Searching for Superorganisms: An Urban Expedition in Madagascar

Every year, tens of thousands of international tourists and researchers descend into the wilds of Madagascar in search of the rarest of the rare organisms on earth. Lemurs, lizards, and even lacewings are just some of the hundreds of endemic species making the island a critical global biodiversity hot spot. While I love spending time in the natural lands of the countryside, these are not the important organisms that I am seeking. I am searching for superorganisms.

A superorganism is, simply, a larger organism - itself made of smaller organisms working towards a common good. Bees in a bee hive are a classic example of such phenomena. When groups become so well coordinated and integrated so as to function as a singular unit, so the metaphor goes - they become a superorganism. Alas - I am not looking for bees either... the endemic species of superorganism I am searching for is located only in very specific environments: the University Cities of Madagascar!

My lab at the University of Toliara has completed it's first year of experimental programming, and we now prepare for 2014 and beyond, focusing on our primary objective: the mapping and cultivating of the University-Assisted Community School (UACS) model in each of the six Malagasy cities housing one of the National University System campuses.

The UACS model, developed extensively by the Netter Center at University of Pennsylvania, supports strong partnerships between university students and regional schools. What's more, such partnerships work towards the aims of highly effective Community School models (in which schools and communities work collaboratively towards widespread benefit).

Now, if my international team of undergrads through PhD candidates is able to both find and cultivate strong partnerships between Malagasy universities, regional school systems, and local communities; how will we know if we are looking at a real superorganism?

Is a UACS model iteself a superorganism, or is it an ecosystem of superorganisms?
OR - is it just an ecosystem of human organisms??

I earlier described superorganisms as both a metaphor and a reality - and that is the exact point of exploration for the programming that lies ahead.

As our lab works toward the critical aim of cultivating UACS models in Madagascar, we will be guided by a top pick of global curriculum to aid us in developing scientific perspectives on the nature and narrative of the school as superorganism.

Pictured above is our (very fledgling) collection of resources. A sort of UACS incubator in a suitcase if you will. Through generous private donations, this year I bring a panoply of resources ranging from Tablets (3) and a Laptop (1), to a portable EEG headset* (1), and most critically - the absolute best in both science and civics curriculum from around the world!

Our three specific curriculum resources:

• The Big History Project
• 13.7 billion years of history and more  - on one little DVD-ROM! 
• This incredible resource brings an internationally benchmarked curricular foundation to Malagasy schools, and one that integrates the physical, biological, and social sciences in a comprehensible and awe-inspiring way! 
• It is within this context of Big History that students are given lenses through which to view their community as a nested complex of organs, organisms, and super-organisms in both metaphoric and scientific terms. 

• Project Citizen (Malagasy Edition)
• A service-learning project in which university students work with high school students to analyze public policy and advocate for positive community development.
• This is the work-horse of our applied learning opportunities and provides tangible benefits for students, schools, and the broader community!
• As students begin to search their own community for signs of the UACS superorganism, we will use the lauded Project Citizen framework to examine potential policy development opportunities. 

• TED-ED
• DVD's loaded with topical TED Talks on issues of Education, Community Development, Urban Studies, Digital Democracy, and much, much more!
• All videos are offered with both french and english sub-titles. This promises to transform our previously struggling English Language Learning Center!

Our information technology resources are slim to say the least - the only way to proceed in such a harsh environment is to capitalize on social capital - bonding and bridging our way to a system of superorganismic significance. That is to say.... using the UACS model, we can now deploy our more than capable University of Toliara Teachers-in-Training into our regional K-12 school partners with the absolute leading-edge of curriculum in hand and mind. 

As the high school and university students of Toliara work together to map and cultivate a healthy UACS superorganism locally, they are really cultivating a healthy future for their city and university cities, globally. There is something about studying the big history of brains, schools, and society all together and all at once - which catalyzes the growth of this exciting prospect. I hope you'll join us over the year on our expedition in search of the superorganisms of urban Madagascar!

*For those wondering how we can use an EEG headset (a measurement tool for brainwaves), our educational psychology students have a special interest in neuropsychology, and this entry level tool, combined with our curricular resources will give them access to new horizons of understanding the effects of, for example, fear, stress and play in student learning and life success. 

Evolving Democracy and STEAMing BIG History

"That's the problem with the Malagasy people" my biology student, Etienne, explained to me in response to hearing about the recent theft of seven new computers in our neighboring psychology department. Etienne isn't in any of my classes, but many students across our small institution are terribly upset by the loss of this scarce resource. These seven computers were to be shared by over 75 students, and now there are none.

What are the students to do? 

Our young scholars at the University of Toliara have had to deal with political turmoil in the past, yet too often their solutions have actually boomeranged and come back to negatively impact their own education. A simple example occurred about a year ago when angry students cut the new internet cable to their rural campus in protest of a variety of economic and political challenges. Clearly - we have a community need to explore the role of democracy in our educational system here.

Evolving Democracy
Our Positive Education Action-Research (PEAR) Laboratory is now facilitating a series of cross-disciplinary student leadership training sessions to develop a Student Technology Leadership Committee, the Universities first explicitly democratic student-run committee, and interestingly, a committee founded on evolutionary principles.

Our unique educational model of BIG Content + Applied Context provides a simple formula for richly integrating evolutionary sciences within the fabric of our learning environments. Let me spare you the theory, and just cut to what we are actually do on the ground.

A BIG History of the Democratic Brain
We have identified a clear problem in our educational community, the theft our common-pool computer resources. So - as scientists of the human condition, how should our students understand the context to such a problem? Is it, as my biology student suggested, "the problem of the Malagasy people"? That is - is there some essential difference between the Malagasy people and people from Universities where computers don't get stolen? That's one hypothesis that appears popular among my students, but I offer a different theory. I suggest to my students that perhaps the causal explanation for the thefts lie not in differences among people, but in differences among the organization of groups of individuals. How can we test these competing hypotheses?

Well, as scientists we always start with a literature review. Here at the PEAR Lab this means exploring a structured framework based on the Thresholds of Big History utilized in the Bill Gates sponsored Big History Project.

Students explore a BIG History of the Democratic Brain, by reviewing selected chapters of history from a Unified Human Sciences perspective. Criss-crossing among disciplines and scales of time and space, a coherent narrative begins to form around group dynamics, human decision making, and the functions and scales of democracy.

Part of this BIG History also includes the many Little Histories of the science of the BrainMind and Human Culture itself.

It is here that we drill deeper into the functioning of groups, and it is here where we start to do something I call STEAMing a BIG History. In the education world, there is a growing movement to integrate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) into a cohesive integrated approach (Yakman 2008, 2010). We are connecting this with the innovations of BIG History and channeling both into applied service-learning projects. Let me explain.

A Recipe for STEAMed BIG History

• 1 part: deep-time historical narrative
• 1 part: concepts from evolutionary studies
• A pinch of history and philosophy of science
• A hefty dosage of art, action, and awe!
• Mix with technology and democracy training and let ferment until ripe

I met with Etienne and his student colleagues to "train-the-trainer" - in a variety of technology development areas. For these students, using computers is a whole new world, we start with the very basics of Gmail and internet searches. Yet, within about three hours he has started to develop his Biology Departments struggling website, and - we were able to examine our hypotheses about the stolen computers through experimental modeling. 

Using the actor-based modeling software, Net Logo (Wilensky 1999), we explored a social-dynamics model called "Prisoner's Dilemma N-Person Iterated model" (Wilensky 2002) . Here, the "actors" in the model walk around randomly, and when two actors meet, they play a simple game. Each actor can either "cooperate" or "defect". If both players cooperate, both will get 3 points. If one cooperates and one defects; the cooperator gets nothing and the defector gets 5 points. If both players defect, both get 1 point. Very simple rules, yet as we saw - some very complex dynamics emerge. 

By altering the behavioral strategies of the actors in our little world - Etienne and friends get to literally play with a multitude of societal scenarios:

• What if we live in a world where half the people always cooperate and half always defect? 

• What if we live in a world where reputation matters and there is monitoring and enforcement of cooperation? 

Through experimentation and discussion, we found there may exist critical thresholds of social organization within which free-riding on the group becomes the less attractive option, social environments where cooperation is king! When we overlay this with the history of Elinor Ostrom's generalized principles for group-level functioning (Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013), and discuss connections to our BIG History perspective - the development of our democratic technology committee is increasingly imbued with a rich new context of community change. 

In the past, Etienne and his friends would have kept on believing that this computer theft was simply "the problem of the Malagasy people". Today, they have been given the tools to create group-level changes to prove that in fact, the Malagasy people are every bit as good as the rest of the world - we just all need environments that allow the better angels of our nature to emerge and flourish!

References

Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. Evanston, IL: Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University. Retrieved from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Wilensky, U. (2002). NetLogo PD N-Person Iterated model. Evanston, IL: Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University. Retrieved from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/PDN-PersonIterated

Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E., & Cox, M. E. (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, S21–S32. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010

Yakman, G. (2008). STEAM education: an overview of creating a model of integrative education. Proceeding of PATT on 19th ITEEA conference. 

Yakman, G. (2010). STE@M: An Overview of an Educational Model, (June). Retrieved from http://www.steamedu.com/WhatisSTEAM.Aggie.pdf

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!