Learning involves shared attention -spiritually too

At the moment, I seem to be making connections between stuff I happen across and things to do with mindfulness. Now this is a bit peripheral to what the linked article is focussing on but nevertheless it caught my... well, attention. In the context of connections to mindfulness, this sentence got me thinking:

"Shared attention is the starting point of conscious human learning"

What is intriguing me about this, I think, is that I'm coming to the theological conclusion that mindfulness is shared attention with God. Mindfulness in the sense of giving attention to something and maintaining/returning attention to it is implicated in the picture from Genesis 1 of God giving attention to what was made and what was teeming or doing its (God-given) thing and seeing that it was good. A Christian mindfulness shares God's attentiveness to what is (made), joins God in being mindful of what God has made. So the quote about shared attention in a way characterises a Christian mindfulness by potentially including God. Of course, a point to take from Genesis and systematic theology is that God is the initiator of sharing; God is inviting us to see "that it is good" one piece of the world at a time.

But let's take that further with what that quote goes on to say about conscious human learning. When I hear or read 'learning', I tend to relate that to 'formation', that is to spiritual development and growth. I see the formation as a partially overlapping semantic field with learning. When we grow spiritually it is learning that takes place. When we learn, as Christians, we are to align our learning with our spiritual outlook and experience.
And I can't help but relate that to Genesis 2 and the naming of the creatures. In the bit of the story I'm thinking of, God brings the animals to Adam to name and Adam's names stand -"that was its name". I have written elsewhere of what is implied by naming. Briefly, naming implies noticing and learning about similarities and differences. It involves, to some degree at least, classifying and deciding what is 'in' or 'out' in the application of a label /name; "Yes that is also a squirrel but it's red, while that one was grey", for example. In this story we note how attention is shared, in fact how God engineers a shared focus to which Adam responds by noticing, learning and consolidating learning by naming. It's worth noticing too that from this perspective the 'naming' which is art or science is essentially the same: focus, notice similarities and differences and render them into another medium in order to think about and share learning. So, in this story shared attention really is the starting point of conscious human learning.

The sharing bit is important too.

before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”

Is that not also present in the Genesis 2 story? God's giving being and the sense of belonging engendered by the induction into a status in the garden. It's important too because language is a shared endeavour. Language is never a solo operation. Shared attention requires trust and mutual respect: we won't share attention if we sense that in doing so we are being co-opted to our detriment. There's probably a theology of advertising lurking there ...

How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete | News | The Guardian: ' via Blog this'

This is someone's story: the BIAPT conference

Lovely to be in Edinburgh in the sun and at the fine Pollock Halls complex for the annual BIAPT conference. The theme this year is story and narrative. We have a real storyteller telling -so far- traditional stories. And I think that this is a good idea -not to just have academic conversations about story but to be exposed to it.

Interestingly, Mark Cartledge's keynote address on the first afternoon has given us the 'go to' story for the conference so far: "Shane's story". It's an Alpha distributed testimony which is a good example of its genre and people keep using it as a common point of reference. Clearly it has raised questions about selection of narrative threads, power, whose interests are being served by the editing and distribution and indeed commercialisation, coaching and priming.

One of the things that I've found myself commenting on several times so far is the connection between telling our stories and the ministry of spiritual direction. I think this is mostly about the fact that I keep noticing how in telling our story in spiritual direction, we are often integrating new experiences into our narrative or finding /noticing experiences hitherto unintegrated that now gain traction or saliency in the light of our development and so need to find a place in our story. I guess this is analogous to the idea of narrative repair.

Kirsteen Kim spoke about the story of Korean Christianity strating with the the 2007 incident of the kidnapping of a mission team from Korea by the Afghani Taliban and then going behind that story. This was helpful in seeing a story unfold of a nation and its relationship to Christian faith -but I wondered how far it was really helping us to consider story in practical theology and how far it was simply being appropriated as history. Certainly we could begin to unpack the story and identify where other stories and perhaps even counter-stories might lie but I felt we needed to have some more guidance into how to 'take' this as practical theology. None of this is to take away from the actual contribution which was well presented and interesting. I'm merely reflecting (perhaps my own ignorance) that it didn't help me to move forward in understanding story in practical theology.

 Alison Millbank gave a very thought provoking talk about virtue and story as they inform or might inform church and school life. The title was "Ethics of Elfand' -drawing on a GK Chesterton essay of that title but which wrestles with the immanence of transcendent virtues (if I've both understood aright and expressed it in a helpful way). It was a wide ranging talk with many interesting things in it relating to church communities and church (largely) primary schools in relation to a notion of the common good. There seemed to be a paradox in the talk: I thought I heard her to be saying, in effect, that the common good is well-enough understood in the kind of way that Chesterton exposes in his essay because it is something of (my terms) a participation common grace of understanding of good lives -and yet later we are considering how the ends (teloi) of things (needed to define virtues in Aristotelian thinking) can only be understood in traditioned ways. I suspect that the paradox is resolved by recognising that the details of living are affected by teloi even if we can recognise in a more general way what common good might be: our understandings from particular traditions of what human beings are 'for' may nuance or even partly contradict some general understandings. But I'll need to think about that more.

One of the things that I found myself considering has been how little we have heard 'from the front' about narratology and the insights it and related areas of study might have to bring us into how stories 'work'. So I have felt that there has been a bit of a sense of sharing of ignorance where our thinking about story and narrative has not deepened although, I would suspect, a number of people have been able to make further connections between stories and to view theology through story. The shame, though, is that for practical theologians, there has been perhaps too little examination of the way that story is both tool of reflection and object for it.  Interestingly perhaps, for me, the most helpful (in the sense of insightful) aspect of the conference in respect of understanding story has probably been the last session with the storyteller Angela Halvorsen Bogo where she explored the ways that text and story work because they are performance and not simply text and the way that biblical texts contain fossils (this is my way of expressing it not hers) of the fact that they began as storytelling performances.

Misrepresenting 2nd language speakers in fiction

I quite like Hercules Poirot, especially as played by David Suchet. However, I've not read the books so I'm not sure whether the 'Frenchisms' are a faithful reproduction of Agatha Christie's writing or not, but I suspect so. By 'Frenchisms' I mean things like :

Mon ami, what will you? You fix upon me a look of doglike devotion and demand of me a pronouncement a la Sherlock Holmes! Hercule Poirot

 In particular the use of phrases such as 'Mon ami' or even 'Oui'

It's not just Agatha Christie, there's a tendency in a lot of writers to insert words from a foreign language to show foreign-ness of a character. The problem I have with it, from informal observation of others and of my own performance in foreign language, is that the kinds of words and phrases that characters like Poirot are shown using are not the kind of phrases or words that we tend to use in second-languages. Why? Because they are the 'easy phrases' we learn first. The first-language phrases we are likely to carry into our second-language usage are the harder things where we may not know the word. A second-language speaker of English is more likely to say 'my friend' or 'yes' but say something like 'etage one' because they haven't learnt 'first floor' yet, than they are to pepper their English with simple common phrases drawn from their first language.

What we tend to see in these fictional cases is actually the knowledge of the writer of the 2nd language projected onto the foreign-language character, and if the writer is not really well-acquainted with the language in question, what they are likely to know are phrases that a beginner would have learned or (possibly) the stereotypical characterisations of other writers or storytellers. I would recommend that any writer wishing to push beyond stereotypes of speakers-of-English-as-second-language should go to a few classes where people are learning English and pay attention to the way that they are taught common phrases and drilled in frequently-used contstructions and can end up producing sentences which are 'close enough' concatenations of these rote-learnt phrases with vocabulary inserted. Reproducing that kind of thing would have much more verisimilitude as would including misunderstandings where the second-language user responds not quite appropriately because they haven't understood something about what has been said to them and produce an answer or response which is on more familar ground for them.

Trusts not learning -how are they supposed to learn?

This caught my eye because it attributes 'learning' to a corporisation and it does so matter-of-factly.

NHS trusts are failing to learn properly from patient complaints, with most needing to make significant improvements on how they learn from mistakes, according to researcher. NHS trusts not learning from their mistakes, report says | Society | theguardian.com 

Admittedly this is echoing the way that many of us talk routinely about corporisations. We speak of them knowing, learning, willing and even deciding. My question is whether this is a mere figure of speech or whether there is a significant level of truth to it. Now, it should be noted the same article also quotes a more 'nuanced' telling of the tale and it may give a way into answering my question:

"too many boards are not considering the kind of analysis they need in order to understand patient experience and use information from patient complaints to improve safety and care. From ward to board level, learning from complaints needs to improve."

In this we catch a glimpse of what learning by a corporisation involves at least in the minds of one set of researchers and their interlocutors. It involves people processing information in groups which have places in structures. Those structures convene the groups and (implicitly, given that the learning is related to improving care) take the product of the group deliberations into changed systems. This seems to parallel definitions of learning which talk about processing information into changed behaviour or structure.

learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. Learning produces changes in the organism and the changes produced are relatively permanent    
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning> 

Since a corporisation is, by definition, made up of individual humans (plus some other 'ingredients') part of what we need to pay attention to is how the move is made from individual learning to the corporate level.

There are many methods for capturing knowledge and experience, such as publications, activity reports, lessons learned, interviews, and presentations. Capturing includes organizing knowledge in ways that people can find it; multiple structures facilitate searches regardless of the user’s perspective (e.g., who, what, when, where, why,and how). Capturing also includes storage in repositories, databases, or libraries to ensure that the knowledge will be available when and as needed. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisational_learning>

And learning takes the knowledge captured and turns it into not just stored information but policies, proceedures, training, slogans, iconography, architecture and accountability structures.

Interactive Advertising Sony Moves

I'm trying to decide how I feel about this. Check it out here:
Sony wants a future of interactive advertising, patents transformation of ads into games | Digital Trends:

Here's a bit from the article if you just want to dart to the heart of the matter:

using the PlayStation Move, the PS Eye, and the DualShock controllers. One shows pizza being ordered directly from an ad by selecting a large “Buy” button with a PlayStation Move controller. Another has a viewer jumping up and yelling “McDonald’s!” at their television screen to continue watching whatever show had been playing previously ... another visualizes consumers choosing between an action-oriented or romantic commercial to pass the time between actual television.

I think that what disquiets me is the androgogy of it: by forcing active involvement and thus engagement it forces attention and to some degree, I suspect, greater awareness of the product. But, on the other hand, what subversions of it will people come up with; will they/we learn to be even more ironic or sarcastic when engaging in this semi-forced way (not fully-forced because we could always just not do it). And if we subverted, took the mick, engaged ironically or subvesively, would that actually mean that the advertising became more ineffective? What opportunities for adbusting code and digital graffiti?

And would that start a re-subversion race in the spirit of Hebdige's Subculture: with constant bricolage being co-opted by the commercial and so on round the cycle?

Balm for revision fever

Here are some articles of research which may help those having to revise for exams and the like.
Lots of things don't really work -even if they make the revisee to feel better about their effort, so in a study about revision techniques only...
"...two strategies -- practice testing and distributed practice -- made the grade, receiving the highest overall utility rating." From this article. The two techniques come down to "spreading out your studying over time and quizzing yourself on material before the big test are highly effective learning strategies"
And, suggesting that where discipline (self-control) is needed, then exposure to 'religious' ideas seems to help muster self-control. I take this to mean that retaining spiritual disciplines like Bible reading in our revision programme could help us overall to keep to the timetables etc that we set ourselves. This seems to me to indicate that maintaining and perhaps even extending our spiritual disciplines including church going is likely to benefit our ability to exercise disciplines helpful to learning.

Now that may be related to why it is that "across all faiths, Erickson's new study found that measures of religious participation and spirituality are positively associated with higher educational attainment".I don't think that this means that going to church (or whatever) would be likely to increase your grade directly, but that the collateral effects of participating in faith communities produces habits and perspectives likely to aid the marshalling of effort effectively and to avoid behaviours that are likely to get in the way of educational attainment. What I would say is that retaining habits of life that 'go with' such attainment is more likely to continue to help.

I'm conscious that sleep and rest are important in my subjective experience and it turns out "this shows up in studies:" "Sacrificing sleep for extra study time is counterproductive," So, in fact, turning in an all-nighter is likely to give you less ability to engage with the demands of study and thinking. I can't help wondering too whether this relates to the phenomenon of stepping away from problems and doing something else which often yields insight to deal with the problem. Sleep in important ("Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory in learning and of course this is a kind of 'gaining life by losing it' paradox in that the 'productive thing to do' is to work as much as possible, rationally. But it turns out if we do that we imperil our learning: we have to rest to allow what learning we have do to consolidate.

One of the factors that helps learning is agency: we learn best when we are in control and making decisions about what we learn and how. "self-directed learning helps us optimize our educational experience, allowing us to focus effort on useful information that we don't already possess and exposing us to information that we don't have access to through passive observation. The active nature of self-directed learning also helps us in encoding information and retaining it over time." (from this article). So revision ought to include agentive opportunities -perhaps by buidling into our timetables acknowledged times to follow up interesting leads (recognising that they may help create further contextual links that will reinforce learning in other areas). Theologically, I'm wondering whether this could link to Adam's critter-naming.

I suspect that in the end, this will turn out to be related to this "They found that by strategically inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems." I think that this means problem solving helps and I think this would be in part because in identifying and becoming interested in the problem we exercise agency in relation to it. Though, of course, it's also about gaining enough information and insight about the topic to understand it thoroughly and the latter allows re-applicability. It's higher-order thinking that is enabled and developed. The effect of this on our study habits should be to see whether either we can find problems to solve or even discover them for ourselves: ones we find interesting and want to do (agency again). Adam naming, again?

And this is interesting "Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs" I've written elsewhere about the importance of allowing for failure. What this means in practice can be "obsessed with success, students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take difficult steps to master new material" and this can happen in revision when the perceived risk of trying to revise in the light of research and spirituality keeps us in old and established study habits.

The same article suggests "Teachers and parents should emphasize children's progress rather than focusing solely on grades and test scores. Learning takes time and each step in the process should be rewarded, especially at early stages when students most

Recognising a natural need for rest:

researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.
Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

See the rest here. Clearly napping and proper sleep at night is good. The latter may need a pre-sleep routine of wind-down, of course, to help stop things whirring around your mind.

Difficult-to-read? Better engagement

We're normally dead-set on finding presentational methods to make things easier to understand and access. And for important information that is clearly important and a good idea: safety info, for example, really needs to be apprehended easily and often quickly too.

However, here is research that indicates that if you want to increase people's engagement with arguments and to offset confirmation bias on their part, then making the material difficult to read is likely to help:

... use difficult-to-read materials to disrupt what researchers call the "confirmation bias," the tendency to selectively see only arguments that support what you already believe ... "Not only are people considering more the opposing point of view but they're also being more skeptical of their own because they're more critically engaging both sides of the argument,"

I think that this could be the basis for a learning strategy: to try and help us to appreciate different points of view, if we can get the material in digital format and change the font to something we find harder to read, we are likely to be helping ourselves to take in the argument more fairly and to give due weight to the strengths of someone else's argument.

Article to get summary and on-click: Difficult-to-read font reduces political polarity, study finds

A Future of Undergraduate Teaching

In various fora, I've been doing a lot of discussing and thinking about this lately and I think that this scenario is very likely.

 ... most teaching in the early years of an undergraduate degree will gradually cease to be via lectures and will instead take the form of online presentations produced by professionally trained presenters backed up by teams of academics. This online content will be paralleled by peer tuition (or teaching by questioning) which, when done well, is clearly effective (see here and here), and the associated growth of so-called learning analytics. Lectures may well become special occasions in which the best-known academics make their presence felt. Meanwhile, small group teaching will make a come-back in all years, especially in the best universities.

We've been saying for years that lectures are not a good way to learn except for a minority for whom it resonates with their learning style. And when we take on board the critique of our education system more generally that it is a huge university entrance system predicated on forming traditional research academics, then in GB it really is likely that the new fee regime is going to concentrate pedagogical minds on androgogical matters (though I prefer a term like mathetogogical). That is assuming that we are able to effect a culture change in British culture more widely to take away the prejudice that the only form of 'education' worth having is precisely invested in the system to produce research academics (even though simultaneously that is derided)

The fact is that HEI's will have to think hard about just what it is that they are 'selling'. I think that part of the answer will be 'accreditation' (largely about summative assessment and benchmarking) and another will be formative assessment and learning coaching.

The question in a barebones version of that future is about the way that those less able to access learning resources (including the human ones) of a traditional-ish form will be enabled to access it. Or will the 'total package' including access to counselling and other support services remain a kind of gold-standard?

The Future of Undergraduate Teaching - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Matching meditation technique to people...

I'm thenking about now about how best to offer opportunities to learn meditation into the life of Northumbria University. So it was interesting to see this report Finding right meditation technique key to user satisfaction. The main thrust of it is this: "Because of the increase in both general and clinical use of meditation, you want to make sure you're finding the right method for each person,"

Basically, the research found that people stuck with it if they took to it. There's going to be more research needed to fine tune what's involved in preferences. Those us involved in spiritual direction and prayer guiding are -many of us- used to encouraging people to consider what works for them. I'm wondering whether patterns could be discerned that might work with different personality types or whether it would be cultural backgrounds ore something else that would prove to be the key factor in what 'works' for different people.


In the mean time, I'm thinking that it may be good to flag up to learners that there are a handful of different approaches and they might need to experiment a bit. I'd already been considering that there should be a short 'course' in which different things could be tried out. But if anyone would like to leave a comment about research or even informal observations of what kind of people take to which kind of approach, I'd be most interested.


I have suspicions or hunches in terms of MBTI types: S may prefer mindfulness as it involves giving attention to sensory experience; becoming immersed in it. I'm less sure, but I think that perhaps mantra-style approaches might work better for Ts. ... I've seen these things worked out in termss of prayer, but meditation is something that overlaps with prayer but not isomorphically. So I'm not quite sure how F and N types would relate.

Tax, reward and the favours of fortune

I'm feeling a bit vindicated reading the report of this research. I've been saying in several posts over the last couple of years that we should be aware that the talk of rewarding the entrepreneurial is overblown by giving too much credit to their 'exceptional' ability (ie it's not normally that exceptional) and too little to circumstances and the formation by their society (if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a nation to raise an entrepreneur). This study shows that we humans have a confirmation bias about this that needs challenging. Hey, -and it has a pedagogic dimension too!

 "Humans, however, often rely on the heuristic of learning from the most successful. Our research found that even though observers were given clear feedback and incentives to be accurate in their judgement of performers, 58% of them still assumed the most successful were the most skilled when they are clearly not, mistaking luck for skill. This assumption is likely lead to disappointment -- even if you can imitate everything Bill Gates did, you will not be able to replicate his initial fortune. This also implies that rewarding the highest performers can be detrimental or even dangerous because imitators are unlikely to achieve exceptional performance without luck unless they take excessive risk or cheat, which may partly explain the recurrent financial crises and scandals." Reward the second best, ignore the best:

 And because their success often is magnified or amplified by those good old dynamics to do with the first player in the field being able to set the parameters, make faster progress, accumulate critical economies of scale etc, we should consider a kind of windfall tax approach. I'ts like in the game Monopoly, the ones who get to the premium properties first and have a half decent strategy tend to win; it's not skill, it's luck plus, as I say, a half-decent strategy (but probably no better than most of the other players).

 The lucky few may be more skilful than others eventually, but the way they gain their superior skill can be due to strong rich-get-richer dynamics combined with the good fortune of being successful initially. This can justify a higher tax rate for the richest when their extreme fortune is accumulated in the fortunate fashion defined in this research.

And I thought it quite interesting to note that we need to try to work against the apparently counter-intuitivity about rewards in this kind of case:

policy-makers need to design 'nudges' to help people resist the temptation to reward or imitate the top performers.

Part of what needs to happen though, surely, is that we keep banging on about this research and we keep analysing and publishing and highlighting the luck and happenstance that has actually 'made' these so-called 'self-made men'. Society has helped make them; the rest of us are entitled to ask for a dividend for the investment we have made in their success. We are all shareholders in the common good; it's time to stop exempting those who impress us.

7 step theological reflection

Worth checking out if this article is any indication. Alban - Building Up Congregations and Their Leaders:

Theological reflection is simply wondering about God's activity in our lives. Where is God present? What is God calling us to do? By taking time to ask questions about what happens to us—seeing our experiences through the lens of faith—we become clearer about our connection to God. We all ask questions about relationships, our work, our children, our government, and our situation in life. We all reflect, wonder, analyze, think, assess, and discuss with friends as ways of trying to understand our life. Theological reflection simply refocuses all that thinking to encourage a stronger sense of relationship with God, asking, "Where does God fit into the picture?"

What this process does is elaborate the basic 4 step pastoral cycle model in such a way as to take on board the group context envisaged, it also explicitly encourages the recognition of the affective dimensions of an experience which is remniscent of Killen and De Beer's theologcal reflection process and one of the important contributions that their process adds. It also makes an explicit step of prayer.

Asymmetric insight

I'm finding these things increasingly fascinating because they seem for me to connect with other things I know from other parts of my life. So, it starts with an intriguing title like this one:
Why You Can't Truly Know Other People (and What You Can Do About It), and what then catches my attention is this:

This phenomeon—what psychologists call the illusion of asymmetric insight—creates a lot of problems. For instance, it allows you to completely reject what others believe because you think you understand it, and remain convinced that they'd agree with you if only they understood your point of view. Basically, you think you can understand everyone else and nobody can understand you

Which seems to be related strongly to that crucial and basic counselling insight; active listening is important because it actually helps people get beyond the isolation that can be brought about by asymmetric insight (no-body understands me) and it also helps get past the first-foot attitude we all tend to start with; that others don't understand us. Active listening helps overcome both those related things.

Note too the importance of this insight for everyday peace-making (and remember 'blessed are the peacemakers ...'); we have to make sure that we do both learn to understand and empathise with others and also demonstrate to them that we really do and that perhaps we understand their point of view. This requires a great deal of humility: the insight that we all think we understand ourselves but no-one else does. It is also part of the 'deal' that if we start from a perspective that others would agree with us if they understood our point of view, then we can't really properly consider changing or moving from our pov until we grasp that the someone else really does understand it. After all, if it's not understood, how can we consider dropping it or modifying it in favour of someone else's unknown perspective? When we truly grasp that our pov is properly understood (in a way that we could recognise it as our own) and yet not necessarily agreed with, then it is that we can move on. This, of course, is the reason why real reconciliation and peace-building is so hard: getting people to listen and to feel heard when the situation is a clash of stereotyping, miscomprehension and dismissal.

The other thing it reminded me of, though, is the acute inner embarrassment (I can't think of a better term just now) as I catch a glimpse of how I might be perceived by others and that they may understand something about me that I hadn't really got hold of. The asymmetry doesn't grant us unique and wholly accurate insight into ourselves. How could it? We are because others are; some of who we are is 'out there' in our social world.

Corporal punishment = long-term negative effects

It is congruent with the proposals that creating low-anxiety, inclusive learning environments produces better learning. Write up is here: Corporal punishment may have long-term negative effects on children's intelligence: "Children in a school that uses corporal punishment performed significantly worse in tasks involving 'executive functioning' -- psychological processes such as planning, abstract thinking, and delaying gratification -- than those in a school relying on milder disciplinary measures such as time-outs,"
I wonder whether this has some bearing on learning outcomes for different communities in Britain. There are some distinct educational outcome differences between different cultural communities inhabiting the same socio-economic spaces in cities in on instance I know of, the attendance of male children at after school classes where corporal punishment is often part of the the environment, is not only getting in the way of their being able to do the homework and be rested for the next day's work, but may be creating a higher anxiety response to classroom/learning situations. The further danger is this:

These results are consistent with research findings that punitive discipline may make children immediately compliant -- but may reduce the likelihood that they will internalize rules and standards. That, in turn, may result in lower self-control as children get older. ... corporal punishment does not teach children how to behave or improve their learning. In the short term, it may not have any negative effects; but if relied upon over time it does not support children's problem-solving skills, or their abilities to inhibit inappropriate behaviour or to learn

Mapping, knowing and propaganda

Some readers will know that I enjoy a good map. It's the colour, pattern and promise of new places. I also find myself intrigued by the idea of mapping. The way that a map picks out certain features of reality in relationship to others to guide the reader through a literal, metaphorical or mixed territory. And while the map is not the territory, it shares with language more generally the ability to make us think it is -kind of.

Now the article here: 513 - Then We Take Berlin: When East Ate West | Strange Maps | Big Think: helps shine a light on the way that things that we take as natural, unproblematic or starightforward, are actually freighted with ideological, hegemonic perspectives -just like ideas and other cultural artefacts. See ...
"Take this map of the urban transport network (1) in Berlin. At face value, it is a purely utilitarian map, giving its readers a no-nonsense, schematic overview of the transportational possibilities of the German capital. But context matters: this map was produced by the East German government, for its captive citizenry. It mixes information with propaganda as it tries very hard to ignore an inconvenient truth - too big to hide completely: the existence of another Berlin."
So this is a great idea for cultural studies teaching and learning: a way in to a central idea...

Victims of metaphor: serious crimes and stepping into creativity

the eight Buffalo schoolgirls “were victims, though no one realized it at the time, not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor.”

You might reasonably ask how that could be.Well it is to do with how the police investigating framed their task and how that framing was summed up in metaphor (or is that vice versa?) In this case the police didn't put certain information into the public domain that could have pceweted further rapes because they saw their task as catching the bad guy rather than saving girls from violation.

And this article on dehumanisation in generating violence seems to show a similar process at work: reframing using metaphors* to categorise and 'prime' responses.

The articles referenced here report some research into how metaphoric framing affects reasoning ability in relation to crime.The article links this to the way that science is reported (because in actual fact, popularising science relies on metaphor and simile) but the same could be said of practical theology.

This insight tells us how important it can be that we reflect on the way that we are perceiving and thinking about things. We can be trapped in our own approaches and limited perceptions. By questioning them and consciously seeking to look at them differently or to supplement them using other images, models or metaphors we can create new possibilities, new futures, more resilient solutions more creative responses. In theological reflection the exploration/analysis should be a point of recognition of the metaphors, models or images that we currently use and to become aware that they may be limited and pull in new-to-us ways to view whatever it is. In the reflection stage we consciously try to bring to bear the riches of biblical imagery or incidents which can in turn open up not only different ways to think about whatever it is but also give us the possibility of perceiving and connecting with the ways of God in it.


*Though David Livingstone Smith claims that 'untermenschen' is not a metaphor but literal. I'm not so sure that works not when the term is linked as it was to terms like "vermin" or "disease" applied to people. It seems to me that untermenschen in that case is merely a catch-all term for a cluster of metaphors aimed at reframing a certain group in terms that made an implicit case for their enslavement and eventual elimination.

The care and keeping of experts

Some highlights from this video:

When  people are told that an expert is dealing with it, their brain scans show a flatlining of the decision-making parts of the brain. Experts often get things wrong in areas where, actually, people know their own situations better. The mistakes the experts make cited here are quite frightening: they (we!) are influenced by confirmation bias and pre-judice. We have a right to be spoken to in ways we understand: informed consent means we are informed not blinded by science (literally or metaphorically). Expert ideas need to prove their worth; survive against other viwes: dissent can produce better ideas than the received wisdom (which is what experts are often expert in). We need to use experts, but we should be aware of limitations

Part of my interest is is noticing that the 'expert effect' is to turn of people's decision-making. This is presumably related to the basic mechanism of being led and of submerging ourselves in the group. This would be a basic mechanism for social co-ordination either by a distinct leader or by our reading of the 'group mind' (cued by all sorts of non-verbal signals as well as other cultural and sometimes linguistic clues). It may be why a mob can be more stupid than individual members -in some conditions. -This video actually mentions conditions that can be created to actually crowd-source knowledge and judgement in ways that can be more intelligent than the experts (and The Wisdom of Crowds would be a good book to find out more about the conditions for the crowd to be cleverer than any individual).

  

The intelligence of the senses

Ever since, 26 years ago I was told I couldn't submit a report on a placement at a radio station in the form of a radio programme, I have felt that there are times and topics where we need to be able to let academic discourse out a bit. It sometimes needs to get a life. Instead of reduce everything the the one dimension of written discourse: "Academia often excludes non-linguistic media such as film, photography, or sound on the grounds that they are not recognized academic formats in and of themselves; they do not adhere to strict rules of grammar nor do they necessarily employ the approved tools of study that yield accountable data, such as surveys of customs and kinship systems. But as the significance of embodied knowledge and lived experience increases in the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences, perhaps the academic world can make a little more room for media that best represent this data, encouraging alternative methods of communication to join language with equal credibility."

Of course, all is not bleak; the arts (as in performance, plastic and visual) have been 'doing academic' for a long time. But perhaps it is time to learn from them. I think that there are areas of practical theology which could probably usefully engage with this. And I note that one of the possibilities I wrote into the Engaging Culture course was that the assessment could be done in the form of some other cultural artefact than the essay...

The McGill Daily � The intelligence of the senses

permission to fail

It's good to see Maggi running with a theme that I've been mulling over in the last year and longer. permission to fail – Maggi Dawn: "To do our best we need to have permission to take huge risks. But you can only do that if you also have permission to fail."

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom?

http://www.newway.org.uk/datasheets/pastoral_cycle.phphttp://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/experience.htmWhen I looked at this I had TS Eliot's lines running through my head:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

-- from T.S. Eliot, "Choruses from 'The Rock'"
. That's a bit of a caveat. Nevertheless this diagramme does seem to capture something, though there are some salient critiques and further suggestions in the comments. If you've admired, as I have, the contents of the book 'Knowledge is Beautiful', then this will seem familiar in style -for good reason.

It's quite interesting to note that this kind of progression is not unusual see this (and more here):

What I'm finding myself intrigued by is the way that the elements in these models seem to correlate to the elements in the Kolb Cycle and the Pastoral Cycle ... don't you think?
If my intuition is right, then it lends further support to my contention that those models 'work' in as far as they do because they are naming important and real elements or stages in learning.
Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom?

Active role in learning enhances memory

Another case of some research confirming what we already thought we knew, but valuable for that in strengthening the case by those of us wanting to encourage more participatory classrooms.
How taking an active role in learning enhances memory: "'Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we're beginning to understand why,' said University of Illinois psychology professor Neal Cohen, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss. 'Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you're actively exploring the world.'"