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. 

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!