Launching the PEAR Laboratory!

Our ENS-Educational Psychology Students exploring a
bevy of resources that tell the mythology of the mind through
four evidential epics!

Last Monday, April 8th, marked the official launch of University of Toliara's newest research group:

The Positive Education Action-Research (PEAR) Laboratory!

Our Lab is a most unique endeavor for our  humble institution. An international applied research collaboration - our aim is simple: to develop, implement, and assess the functioning of Positive Psychology within educational settings across Madagascar. We want to empirically explore - and maximize - the ways that Schools contribute to Human flourishing; and we want to start offering our findings to the global scientific community. We want to work in a way that simultaneously transcends and rigorously values scientific disciplines. We want to explore the Big History and Future of Human Flourishing in Madagascar!

The Lab, as it stands today, revolves around our EvoS-inspired, introductory core-course for Educational Psychology Students: Mythic Minds.

The course itself is the subject of intensive empirical scrutiny under the watch of our Level II Ed-Psych Students - who recently completed this very module just one month ago. Indeed- these Level II Students are tasked now tasked with implementing much of the core-course for our incoming Freshmen. This unconventional course spans everything from the ancient history of meat-eating; to the future of the Internet - and weaves within these stories a contextual thread of educational best practices for our Teachers-in-Training to ponder and model.

A Three-Fold Approach

• Curriculum & Questionnaire Development
• We are developing innovative independent curriculum; as well as translating and culturally adapting numerous empirically validated Curriculum and Psychological Questionnaires from around the world. 

• Action-Research in Classrooms & Communities
• We are beginning to test, assess, and improve these curricular and questionnaire resources

• Curation of the Mythic Minds Story Collection
• We believe that the Human brain is wired for story (Gottschall 2013, Cron 2012). We hypothesize that evidence-based story-telling and metaphor-making are skills of untold value for the educator of the future. As well - that Big History provides a new context for developing evidential epics that may in fact function as a guide to the unknowable future. In recognition of this; we are are starting to curate a multi-lingual Story Collection for the Mythic Minds curriculum. A toolbox for the artisanal construction of four such evidential epics; four densely interwoven stories from Humanities deep past that we think are indespensible for Teachers from any culture, creed, or background! This Story Collection covers the full range of course content for both Level I & Level II core-courses; and serve as a basis for constructing image-rich mythology of the human mind for Students of all ages. 

So.... what exactly are these 'magical stories' that tell us so much about our brains and ourselves?

The Story Collection

• Evolution of the Meat Tribes
• The ~320 Million Year saga that starts with the differentiation of our ancestors from the reptilian synapsids; and ends with a glimpse of moralisitic debates about Animal Rights and synthetic In-Vitro Meat products of the future.

• The Story of Sacred Truths
• The ~8 Million Year journey from primate morality to faithless toolmakers to a world dominated by a diversity of faith-based beliefs and even secular moral positions; this is the story of religion and moralizing. 

• A Big History of the Classroom
• The ~2 Million Year haul from a tool makers apprentice to the global rise of the ivory towers; this is the Big History and Future of education.

• The Hive Mind Mythology 
• The complete picture; the 13.7 Billion year Big History of everything; boiled down into a mind-boggling mythological context. This is - in fact - a Big History of Human Consciousness and the Internet; told from a most unique perspective. A perspective that predicts a future of increased hybridization between humans and information technologies; and a perspective that makes highly specific comparisons between the emergent digital culture and the social model of the Bee Hive. Presenting the contentious notion that life is - in it's essence - groups of self-organizing groups; from the most ancient molecule - to the most futuristic society. This is perhaps the core sacred belief of those who enjoy the Hive Mind Mythology; and offers virtually unlimited forays into the domains of moral and positive psychology. In class we always support dissenting or differing  cross-cultural and individual beliefs; we simply explore the evidential basis and often shocking conclusions of the Hive Mind Mythology.

During the week to come our Level I and Level II Educational Psychology Students will be hard at work; both crafting these mind-boggling tales into relevant Malagasy terminology - as well as using our questionnaires to explore the evolved morality of their own community - here in the coastal SW Malagasy city of Toliara!

I hope you'll follow - and even  join us on this epic adventure into the the mythology of minds and the future of flourishing!

References:

Cron, L (2012) Wired for Story: The Writers Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

Gottschall, J. (2013) The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

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.