Tag: wonder

To Measure Success in America’s Schools, Count the Flamingos

Posted on | by Sam

As an educator, I can’t think of a more important, elusive, and agonizing question than this doozy: How do you measure success?

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered a new source of inspiration for how we should answer it, by way of a 27,000-acre fish farm at the tip of the Guadalquivir river in Southern Spain.

The farm, Veta La Palma, is led by a biologist named Miguel Medialdea. I learned about Miguel’s work from a 2010 TED Talk by renowned chef Dan Barber, who first became aware of Miguel after discovering just how unsustainable “sustainable fish farming” practices really were.

To produce just one pound of farm-raised tuna, for example, requires fifteen pounds of wild fish to feed it. Nothing sustainable about that. In response, industry leaders have dramatically reduced their “feed conversion ratio” by feeding their fish, well, chicken – or, more specifically, chicken feathers, skin, bone meal and scraps, dried and processed into feed.

“What’s sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?” Barber asks his audience, to peals of laughter. Yet there’s nothing funny about the ways we have decimated the large fish populations of the world. And there’s nothing funny about an agribusiness model that, in an effort to find ways to feed more people more cheaply, has in fact been more about the business of liquidation than the business of sustainability.

Enter Veta La Palma, formerly a cattle farm, and now a sprawling series of flooded canals, flourishing wildlife, and fecund marshland. In fact, because it’s such a rich system, Veta La Palma’s fish eat what they’d be eating in the wild. “The system is so healthy,” Barber explains, “it’s totally self-renewing. There is no feed.

“Ever heard of a farm that doesn’t feed its animals?”

Eventually, Barber asked his host the $64,000 question: how they measure success. Medialdea pointed to the pink bellies of a thriving population of flamingos.

“But Miguel,” Barber asked, “isn’t a thriving bird population like the last thing you would want on a fish farm?”

“No,” he answered. “We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. The pinker the belly, the better the system.”

It was at this point I thought about how much of Miguel’s work had lessons for our own.

Like agribusiness, education has been shaped by the logic of a single question for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, just as feeding more people more efficiently has led us into a feedback loop in which we constantly erode our own global supply of fish, educating more children more efficiently has yielded a shell game of metrics that have allowed us to falsely claim success (or failure), when in fact all we have been doing is eroding a different, more precious supply: our ability to fall in love with ideas.

You know this, but it’s worth saying again: the ultimate measures of success in our schools cannot be reading and math scores, or better attendance, or higher graduation rates (though those are all good things). These are not our Pink Flamingos, because they are not indicative of a thriving ecology in our schools.

At Veta La Palma, the best way to measure the system’s overall quality is by gauging the health of its predators. What is the equivalent measure in our schools? If we started to view our schools less as solitary islands, and more as single links in a systemic chain of each child’s growth and development, how would we measure success then? What would we need to start, stop and keep doing?

For starters, I think we’d want to track every available measure of that child’s overall health: mental, nutritional, social, emotional, developmental – and yes, intellectual. We’d stop assuming that schools are capable of being assessed in a vacuum, and start making sense of their effectiveness amidst a larger network of institutions and services (think how much this would change the perception of private schools). And we’d keep looking at existing efforts to apply a more ecological approach to learning, from the Community Schools model, to instruments that help measure a child’s sense of hope, engagement and well-being, to individual schools that proactively measure – wait for it – curiosity and wonder, to, yes, the nearly 22,000 Montessori schools around the world.

These priorities would also lead to a different set of questions that could drive future innovations:

  • Who else, and where else, are our children receiving sources of nourishment for their growth and development? Are the connections between those resources and the school implicitly or explicitly drawn?
  • What are the components of each community’s ecosystem of youth development and support?
  • What are our young people bringing with them to school each day – figuratively and literally – and how is our work at school explicitly designed to help them find the proper balance between their different developmental needs?
  • How can we better measure the optimal reflections of normalized growth – i.e., self-awareness, self-control, self-direction, and self-satisfaction?
  • How much student learning are we expecting to occur in the school building? How else can we leverage the larger community to be an active partner in the overall learning process?
  • In what ways are we creating everyday conditions for wonder and curiosity?
  • How clearly have we articulated our school’s ultimate vision of success, and how clearly do our students and their families understand how what we do each day is in service of that larger goal?

To transform sustainable farming, Dan Barber proposed a new question: “How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?

The same lessons of scale are true for sustainable schooling. As Miguel Medialdea puts it, “I’m not an expert in fish; I’m an expert in relationships.”

So are America’s educators. The central goal of schooling is not to instill knowledge, but to unleash human potential. The central model for schooling is not a factory; it’s an ecosystem. And the central measure of success is not a single benchmark, but a comprehensive ability to affirm the overall health of the systems that surround our children as they learn and grow.

So let’s get serious about applying two billion years’ worth of proof points in order to build, and measure, the ecological networks our kids actually need in order to learn and grow. It’s the only way to find the Pink Flamingos that have eluded us thus far.

A Year of Wonder: The Neuroscience of Empathy

Posted on | by Sam

By announcing last month that I wanted 2016 to be a year of wonder, I put friendly pressure on myself to pursue on all the big questions that occurred to me. We’ll see how well I’m able to sustain the energy over the course of the rest of the year, but my first riddle was this: ‘If empathy is what makes us distinctly human, what do we know about the neuroscience of empathy itself?’

If a person wishes to wonder deeply about the world, which ingredient is more important – the person, or the world?

Until recently, our answer was clearly the latter.

For the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which together make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death.

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – and to find an equally endless source of awe and wonder as we do.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to wonder is more than just a desire to daydream; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“What do we human beings do all day long?” asks neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni. “We read the world, especially the people we encounter.”  And according to Iacoboni and his colleagues, we do so by relying on “mirror neurons” – a special subset of the more than 100 billion neurons that are busily and ever at work in the most complex structure in the known universe: the human brain.

They’re called mirror neurons to describe the ways that observing the behavior of someone else – from eating a peanut, to yawning, to experiencing sudden pain – can trigger the same brain activity in the observer as in the observed. “Our brains are capable of mirroring the deepest aspects of the minds of others at the fine-grained level of a single brain cell,” Iacoboni explains. “This is utterly remarkable. Equally remarkable is the effortlessness of this simulation. We do not have to draw complex inferences or run complicated algorithms.

“When we look at others, we find both them and ourselves.”

Similarly, a growing chorus of researchers has begun to suggest empathy is a foundational building block in our process of developing social cognition. “The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

And yet, as far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: strictly speaking, it is not the world that makes us wonder; it is our wondering that makes the world. Or, even more specifically, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana point out, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to realize, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

The downside of all this navel-gazing? A heightened risk of narcissism, consumerism, and reality television.

The upside? A steadily increasing empathic capacity, anchored in our development of a shared sense of vulnerability, and a paradoxical desire to seek “universal intimacy” with the world.

“We are learning,” Rifkin writes, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy – to become an island to oneself – but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. We have been sending out radio communications to the far reaches of the cosmos in the hope of finding some form of intelligent and caring life, only to discover that what we were desperately seeking already exists among us here on Earth.”

 

 

A Year of Wonder

Posted on | by Sam | 11 Comments on A Year of Wonder

I admit: I’m the type of person who sees every New Year as a chance to reboot, revisit and refresh.

And this year, 2016, I want to try and sustain a yearlong exploration of wonder.

Part of the reason for that is pretty straightforward: on January 1, I officially became a partner in a global design studio that helps communities reimagine learning at the intersection of space, culture and story.

Our name? WONDER, By Design.

But part of it is also a desire to wrestle with some questions my colleagues and I want to understand more deeply:

  • If wonder is to learning as carbon is to life, then what are the neurochemical underpinnings of wonder itself?
  • In what ways does our capacity for wonder help explain what is most essential to what shapes and drives us as human beings?
  • What blocks our ability to wonder widely about the world? What gets us unblocked?

You can imagine my excitement, then, when I saw that the Renwick Gallery, a century-old museum in Washington, D.C. once described as the “American Louvre,” had recently undergone its own reboot – a literal, massive, two-year renovation – and was reintroducing itself to the public by having its first new exhibit transform the entire building into an immersive, multisensory work of art.

The inaugural exhibit’s name? WONDER.

So, last week, just before a massive blizzard ground the nation’s capital to a halt, I decided to visit on a random weekday morning.

A mixture of locals and tourists, old and young, prepared to move their way through the different exhibits and rooms with a hushed reverence. A sign on the wall, however, reminded us not to let any initial silence be mistaken for any required sense of formality: “Photography encouraged,” it read.

I walked into the first room, where I found a termite mound of index cards – a landscape of detritus, reconstituted into something both foreign and recognizable.

I squinted to see through a diaphanous indoor rainbow, made entirely of string.

Strangers and I peered at one another though a round opening in a human-sized bird’s nest – two sides of the same mirror.

And I walked alongside a Plaster Paris cast of a massive tree laying on its side, its bark recreated by the careful stitching together of small wooden rectangles, its empty center providing a portal through which to view . . . what exactly? The other end? The eternal? The unnameable?

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What drives us as human beings to spend thousands of hours making a plaster cast of a living tree? What is sparked in us when we experience it here, in this distinctly man-made space? And when I tell you that in two years the cast will be laid at the base of the actual tree it was based on so that it can gradually decompose and become part of the forest floor, what does that information make you feel?

Then I walked to the second floor of the exhibit. Other museumgoers were scattered on their backs underneath a giant, colorful, undulating map of the energy explosion that caused the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. I wandered into a magenta-hued room whose walls were covered by constellations of actual insect bodies, impossibly large. And in each room I jotted down framed quotations from people across the past 1,000 years who have wondered about wonder.

“Wonder – is not precisely Knowing And not precisely Knowing not – A beautiful but bleak condition He has not lived who has not felt.”

“Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote.”

And my personal favorite – “It is not understanding that destroys wonder; it is familiarity.”

I thought about that one as I returned to the hollow tree, and stared again through its open center. All along the outside, the tree’s branches jutted out like natural antennae, thin wires suspending it at eye-level.

This, I realized, was what this exhibit had led me to wonder about: What suspends us? What do we suspend?

Over 800 years ago, St. Albertus Magnus offered his own take on those questions. “Wonder,” he said, “is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual that the heart suffers a systole.”

It’s not an answer, just another layer to peel off and examine. I hope you’ll join me in the search, and add your own thoughts, in the months ahead.

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