During a Family Support and Crisis intervention Course in Bedford Row some years ago we asked Prof Billy O’Connor of University of Limerick Graduate Medical School if he’d evaluate the teaching and learning ongoing on the Course.
In addition to doing the evaluation, he gave us a fascinating lecture on how we learn. He stated that one finding of neuroscience is that children learn better when they are moving around instead of sitting all day in the hard-old-bench to quote the rhyme of my youth. Reading about hunter-gatherer societies I also note that virtually all their children’s learning is done while moving around – and I remembered Billy’s words.
After his lecture and evaluation I was wondering if some people had academic brains, and some people’s brains were more experiential. I’d say that the reason that I was wondering this is that I struggle a lot with academic (that is, linear type) learning but I learn very quickly experientially.
That is, if I experience something I get a feel for it and I know that I know it – I don’t have to go over it and over it to remember it.
For example, if a tax officer explains how I claim my credits and get some money back from the taxman or my pensions or insurance advisor explains something about what I’ll be entitled to etc. I can understand it quite well. However, after a few weeks it’s gone out of my head and I find it difficult to recall. I often feel that such people must wonder if I was listening at all!
When I was learning physics I could visualise all the concepts that were described in the various aspects of it very well; but I always found that I had to learn the mathematical equations that accompanied the phenomena that I was describing over and over again, because they didn’t come to me that easily.
This is one of the reasons why I am interested in neuroscientific enquiry. It appears (from what I have read and studied – and I realise that a little knowledge is, as they say, a dangerous thing) that it leans as much towards the experiential as the academic, towards the heart as much as the head, the holistic as much as the reductionist.
This has implications for its relevance both in the nature of the support work that is suitable and the training of practitioners in respect of our Focus Group.