separate from body. Why does our society and education see learning as sectioned from feelings. If fact, if student's feeling life is activated, learning is deeper and more impassioned. Discoveries in neuroscience, in particular mirror neurons, can help set the stage for a more balanced curriculum with the arts as equal partners to other disciplines. Arts integration becomes a key venue for generating understanding, analysis, evaluation and creating as defined by 21st Century skills. Research on arts integration (Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond [Ed.}, Putting the arts in the picture: Reframing education in the 21st Century, 2004) continues to support this powerful learning model as a process of bringing together two disciplines to advance knowledge and skills in both and engaging learners in authentic intellectual work. For integration to occur each discipline must be valued equally and studied in a way that invites inquiry, challenges students to address real-world standards of craftsmanship, and work in depth to apply knowledge to new situations or settings (p. 25).
The arts may be the mirror we need to view ourselves as an integrated being with emotional thought who attends to the world more fully, recalls more deeply, and makes socially conscious decisions that improve both ourselves and others.
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This will then be what I evaluate for the class.
ENJOY.....dr. pinciotti
This gives us so many new ways to think about the arts and learning. We have all seen the the faces of children light up when they participate in the arts. That little light switch is in the brain. Lets try turning it on a little more often in our schools.
It is truly fascinating that after 25 years of research that Dr. Pinciotti herself has dedicated to the brain and the body, that NCLB would still view the two seperately. Especially with the discovery of mirror neurons I would think that a lot more attention would be paid to the brain and the body working together in the classroom. I am a dance teacher and know first hand how important dance, art and music are to the brain. Studies have proven time and time again that the arts help children to become better students yet most schools view the arts as extra-cirricular. Schools seem more concerned with seeing higher test scores on standardized tests than with making a real difference in the individual students. Don't they realize that if you start to change the way we teach and incorporate the arts that in the end the test scores will be highter and that children in general will be a a better place not only academically but emotionally as well?
After reading the blog I feel discouraged because from 1982 to 2009 everything has come along way, and its dissapointing to see that cogniton and emotions are still not being related to each other. After the exploration into mirro neuros, cognitiona and emotions are still not being connected. Art has such an impact on a childrens life and their shool studies. It is really unfortunate these days to hear of some schools getting rid of the art program. Not obly does art help express the ideas of developing children, it also gives them a new side to studying.
Child Development students....make sure you check the rubric to see how I will be evaluating your insightful comments. dr.p.
In my substitute teaching and after-school tutoring experiences over the last few months, I have heard recurring comments from students regarding their class work. “What is the point?” “When am I ever going to need to know this?” “This is boring.” These comments represent the want and need that students have for emotional engagement in school and application of the material to their lives. When we were students, most of us probably echoed these exact same comments. So why is it that, as teachers ourselves, we are using the same teaching methodologies as our predecessors that we found so boring and disengaging when we were students?
This use of dated teaching methods is certainly not due to a lack of modern research regarding cognitive and emotional development and the benefits of new methodologies. The neuroscience research that Immordino-Yang and Damasio describe in the linked article, "We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education" (2007), discusses cutting edge findings that show how learning without emotion may lead to a proper response in the school or laboratory, but not in the outside world where unpredictable circumstances exist. For example, students may learn how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, calculate percentages, and receive a perfect test score. But without linking this information to real-world recognition, such as figuring discounts, balancing a check book, or tracking credit card purchases, they may make poor decisions later in life.
In addition, this blog points to the discovery of mirror neurons as a key that may help us unlock some of the mysteries of and interplay between cognition, emotion, and social functioning. This could provide additional support for an integrated classroom model, where math, history, science, English, and the arts are taught side by side, in relation to one another. This integrated model more realistically presents information as it would be experienced in the world, as part of a whole rather than separate entities, and allows students to cognitively, emotionally, and physically engage in the learning process. In contrast, most of today’s schools confine individual subjects within a four-walled classroom, with each subject separated from the others by a bell. The bell rings and math is over. The bell rings again and language arts has begun. There is rarely any overlap between courses and material. And we wonder why our students are bored and disengaged?
Again I ask, with all of this cutting edge research on cognition, emotion, and its implications in the classroom, why are we still teaching our students in the same disengaging and boring way we were taught as children? Imagine if other fields, such as medicine or technology, ignored their research and continued to practice as they did even just a decade or two ago. Now, imagine how advanced education could be if we applied our research to the classrooms in the same way that medicine has done in the pharmaceutical labs or technology has done in communications.
Emotion and art seem to go hand in hand - check out some of these examples: http://www.artsology.com/emotion-in-art.php
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