Two young girls at the pianoPierre-Auguste Renoir

1892

• If something abstract is made concrete and relevant to your perceptual experience, it becomes more interesting and easier to understand.

Who we are

• Our educators are working scientists and college teachers from Rutgers University who have developed these methods in our own psychology and neuroscience classrooms.

What we do

• Our mission is to improve New Jersey K-12 education by…– Developing pedagogical techniques that cut across disciplinary

boundaries– Training teachers to use these techniques in their own

classrooms.

• We principally use neuroscience and the visual arts to demonstrate the confluence of science and the humanities.

Our Goals for Today

• To provide you with a few new ideas and materials that can be easily adapted to your own classrooms.

• To give you each some insight into how the brain works and how neuroscience can (and cannot) inform your teaching.

Art, Neuroscience, & Education…Why?

NJ education standards segregate the sciences into biology, chemistry, psychology, physics, etc.

But it’s worse than that…

We teach our kids that “scientific” thinking and “artsy” thinking are incompatible and that people are usually only good at one or the other!

Art, Neuroscience, & Education…Why?

We believe that science and art both have the same goal:

To discover and communicate fundamental truths about the world and about ourselves.

Art, Neuroscience, & Education…Why?

We believe that the methods of science and art frequently overlap:

• Repeated drawing or painting of the same subject while making small changes is actually…

EXPERIMENTATION

• Putting together elements of a poem or essay to lead to a logical conclusion can be a lot like…

SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT

Why Neuroscience?

• Neuroscience is the science of “what makes you who you are.” That makes it a flavor of science that feels personal for students.

• The neuroscientific basis of perception is well understood and is both readily applicable to our daily lives and the substrate of most art forms.

• Engaging students at a personal level is the first step in making them want to think like scientists.

Why Neuroscience?

• It spans almost all scientific fields– Biology: cell biology, molecular biology, genetics,

development

– Physical sciences: organic chemistry, physical chemistry, biophysics

– Math: statistics, mathematical modeling

– Other fields: psychology, computer science, medicine, engineering, philosopy

Why Neuroscience?

• Teaching is the process of changing your students’ brains.

• Knowing a little bit extra about how those brains work can help contextualize your teaching efforts.

What do you already know about the brain?

What does a neuron look like?

The Neuron

From Carlson’s Physiology & Behavior, 1992

The Neuron

Biological Science, 2005

The Neuron

Brain Facts, Society for Neuroscience, 2006

The Neuron

The Neuron

The Neuron

This is a LIE!

A Real Neuron(Short Axon Cell – Olfactory Bulb)

A Real Neuron(Purkinje Cell – Cerebellum)

Other Real Neurons

• You will remember that the textbook shape of a neuron is a lie forever…

…which means I just changed your brains.

The Spirit of Science Education

What constitutes knowledge?

• What are the parts of a car?– You would say things like: the wheels, the engine, the

brakes, the seats, etc.– You wouldn’t say things like: the front of the car, the

back of the car, the bottom of the car, etc.

• What are the lobes of the cerebral cortex?– Frontal, occipital, temporal, parietal are just locations– Visual cortex, auditory cortex, motor cortex, are the

sorts of terms that reflect an understanding

What constitutes knowledge?

• What are the parts of a car?– You would say things like: the wheels, the engine, the

brakes, the seats, etc.– You wouldn’t say things like: the front of the car, the

back of the car, the bottom of the car, etc.

• What are the lobes of the cerebral cortex?– Frontal, occipital, temporal, parietal are just locations– Visual cortex, auditory cortex, motor cortex, are the

sorts of terms that reflect an understanding

What constitutes knowledge?

• What are the parts of a car?– You would say things like: the wheels, the engine, the

brakes, the seats, etc.– You wouldn’t say things like: the front of the car, the

back of the car, the bottom of the car, etc.

• What are the lobes of the cerebral cortex?– Frontal, occipital, temporal, parietal are just locations– Visual cortex, auditory cortex, and motor cortex are

the sorts of terms that reflect an understanding

What constitutes knowledge?

• Science is not history. It is not a list of names and facts that students need to learn.

• Science is a story about how the world works. That story is testable and falsifiable at any time by anybody.

• The essence of scientific thinking is the experiment, because only experiments can prove cause and effect. Students perform experiments constantly but don’t know it.

Science is a way of thinking

• Scientific thinking is skeptical – it says “how do you know?” and “what could we do to confirm that?”

• Science education should constantly ask students a) to design their own experiments to test facts they’ve been taught and b) to interpret experimental data in terms of support or contradiction of a hypothesis.

How Can Neuroscience Inform Educators?

Brain-based Education?

• There are some neuroscientific principles that seem obviously relevant to education…

• …but almost none of them have been experimentally validated for education.– e.g. “learning styles” model has no empirical support

We are going to try to teach you some neuroscience that informs our own teaching.

• Education and neuroscience have mostly not linked up yet – but we’re getting close

Thanks for attending this presentation from the RENOIR Program.

Feel free to contact us with further questions:

John McGann: jmcgann@rci.rutgers.edu

Lindsey Czarnecki: czarneli@eden.rutgers.edu

renoir.rutgers.edu

This presentation is Copyright John P. McGann 2013, all rights reserved