5 Myths About Learning in College: Myth 1
This grotesque figure is actually a diagram of the brain’s sensory cortex, and how much of the cortex’s function is take up by each part of the body. The huge hands demonstrate how central they are to our ability to sense and manipulate the world.
Because my approach to teaching is unfamiliar to my students, I always spend part of the first class meeting talking about my approach to teaching. I want my students to know that there is method to my madness, and why my classroom looks and operates very differently. To help me explain, I created a handout I call “5 Myths About Learning in College.” In this post and the four that follow it, I lay out the myths and the evidence against them. I end each post with a “Proposition” that re-frames college teaching and what makes it successful.
Myth 1: Learning takes place inside our heads, so the rest of our body should remain still except to take notes.
Most of what goes on in college classrooms today reflects a set of assumptions about human cognition, learning, and the nature of knowledge that are at best outmoded and at worst fundamentally wrong. Many traditions of Western thought, passed down through the centuries in our universities and infused into our culture, make a distinction between mind and body, drawing a bright line between the body and the senses on the one hand, and the transcendent faculties of mind and reason on the other. We are so conditioned to these distinctions that it can be very difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise.
Not only do we separate mind and body, we also make value judgments about the relative importance of the two. We favor “book smarts” over other sorts of intelligence, the “know what” over the “know how.”
Recently, though, neuroscientists have conducted research that demonstrates that human thinking is “embodied”—that is, that we think not just with what’s inside our skulls, but also with our hands, our bodies, and the things in our immediate environments. As we manipulate objects, our bodies and our eyes adjust and support our examination of the world around us, working in concert and processing some information before it even reaches our brain. As we are acting we are also thinking. We are an entire organism, a human system, not a robot with a Central Processing Unit and a bunch of sensors and actuators.
The conviction that the mind and the body are distinct is a foundation of higher education as it is generally practiced today. You see it all around you: in the way classrooms are configured, in the content of courses across the disciplines (with the exception of a few things like studio arts and laboratory sections in STEM), and in the way that anything that puts the body in motion is relegated to “extracurricular” status. The expression “the life of the mind” captures this myth perfectly.
To counter this myth, I offer the following proposition: