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The whole person learns

It used to be thought that the body and the mind were completely separate, and that intellect and emotions were totally different. All that is now being turned on its head. The emerging pattern is that a person is a learning system, and every aspect of a person – body, brain and mind - is involved in the perception/action cycle. (Fuster, 2003). The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spells this out more formally in Descartes Error (2005 ) when he says that

(1) The human brain and the rest of the body constitute an indissociable organism, . . .; (2) The organism interacts with

the environment as an ensemble: the interaction is neither of the body alone nor of the brain alone;

In fact cognition (in a very general sense) should be seen as an indispensable function of all living systems (Varella and Thompson, 1993; Thompson, 2008).

Practical implication: When it is seen that the whole person learns, and that learning and creativity are system properties, it becomes easier to ensure that education deals with the whole child, and that the "intellect" is not separated out and treated as an entity unaffected by emotions, relationships, the state of the body and more.

“Learning” defined

The words "learn" and "learning" have several different meanings. That is one reason why those concerned with education are so often at cross purposes, and why there is so much confusion and debate about how people learn and how to teach them. Some meanings of "learn" include:

To remember;

To gain insight and develop understanding;

To acquire skills;

To gain a feel for things;

To mature and grow up;

To make sense of experience.

Most education in the United States settles for a very limited conception of learning, usually framed in terms of memorization, and the development of basic skills such as reading. Even though standards often call for the development of understanding, in practice teaching is for memorization.

Practical implication: In order to raise standards, education needs to teach for all the different aspects of learning. And that means that all the different aspects of learning need to be understood.

Natural learning

In order to survive and thrive, every single human being for the last 30,000 years has had to learn. That common process is what we mean by "natural learning." (Others define the term differently. Just Google "natural learning" ). Simply put, all organisms in the real world have to do two basic things in order to survive:

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They have to gather information about their environment and themselves (perception) and

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based on this information, they have to manipulate their environment, and themselves, in a way that is advantageous to them (action).

As a result of acting, the organism gets feedback - new information from the world and from itself. That feedback provides the guidance about how the organism needs to act next time. This may cause a change in the organism and in its capacity to perceive or way of perceiving. This can also lead to changes in the capacity of the organism to act and/or to perform different types of action. In short, it learns.

Not surprisingly, then, the essence of natural learning is what biologists call the perception/action cycle (Fuster (2003) cortex and Mind).

Practical implication: If the core natural capacity and predisposition of all individuals is to learn for success and survival in the real world, that should be the place to start in understanding learning in education. The way to do that is to set, as the primary goal of education, learning for real world outcomes - and this should apply to ALL the standards. Other learning outcomes emerge from this foundation.

Research trends

Natural learning has not itself been the primary focus of most formal research, though many educators and others use the term.. Although aspects of learning have been researched extensively for over a hundred years, it has been from many points of view. These range from different branches of clinical psychology (with, for instance, interests in therapy and programming behavior) to cognitive science (with an interest in such phenomena as concept formation). In that time, there has been a wide, perhaps wild, swing in the scientific view of how people learn. In recent times there have also been at least two significant developments.

The first is the dramatic increase in brain research with a corresponding torrent of advice to educators from the researchers and those who interpret the research.

Second, there has been a growing realization that the many different fields of study that impact learning, ranging from neuroscience and cognitive psychology to stress theory, the development of expertise and creativity research, should be seen as deeply interconnected.. That synthesis is now heavily underway.

The Caines have been advocating the integration and synthesis of research since 1989, with the publication of their brain/mind learning principles, which were expanded into an approach to teaching in their best selling book, Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain (1994)

The fundamentals that are slowly being revealed are finally beginning to exlain the way in which the perception/action cycle (the core of natural learning) works, and the ways in which people learn by making sense of experience or acquiring new capacities to act.

Practical implication: The essential problem is that much of the learning that occurs naturally has been excluded from schools, so that learning from life and learning in schools have, to a very large extent, been divorced. When natural learning is embraced, many unused capacties of all children can be accessed and developed.

Systems principles of natural learning

The perception/action dynamic functions according to the systems principles of natural learning developed by Renate and Geoffrey Caine. They have been derived from a synthesis of research in many fields, ranging from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to the development of expertise, the nature of creativity and stress theory. The principles apply to all learners irrespective of age, gender, subject matter, ethnicity, economic status or any other factor.

Practical implication: Each principle is a gateway to understanding the research. In addition each one helps to spell out a learning capacity that all learners have that are currently unused in schooling. The key to raising standards for all students at every level is to tap into all these "hidden" capacities.