Dana Foundation Blog

Posner receives presidential regard

Next Tuesday, cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner will be one of nine researchers this year to be awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to scientists, educators and inventors. He wrote about his recent research in this month’s Cerebrum story, “ How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition.”

He also took part in the Dana Foundation’s Arts & Cognition Consortium, which in March 2008 reported evidence of close links between training in the arts and improvement in certain cognitive areas, such as memory, self control and attention. He is a strong advocate for spreading the word about what we are have discovered about the brain and learning to the public and to policy-makers, including coming here to the Dana Center in Washington, D.C., in 2008 to talk about the consortium studies [see videocast].

I last saw him this May in Baltimore during the Learning, Arts, and the Brain summit, sharing his research and participating in the small-group brainstorming sessions with educators, arts advocates and state and regional government leaders. The teachers and advocates at my table were quite taken with him, especially his easy style and clear delivery that made the top-flight research understandable, helping them to see clearly what we’ve learned about learning and the brain and what we do not yet know.

My table-mates also commented on the discipline of research in general and on how careful he and the other scientists were to claim only and exactly what they could verify, unlike the intuitive and anecdotal reporting education researchers often rely on. Transferring a more rigorous research approach may be one of the first goals of people developing the nascent field of neuroeducation, which combines neuroscience, psychology and education to build improved teaching methods and curricula.

—Nicky Penttila

“Music and the Brain” podcasts; “Depression and Creativity” Webcast

If you're a regular visitor to the Dana Foundation’s Web site, then you’re probably familiar with Dana's interest in neuroeducation. So we’re eager to inform you that the Library of Congress has recently released podcasts of the “Music and the Brain” program. Dana Alliance member Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, served as project chair of this informal, thought-provoking series of lectures. Taking a deep look at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and music, the series features conversation with some of the country’s leading musicians, scholars and experts in the field.

However, if you prefer Webcasts, then take a look at “Depression and Creativity,” which features Jamison; Peter Whybrow, M.D., director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine; and Terrence Ketter, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Bipolar Disorder Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine. Alternately, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature" features Daniel Levitin, Ph.D., director of McGill University's Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise and best-selling author of This is Your Brain on Music.

For more information on neuroeducation, there’s also Learning, Arts, and the Brain: the Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition. This white paper reports the findings of a multi-university scientific research team lead by Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D, focused on the effects of music, dance and drama education on learning.

-Barbara Best

Bridging the gap between teachers and brain scientists

For the nascent field of neuroeducation to progress, the first thing researchers need to learn is how to talk to one another. That’s one of the primary concerns for organizers of the Neuroscience Research in Education Summit, which ends today at the Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.

Neuroeducation, which aims to translate new brain science discoveries directly into better classroom practices and materials, is one of several interdisciplinary fields that have sprung up following the development of new research tools. One such tool is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allows researchers to image the brains of conscious people directly and makes possible a novel class of experiments that could eventually have direct practical applications.

Seeing that potential, major universities—including Harvard and Johns Hopkins—are racing to put together top-notch new research centers to explore the intersection of brain science and classroom practice. Hopkins played host to its first neuroeducation summit, “Learning, Arts, and the Brain,” on May 6 [see stories including “Brain Scientists Identify Close Links between Arts, Learning”].

But, as early writers on the topic repeatedly point out, neuroscientists and education researchers work in different ways and on different topics, framed by distinct conceptual understandings of the world. For instance, neuroscientists adopt a reductionist outlook that doesn’t gel well with the messy real-world situations teachers face, while educators’ focus on variables such as context would mess up the precision that neuroscientific experimentation demands. There are pragmatic concerns, too, such as worries that neuroscience is too expensive or that its insights are too preliminary to inform educational practice. The result, some say, has been a wariness and hostility toward collaboration from both groups.

At the summit, which is sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience, about 60 experts from both sides of the equation are trying to come up with concrete steps to better collaborate. At the heart of the meeting are small-group discussions of two key questions: How can neuroscience research inform education strategies, and how can what teachers want and need to know about how students think and learn drive neuroscience research?

There are no easy answers. Both teachers and neuroscientists are busy professionals who undergo years of training in their respective fields, and overcoming the habits and deeply rooted beliefs that come with such intense education can be difficult. The gap between the world of neuroscience, with its controlled experiments, quantitative rigor and relative abstraction, and education, which must navigate the often conflicting needs of administration, teachers, parents and students, is particularly large.

But both groups have a large stake in finding middle ground. Neuroscience insights into learning and teaching could help ease the difficulties faced by children who struggle with formal schooling and increase the effectiveness and appeal of school for everyone. Neuroeducation also serves as a litmus test for the broader application of “social neuroscience.” A success here could bode well for other genre-crossing research such as neuroadvertising and neuroeconomics; a failure could cement the suspicion that brain science is interesting only on a theoretical level.

—Aalok Mehta

Teaching artists are still learning their roles

Despite a long history, the exact roles that teaching artists play in schools and the best ways for them to interact with fellow teachers and school administrators remain fluid, according to veteran educators.

The role of the teaching artist “is a perpetual question in the field,” said Nick Rabkin, a researcher for the Teaching Artist Research Project at the University of Chicago. “It haunts us and vexes us—or we’d stop asking.”

Rabkin was one of four panelists who spoke during the June 19 Web symposium “Artists in Classrooms: What Is the Role of the Teaching Artist?” All agreed that teaching artists can have big effects at many levels, from individual children all the way up to whole-school administration, and that the ambiguity of their exact purpose offers both obstacles and opportunities.

Teaching artists have been around schools and communities for at least 100 years. As working musicians, writers, dancers, actors and visual artists who choose to spend part of their professional lives in public classrooms, they are a unique part of the educational system.

Thus far, Rabkin said, because of their unique nature, teaching artists have “invented the work they do.” Depending on context, he said, they serve to increase access to arts education, improve arts appreciation, improve student performance, engage reluctant learners, connect school life to real life, help students express themselves and even “bring light in what can be a somewhat dreary school day.”

Such ambiguity may allow teaching artists the opportunity to actively shape their place in the school system to maximize the good they do. “Public education needs help from outside; teaching artists are one of the resources bringing that help,” he said. The proper question may not be what role they play, but rather “what role do you, teaching artists, want to play in public education?”

One of the significant roles of teaching artists is to “de-isolate” arts teachers, who can suffer in comparison with those who teach subjects regularly tested at the national level, such as reading and math, said Sarah Johnson, director of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. The combination of a dedicated arts teacher and teaching artist in the same room is particularly powerful, she added—“if you are a teaching artist fortunate enough to have an arts teacher, you maximize the opportunities for connectivity,” she said.

Echoing those comments, Naho Shioya, production manager and teaching artist at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center in Seattle, said, “We are teaching artists to both students and teachers in the classroom.” The mere presence of the teaching artist, for instance, can bring back the optimism and joy that spurred many arts teachers to enter the field but that can quickly become lost amidst restrictive school policies and dwindling resources. But at the same time, teaching artists need to follow school guidelines and administrative policies that may limit what they originally had envisioned.

Learning to navigate school policies is just a first step to practicing a kind of “subterfuge” that allows teaching artists to reshape school policies and content, said Lisa Fitzhugh, founder and former executive director of Arts Corps. Particularly important, she said, is bringing “the language of love and learning” back to schools that have become increasingly dominated by “technocratic language.”

About 600 people registered for the symposium, which closed with a reminder for teaching artists to participate in Rabkin’s research project, a 12-city survey that aims to offer, by August 2010, quantitative answers to some of these issues and possible new directions for teaching artists. Moderated by Russell Granet, founder of Arts Education Resource, the event was sponsored in part by the Dana Foundation and will be available for re-viewing on the Association of Teaching Artists Web site starting on July 10.

—Aalok Mehta

Free Webposium for teaching artists

Join us online for a discussion about the evolving issues in the Teaching Artist profession. The event will be streamed live and viewers will be able to join in the Q and A at the end of the session.

Friday, June 19, 2009 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. (PST); 1 p.m.-2:30 p.m. (EST)

Topic: Artists in Classrooms: What Is the Role of the Teaching Artist?

What is the role of the teaching artist in public education? How can schools maximize a partnership with an outside artist? What is the artist role in the classroom, in the art room, in the school? How can artists help build a culture in a school where creativity, innovation, and imagination are at the core of teaching and learning?

Panelists include:

Nick Rabkin, Lead Researcher, Teaching Artist Research Project, NORC at the University of Chicago

Lisa Fitzhugh, Founder, Former Executive Director, Arts Corps

Sarah Johnson, Director, Weill Music Institute, Carnegie Hall

Naho Shioya, Teaching Artist

Moderator: Russell Granet, Founder, Arts Education Resource

Register Now!

Registration ends on Thursday at 5 p.m. EST and will be capped at 499 people. As of Friday, June 12, 305 people had registered. Sponsored by the Dana Foundation.