Why ask Why? The Debate over WHAT Teachers Need to Know

With the wonderful success of our recent EvoS core course experiment; Mythic Minds - a group of us at University of Toliara are now working to develop a Positive Education Action-Research Laboratory - an innovative research group focused on refining, expanding, and disseminating the best practices we all just experienced within this pilot program. It sounds exciting and uncontroversial - and in a land with numerous Human development challenges - why would we not explore educational strategies aimed at maximizing Human flourishing?

"Why Ask Why?" might be acceptable if we want our kids to chug
Bud Dry - but if we want them to be
thoughtful, healthy, and happy Human Beings -
we'd better get really good at asking - and answering
these very big questions of "Why?"

Indeed - it really isn't controversial. I even chatted with a local Baptist missionary recently about the aims of our work - and indeed - he was quite supportive. Yet - unsurprisingly - he offered that "I like this positive psychology stuff.... but I'm not clear on exactly why you are bringing all this evolution stuff into it?". To be sure, my Baptist colleague is not alone. An apparently secular University of Wisconnsin-Madison Law Professor recently commented on an article from the Evolution Institute that "once you know how people learn, the intervention at the point of teaching and learning some material eliminates any cause and effect dependency of how we got that way" . This certainly seems reasonable enough - if we know "how" to best teach Students - why do we need to understand "why" it is we got that way? Shouldn't we focus intensely on  "how" best to teach Students; and just leave the "why we should teach in this way?" questions- up to Philosophers and others who focus on cosmic contemplations of the navel? The short answer is - definitely not.

To be sure - I strive to emulate, with unending respect, a great many Education Professionals who do not venture into the deep-time mysteries of evolution to inform their practice. In the emerging "3-6-10" model of Positive Education practices we are exploring in our Laboratory; two of the three organizations we follow have no evolutionary inclinations at all! Despite their proximate focus - many Educators know they have hit the nail on the head. So why then - why in the world should we spend our precious time asking questions about "why" some educational practices are better than others?

The answer is simple and two fold; engaging our sense of awe - and [only perhaps] more importantly -being able to ask better questions!

For me; and for many of us - it is simply an amazing, awe-inspiring story; the story of how Human Educational systems came to be. From an ancient ancestral adaptive need some 1 million years ago - until the shockingly inappropriate industrial renovation of childhood social systems within the last couple of hundred years - it's a wild ride filled with mystery, magic - and an explanatory power no serious Educator would want to miss. But interest alone does not make a curricular strategy.

The (perhaps) better response to my Baptist and Secular Skeptics lies in the realm of inquiry. Yes - many have "stumbled" (albeit through intensive empirical study) upon improved - and perhaps even currently idyllic models for teaching the evolved Human Brain-Mind; but that is not a secure direction for continued success. A perspective built on a deep-time and holistic-mechanistic understanding of why we got to this state where we can begin to describe how we should teach - this perspective is the one that allows us to ask the most appropriate questions to ensure a positive developmental future for the world's growing Humans.

A more unified perspective of Human Sciences makes it clear;
Ultimate explanations - the "why" questions -  are critically interconnected
to the more immediate - proximate level explanations of "how" we
must teach Students across the board!

I can understand and empathize with those who wonder "why ask why?" - but I can certainly not agree that it's a valid, or even interesting question. If we take a truly unified perspective to the human sciences; it becomes instantly apparent that the ultimate level of explanation - the "why" questions that inform an evidential understanding of the proximate level regarding "how" we should teach - are of the utmost importance and value to shaping the future of Academia K-12; and into Higher Education as well.

Evolving Groups of Groups & Sparking an Education Innovation Revolution in the Process!

This picture may appear to be 'just a group of Students' - but it's much more!
These groups are exploring what it will take to integrate the best in evidence
towards the goal of offering all Malagasy Students - the best in education!
What evolutionary science is showing us - is how to design the most
cooperative, learning-enabled classroom groups possible!

Evolution shows us that Life is Groups of Groups.... That is - the biological cell is 'merely' -or perhaps rather - magically - a group of molecules; an organ is a group of biological cells; an organism is a group of organs- and a society is a group of organisms

Clearly to say that Life is 'merely' groups of groups - is disingenuine. The group-stuff of Life must be the most carefully cooperative group-stuff - in the Universe! A cooperation utterly contingent on the design elements found at every scale!

As our 10-day - EvoS seminar for our Secondary Education Teacher Training Program was coming to an end - we decided to turn our group's newly found deep-time eyes towards the potentially murky abyss that is Educational Design.

• How do our Classroom Groups function?
• How can we redesign Classroom Environments to support Students in the organization of effective learning groups (from the micro-level of the neuron; to the macro-level of culture)?

A group of learners - that is -  learning in ways that connect their neurons to their culture; their ancestral past to their anticipated futures!

These are the big questions and tall aims my Students have chosen to tackle. To take on a Service-Learning Project - in which they become the Educational Design engineers for the future of Madagascar!

Armed with our Unified Human Sciences (UHS) framework; and an expanding literature review of educational best practices - the next offering from EvoS@UoT is going to kick things up a notch! In this coming round - our Level II Educational Psychology Students will explore Positive Psychology - and the Human traits of optimum well-being. They will examine these traits from across the UHS spectrum (asking evolutionary questions at multiple scales of time and space) - and from this study - they will re-engineer the Mythic Minds - introductory course they just completed; and that their incoming Freshman colleagues are about to begin!

As our Students are exploring what the Regents Academy
Experiment was all about - they are experiencing a
radically new style of education;
& they are being empowered to bring these lessons to the
larger University of Toliara community!

From our studying of educational Best Practices - we are seeing that Humans have, what scientists call; an Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness - or what we can think of in lay terms as an environment to which our genetics are best able to thrive in. This may have BIG implications for education - and luckily these implications are simply re-confirming what many educators already know!

From our studying of David Sloan Wilson's work in creating the Regents Academy Experiment; we began to glimpse how converging evidence is leading educators to a growing list of best practices in the classroom.

For millions of years our ancestors learned in very different environments than those imposed by the "Factory Model" of education - as so eloquently described in the video belo, by Sir Ken Robinson. In these varying Environments of Evolutionary Adaptedness learning environments had some basic common traits:

• We learned in small groups of mixed ages and skill ranges
• Our learning was focused on practical, experiential learning, based on the needs of our communities
• Finding a personal niche - based on one's individual strengths - a niche that is beneficial to one's community; would have been a prized virtue

Our modern day Service-Learning model, indeed, offers a clear package of best practices for our Teachers-in-Training to bring back these ancestral traits into our future classrooms. We will practice what we preach - using the Service-Learning model to understand, and ultimately re-engineer our own educational system in ways that honor our ancestry and prepare us for the future!

In our EvoS-Inspired classroom we are evolving some most interesting varieties of Student Groups. These varieties are empowered with a rigorous evidential literacy, a sense of exploratory awe befitting of anyone wishing to study the miraculous web that is Unified Human Sciences - and - a call to action; a call to improve the very educational communities in which they study and work!

For More Information:

The Regents Academy Experiment at the Evolution Institute 

The KIDS Consortium for Service-Learning; far and away the best in the business for making these kinds of projects work!

The good folks over at George Lucas' Foundation EduTopia also get it! Their evidence-based Core Concepts perfectly reflect our approach - and provide yet another platform for our Students to re-conceive what education can be!

Finding Myth, Magic, and Public Policy in Evolutionary Religious Studies

The Norse tale of Auðumbla, the Sacred Cow who fed the God
Ymir, and licked Buri - the origins of Humanity -
from the Salt of the Earth.

Folks often ask me: How can I teach Evolutionary Studies in such a largely Christian Community? For that matter- a community so supposedly different in so many ways from my own cultural background?

The answer is quite simple:
With genuine Human-to-Human respect; and the unstoppable magic of combining great story and great science!

Indeed - there appears to be little or no conflict for most of my students regarding our path of study - especially under the awe-inspiring gaze of evidential deep-time!

Our developing Teacher Training Core Course postulates that we must cultivate in our Students; a humble-awe and deep transdisciplinary understanding of the mythic Human Origins stories from across all cultures, times, and belief systems. That means; the Evolutionary Story is simply among the more recent of such epic tales of Human Origins - differentiated only by it's sacred focus on convergent evidence!

With these stories - of course - come belief systems; and our students are increasingly comfortable analyzing such phenomena through the  interconnections between culture; life experience; and of course; the biology of the brain. Criss-crossing throughout temporal and organizational scales of analysis during each and every seminar day!

We discuss the difference between Factual Realism and Practical Realism when it comes to these legends of mythic proportion. The former referring to how a given story connects with the exploding convergent evidence of Human Origins. The latter referring to how a given story motivates adaptive (i.e. beneficial) behavior in the individuals and communities which cherish it. Let's see how these two concepts from Wilson (2002) help us interpret my favorite mythic narrative about the origins of Humans and our relationship to the Bovid family of non-human animals.

The Norse Mythology of Auðumbla

Those who know me - know - I am gonzo for Cows! So let me share one of Humanities great bovine-based  myths of yore - the Norse tale of Auðumbla. What is this mythic story? And - how can we talk about it's factual versus it's practical realism? 

Ymir was the God of his day - literally; living the good life, lazing around and suckling copious quantity of milk from the four streaming teats of his primeval ruminant; Auðumbla. Yet - from where did Auðumbla get her nourishment? According to a 1916 English translation:

"She licked the ice-blocks, which were salty; and the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man's hair; the second day, a man's head; the third day the whole man was there. He is named Búri." (Brodeur 1916)

How many of you now believe the Story of Auðumbla is factually real? 
Not a hand among my 26 undergrad students was raised. It seems my efforts to convert them to this ancient Scandinavian Bovine-Worship Cult had failed ;)

But why did it fail? Did Students reject the truth of this story based on a cross-cultural intuition - a moral distaste for it? Or - was it because of a reasoned response based on sound science? That's a hard question to dissect - but many of them are now certainly able to articulate that we would need a LARGE amount of convergent evidence to try to argue in favor of the factual realism of Auðumbla.

But - if this story is so clearly not factually real - WHY - why do you think these peoples would create and tell such a myth, for so many generations (possibly dating back to proto-indo-european origins)?

I'm training my students to think as skilled functionalists - that is - I want them to think about what the functional impacts of any given Human trait (including the story of Ymir and Auðumbla).  If we understand the function - we may also glean insights into the origins. 

Students were hesitant to offer a hypothesis....

If you did actually - really really believe this story; how do you think you would might feel and act towards Cows? 

AHHH.... I can see some light bulbs flashing in the faces seated before me!

"well - we would treat the zebu like our mother or sister - like family"

While our Students easily reject the factual realism of the Auðumbla mythology; we can not be so quick to reject it's practical realism. It seems apparent that such a story could have quantifiable (in theory) positive impacts on how individuals and communities cared for and treated their bovid-buddies across the generations. During this nordic-slice of Human ancestry; those with healthy, happy cows undoubtedly fared better than their neighbors who sacralized less practical beliefs. An inspiring, culturally owned story that motivated one to do the absolute best for her cattle - this would certainly be a story with enduring value!

Now - did we just cheapen the story of this Divine Bovine, Auðumbla, by bringing an evidential understanding to it? Did we just reduce a cherished piece of ancient culture to "mere evolutionary principles"? HARDLY!

Integrating the Evolutionary Origins Story;
a Practical Matter of Night & Day!

The Reverend and Philosopher, Michael Dowd famously uses the concept of Night Language and Day Language to discuss the differences and connections between Science, Religion, and Mythology-at-large.

At a recent TEDxGrandRapids Talk; Dowd eloquently explained:

"What we used to speak about only in the Night Language of Religion, we can now also speak about in the plain, factual Day Language of Science". 

The Mythology of Auðumbla offers
spine-tingling Night Language for the
Scientific Day Language  of
Human-Bovine Co-Evolution!

For Dowd - Religious Mythology and Hard Science can be two sides of the same coin - an effort to help Humanity live in, what he calls, "right relationship" with our world. What my scientist colleagues refer to as; promoting adaptive behaviors. Recognizing that, on a neurological level, our Brains can literally be said to be "wired for story" - it seems premature of strong Atheists to fanaticize religious believers for embracing the Night Language of their faiths. In-fact; I argue we should all strive to cultivate the art of night language; in appropriately strong connection to the day language of hard science.

I love the Auðumbla story precisely for the spine-tingling night language translation of the evidential day language we now can share about the co-evolution of Humans and Cows! 

Auðumbla needed nourishment - and in her search for it - she found a most amazing ice-block. An as-yet unsculpted piece of nature whose potential to emerge as Human- she  would ultimately unleash. Slowly; and with the same cosmic care we can see as a modern mother cow licks her fresh calf into the world - 

Auðumbla licked Humanity into world - even as our traces nourished her own development  - and fed the God Ymir with abundance! 

Probably no one believes in the factual story of Auðumbla today; yet every single human today should appreciate the role of Human-Animal partnerships in the agonizing, astonishing, ancestral rise of our Species. We are the descendants of those who believed and acted in the most "right relation" to their given environments.  Rather than deride the lack of reason we may now judge in our ancestor's beliefs; we can celebrate their adaptive innovation - and hope we have the heart-felt (and reason-tested??)  insights to do as well in our modern environments!

Integrating both night & day language cultivates a truly mythic understanding of evidential reality - and is an approach that pleases many of my most fiercely faithful - and most soulfully secular Students.

From Myth to Policy - Understanding the Moral Psychology Determining the Future of Education

Armed with a basic understanding of the above concepts derived from Evolutionary Religious Studies and Moral Psychology;  we were now prepared to delve into the most potentially contentious moralistic issue imaginable; 

What should Educational Policy around the teaching of 'Evolution vs. Creationism' look like for University of Toliara? What about for the Malagasy High Schools our Students will soon be Teaching and Administrating?

A sample PPT slide from my course; illustrating both the diversity
of moral positions; and the nature of disagreements and congruence
between individuals who care about the topics of Science & Religion
The Yellow Arrows denote the expected and temporary disagreements
to be found amongst believers in Convergent Evidence
The Red Arrow denotes the critical dividing line for respecting the
 nature of Convergent Evidence - and entering the domain of
Science conspiracy theory.
(From L-R; Zack Kopplin, David Sloan Wilson, Michael Dowd, Ken Ham,
Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Connie Barlow)

We looked at US media coverage of the "debate" - and could easily see that it paints a "2-sided" image. That of a strong and impenetrable divide between Scientists and Religious Folks. Our new understanding of In-Group / Out-Group psychology helped us easily make sense of why this vast simplification may occur.

As Moral Psychologists, however - we decided to pierce the veil of the media and take a more scientific look at the full moral diversity on the issue.

We spent more than half a class (2 hours) discussing the nature of agreement and conflict around this issue. We began to understand it as  a broad and complex spectrum of diverse beliefs - rooted in our basic understanding of moral psych. We noted the prevalence and diversity of disagreements across all groups; but we also noted such diversity was not "a wash". That is - it's not that all of these differences of opinion are on equal footing. In particular we examined the sentiments of many major players relevant to our topic (see the PPT slide caption above). After examining the moral diversity of our elite sample group; we were able to notice only one hard dividing line.

By analyzing the Moral Diversity on Science Education Policy;
We can see a broad spectrum - yet when Creationists deny
convergent evidence; they do create a harder-line division 

In the context of what we know about our moral brains; I offered Students the idea that Science is a culture - a socially binding force based on the sacred (untouchable) notion of convergent evidence. Just as all cultural moral matrices have their sacred notions - convergent evidence is the untouchable ideal for Scientists.

Yet in fact; Scientists DON'T all believe the same thing - nor do we believe in unchanging truths. In the PPT slide above; we see a bevy of disagreements represented by the Yellow arrows above the Black spectrum line. These are disagreements about the nature, breadth, and depth of the evidence around relatively small claims concerning human nature and origins. 

These disagreements - which we all expect to occur - will come and go. New agreements will be made based on new evidence; new disagreements will arise based on new evidence. But - the discussion always relies solely on the powerful notion of convergent evidence. The Big Red Arrow - separating Creation Museum Operator, Ken Ham - from the rest of the sample - this represents a hard line of in-congruence. The line beyond which the concept of convergent evidence no longer holds sway. Here, beyond our red arrow, science becomes a global conspiracy to test the faith of any particular Religion's followers. 

My emphasis - to be clear - is not on "converting" Students to my explicitly held sacred belief in convergent evidence; not anymore at least, than I genuinely sought to convert them to the ancient Norse belief in the Sacred Cow Auðumbla. My point is ONLY to demarcate identifiable boundaries within the complexity of moral diversity we can see - and offer them a road-map to the moral mind from which they can make sound personal choices. Students will never be graded on their personal beliefs; as long as they demonstrate understanding of what beliefs on either side of the red line genuinely entail!

By conquering the false-dualism of "Evolution-vs.-Religious Belief" and looking instead at the real complexity of moral diversity; from a transdisciplinary and evidence-based perspective; we offer students a truly empowering education from which to craft their adoption of mythology and science in genuinely awe-inspiring - and we can hope - adaptive ways!

Atheist Fundamentalists may criticize this approach as still allowing my Students of the Human Sciences to hold on to "unscientific ideas".... To this I remind the strong Atheists that skepticism is a scientific ideal..... Atheism - even Dawkins readily concedes - purports an untenable certainty to be a good Scientific proposition. As long as Science can not Hypothesize about the existence of a God who chooses to remain beyond the vision of methodological naturalism; let us cultivate the broadest and strongest respect for the nature of convergent evidence  - and allow our newly-minted Scientists to otherwise believe as they will. 

References:

• Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist (tr.) (1916). The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation.
• Dowd, M. (2012) Why Do We Struggle Now? TEDxGrandRapids
• Wilson, D.S. (2002) Darwin's Cathedral: The Nature of Evolution, Religion, and Society. 

The EvoS Experiment - Malagasy Style!

The First EvoS - Core Course Students at University of Toliara!
These Students are nationally selected leaders;
the future of Educational Psychology in Madagascar!

As I walked from my hotel to the CEDRATOM complex at University of Toliara; the pungent burning of freshly butchered coconut palms was an all to real reminder that recovery from Hurricane Haruna is far from over.

Indeed, day one for this pilot educational experiment - offering an EvoS Consortium based Core Course, for our Educational Studies students  - got off to a rough start...

Yet - it seems like it is heading towards a remarkable finale!

It is a course that examines the vast interconnection amongst the all of the Human  Sciences. Fostering literacy in the basic processes of science - and breaking down old-fashioned perceptions of strict barriers between any and all disciplines. It is a course I titled Mythic Minds: Connecting the Story of Our Moral Brains Across the Unified Human Sciences.

We're connecting the very newest of neuro-science to the most ancient of anthropology!
We're integrating a mythic understanding of the Universe - with an evidential understanding of the same!

These are seriously lofty ideas - and the still flooded streets, hourly electrical brown-outs, and collapsed sheet-metal shacks I witness daily enroute to campus are a constant reminder of the realities many of my students are facing.

Where several Students in my class had most all of their possessions destroyed by Haruna just days ago, my colleague; Dovick Alexis and I, figured we should plan for a slow beginning for the class.  As Students trickled in, we provided them with the Moral Foundations Questionaire; explaining that this "introduction to psychology" would be different than their other courses in that we will be actually engaging in the scientific research process as we proceed through the course. Exploring our own moral psychology - through this survey mechanism - was the entry point to understanding something we are calling a "Unified Human Sciences" approach. As all the students arrived and completed their questionnaires, I turned on our brand our new LCD Monitor (Thanks to IEET!) - combined with the second screen of my Laptop; and our trusty dry-erase whiteboard for the brown-outs - I  introduced the students to the psychological quandaries of optical illusions; a fun if standard entry to understanding the human brain.

UoT is a low resource school;
in a low resource region;
in a low resource nation
It Doesn't Matter!
EvoS Content is working here!

3 days in to the 10-day intensive seminar now, and we've covered a mind boggling amount of ground - especially considering that we're working in three different languages (English, French, and Malagasy!)

Students are beginning to get grounded in our Unified Human Sciences framework; able to see how any human trait must ultimately be described and explained from a multitude of disciplines, timescales, and levels of organization. We've also explored some of the history of Human Sciences - and noted it's a bit WEIRD. That is - most of these Human Sciences were developed by Scientists who could be classified as coming from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Developed backgrounds. What does Moral Psychology - Malagasy Style actually look like?

Today we decided we will map the moral vocabularies of the Malagasy language! We will have our Educational Psychology students take cultural ownership of the concepts we just learned by seeing how the vocabularies surrounding morality in their own communities may or may not "map" onto the transdisciplinary moral psychology of the west.

We dissected a French translation of the field's emerging standard research tool - The MFQ-30; or Moral Foundations Questionnaire originally created by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and Brian Nosek; we talked about how a translation is much more than a "1-to-1" word conversion; we have to make these metrics culturally relevant! Quite a task for our first year Undergrads, but I am confident they're up for it. Student teams of 3 have each selected 3 items from the MFQ-30; and over the next week - they will each interview (n=15) Toliara residents (per group; total surveyed to be n>100) - from widely variable backgrounds regarding the accessibility, relevance, and associated moral Malagasy vocabularies - in the context of Haidt and colleagues theory of Moral Foundations.

Our Students work in this area will directly result in a reliable and enduring new Social Sciences research tool for the entire nation of Madagascar! A tool that Students themselves are already self-reporting - they could also use to engage their future High School students in the transdisciplinary science of moral psychology!

As part of the final class assessment - students must craft science-based arguments for or against a very specific Educational Policy position:

• That further developing the EvoS program at University of Toliara should be a significant priority across all of our Biological and Human Sciences related departments.

Preliminary evidence suggests this policy may be very supportable!