RETURN TO HEART LEARNING

RETURN TO HEART LEARNING​ 7/19 ​by Dave Graber . Amended 7/20 for blog

I started teaching in Southern Montana Indian schools in 1973. I was soon discouraged with large numbers of students who seemed rebellious against my teaching. In time I realized most were probably unable to sit down, hold still, be quiet and pay attention. A trusted grandparent friend came to my parent/teacher conference. He said it was the Cheyenne way to enjoy seeing children physically active, the more the better. Sitting down, holding still, being quiet, and paying attention were not taught. The Cheyenne way of child upbringing built strong hearts so respect and quietness were learned when the child was ready.

I remember faculty room conversations back then criticizing parents for not teaching their children to obey. Children came to school with difficulty respecting teachers, and often erred in responding to teachers’ demands for obedience. It took me years to start respecting a culturally different way, what I now call “heart learning.”

My respect for these ways grew slowly over the decades. At first I could not see the self-discipline of elders patiently responding to my questions. It seemed they joined in rebellion with their children. Desperate for better ways of handling their young, I began imitating these elders. But this was largely new to me, and to nearly all other non-Indian faculty. Back in 1973, in a school 99% Cheyenne Indian, we white teachers were opposed to having our European cultural way of discipline undermined. We resolved to continue the culture of reward and punishment for students established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs leaders. We were frustrated that rebellion against us was not only just OK, it was encouraged. We faculty could only see only one way out: use force and fear to dominate our classrooms. Our use of consequences were failing. But the community was patient.

I began to notice in family gatherings children getting positive attention from adults more than adults requiring attention and correct responses from children. Games, dances, song, and stories built children’s hearts by eliciting responses from adults without correction. Children danced out of time, or sang improperly, without being corrected. I wondered what was wrong them. Cheyenne elders didn’t care whether their children danced or sang correctly or not. I was helped along patiently by my friends at singing and drumming sessions with White Buffalo Singers.

Now I know that volumes of new scientific evidence supports the ancient ways of the Cheyenne and other indigenous nations for children’s learning. Yet today, especially in Montana, mainstream education has maintained an anti-indigenous culture of discipline for learning. It mistakenly bypasses heart learning. Instead it focuses on teacher-assessed corrections of student efforts.

self-assessment of learning.

How do we find heart learning? Engaging the whole body, collaborating in fun and games with others, with child self-assessing. This is the heart learning foundation for all learning. It invites balance in responses. No one person, not even the teacher, elicits all or most of the responses. Everyone in the class is empowered to do and be. With freedom to enter into song, dance, and verbal or vocal expression, emotions are connected with others in joy and safety to engage. Instead of teaching, the teacher attends to structures and scaffolding. Then school subjects are included as needed in the quest children’s minds and hearts are together engaging. The quest for skill and understanding of a game, life skill, story, or other real challenge normal in the community is the learning focus.

All children can engage in collaboration with teacher and others regardless of developmental level. Then the teacher, with the ancient kinds of training, becomes the facilitator. The child constructs knowledge in collaboration with adults and peers as friends and family. The heart’s need for fearless trust, engagement, joy, and celebration is the foundation for cognitive understandings. These are built by the child at the appropriate developmental level.  Direct instruction happens with natural requests of the teacher. The student, not the teacher controls the teachable moment. Teacher controls the scaffolding and the structures designed so learning can happen.

Humankind’s survival needs mainstream education to return to educating the heart. It should not have been separated from cognitive learning. Heart learning is the foundation of human achievement. It engages with other human beings for the good of all. It builds the evidence that grades or money are mindless and ineffective motivators for life success. Many new (ancient) standards of Montana’s current common core uphold the better, internal motivators. Now is the time for each Montana child’s heart learning foundation to be accessed by our schools. A good place to start is see how other nations have adapted or discarded assessment protocols deploying external assessment over children, replacing them with internal heart motivators.

Developmentally appropriate standards

Worldwide, Non-Western cultures have been rebuilding heart learning with quality outcomes-based research. It attends to the full developmental needs of children. The total social, emotional, spiritual, kinesthetic and cognitive learning together, in other words, heart learning are accessed together. Children and parents are weaned from the concept that children must sit down, hold still, be quiet, and pay attention to adults so they can learn. Of course discipline to do this is essential as children mature! But external discipline for learning at too young an age hinders achievement in heart learning. Even one child suffering heart learning damage at school, destined to be a loser because of this toxic pedagogy, is a problem worth solving. We need a change back to inclusive heart learning, as it was in all our heritage family learning before the industrial revolution, when children were engaged placing themselves at their developmentally appropriate level for learning anything.

Executive Function of the Mind

Heart learning accesses the mind’s affective domain in the building of executive functioning. Decades of research have demonstrated that when children’s bodies are engaged in kinesthetic, social, spiritual and emotional learning, cognitive learning happens much better. It's easily demonstrated that the most troublesome children in any given classroom in elementary are often the brightest. Is it possible our modern obsession with cognitive learning steers some children in dysfunctional directions? Harvard University’s Developing Child Center has extensive studies on the mind’s executive function development–the center of heart learning.

Direct Instruction

An essential element of this return is developmentally appropriate direct instruction. Children better learn to learn from others directly when it’s not demanded too early. When a child says, “let me do it!” parent/teacher trainers should have been building systems and scaffolding so the child can do it with a sense of autonomy. Mainstream education commandeers the instructional task children love to do for themselves. Direct instruction needs modification with adult self-discipline. Adult wisdom must learn when the child’s empowerment to self-teach is better than the adult’s ability to impart knowledge. Unfortunately, teacher education has focused on lowering the age when children are content to accept disempowerment to learn. So enormous college coursework like “teaching in the content area” needs discarding and rebuilding from scratch. When we start solving the essential heart learning problems of Indian education the whole nation’s education system will benefit. Unruly children will be thriving again. Direct instruction as a strategy will return where it belongs, away from the teacher’s initiative, so the teacher has energy to build the systems and scaffolding, designed so teacher can easily self-limit DI to responsivity.

Culturally Sustaining and Restorative Pedagogy

How can we do it? By listening to elders who remember the old ways of respect for children, and studying both modern science of human development, and other indigenous decolonized ways of learning. The academic field of Culturally Sustaining and Restorative Pedagogy (CSRP), where evidence exists empowering learners to learn and to be is a great way to start in academics. Before getting into academics, it’s best to listen and experience the old learning in families or cross-generational gatherings at work, play, in ceremonies, with singing, dancing, and multisensory intergenerational engagement. Or visiting classrooms designed around heart learning or any of the many labels for accessing the Creator’s intent for children to thrive. This is unfortunately rare in Montana schools, and most needed in Indian education.

Curriculum exists to help children do what they can.  (By DG  8/19)

It helps if children are allowed to do stuff with real stuff, and are expected to with adults or peer collaboration.  The process itself is so simple and natural. Every successful culture, family, or community has built and run their own curriculum... until recent centuries. Now, modern society pays specialists to do this for children at younger and younger ages. 

The best practices in school reform strategies reverse this. They promote building content from life practices, celebrations, arts, and in the heritage and current culture of the child’s family connections. Children thus empowered to do elder-familiar stuff can elicit approving responses from community/family. This becomes a true foundation for success in school and life.

Modern mainstream schooling often deprives children of heart learning.  Outcomes-based strategies entice children to want to do what they normally would not want to do.  It would be good to ask some questions again: What should my children learn?, when should they learn it? How should they learn it?  Where should they go for help and wisdom?  Who should be doing the learning (teacher or student)? Who can assess whether it’s learned? Who bears the responsibility of not having learned it? These should be answered by the child, and the child’s best interests.

Then success is better achieved, and assessed by the presence of:

1)    multi generational learning, across ages, like a human family not a puppy litter.

2)    Culturally appropriate activities..  what has been done in child raising for generations

3)    Place- learning: doing what families have long done in the community in this place.

4)    Imagination and creativity: Each child must be guided to enjoy making toys or models or pictures of his/her own learning stories and experiences to match his physical, cognitive, social and spiritual competencies important where they live.

5)    A learning circle: Where children’s right to be heard telling their own stories aurally, visually, non-verbally, and spiritually, moving into verbal expression after syntax is built, continually having their own stories /songs heard and not discredited.

6)    Hands on activities—experience based with real stuff.

7)    Respect for everyone’s right to be engaged at their level.

8)    Teacher providing structure and scaffolding: questions, challenges, and puzzles children can figure out.

9)    Children telling stories & acting/dancing on their own before books or paper are prioritized

Curriculum like this will be rebuilding children’s dysregulated stress response systems with self-actualization, healthy attachment, mindfulness, attunement, responsivity, reactive relationships appropriate to build children’s proactive capacity for their own management.

Curriculum questions? Schools with track records of doing this? Look up  progressive education, indigenous pedagogy, compassionate schools, trauma sensitive schools, escuela nueva foundation, culture sustaining restorative pedagogy.