Teaching Mapmakers, Not Map Readers: Rethinking Concepts with Adrian Von Wrede-Jervis

And you asked about what we summarizing what we talked about last time.

Yeah, I spent some time trying to unpack some of the work of Mary Helen Imedino-Yang and her work.

Work on transcendent thinking.

And essentially, if your listeners haven't clicked on that link, it's really worth reading her landmark study on what happened to teenage brains when they placed themselves within the story of the learning that was happening.

And what she discovered was the brains literally grew in size.

And that's like a wild claim.

It It turns out to be true and replicatable.

And the sense of well-being increased.

And I've been actually since that podcast, I'm going to do a shout out to a chap who I've been connecting with called Christian Moore Anderson.

And he's been looking at meaning making in a quite different angle.

He's been looking at it from a a concept called meta cybernetics, which was something I had to go look up.

But it comes to the same conclusions that essentially what the humans do is we like to try and make sense of our world.

And if we want to do that, to try and reduce The uncertainty of our experience in the world.

Now, because I don't know if I've really bad hodged up that theory.

What's interesting was through his journey and through my journey, through very different fields, we come to the same conclusion that...

The process of meaning making is so very important.

And the ability of students to actually see themselves within the story of what's happening around them is vital.

And it's a kind of a contrast, using some technical terms, of between cognitivism, really seeing the brain as a computer, and seeing it as a very isolated organ that's That's processing everything.

And that has been the dominant view of the way education has been done.

So brain speaks to brain.

We convey information versus another view, which is growing in popularity and popularity which Mary Helen Imadino-Yang would subscribe to, where it's a whole body experience.

And as the more we experience, we understand that, the more we realize that as students make sense of the world around them, they are, that's where the learning really happens in that whole body exploration of the world around them.