 Hi, this is a video on the Eola Learner Outcomes, specifically Module 5 on Learner Strong Foundations, and Olocha Aina, I'm looking at the Hawaiian patriotism and the love of the land and people. My name is Tresita Kahame Espinosa, and today we're going to be looking at Learner Strong Foundations specifically as they relate to culture and its impact on learning. We'll do this by looking at certain cultural artifacts, specifically the examples of language processing and numerical processing. Then we'll talk about culture and learning, and how the environment physically changes the shape of the brain. And we'll end with this very big concept of the Baldwin Effect, something that's been around for over a hundred years, but is still having an impact on the way we're studying the brain today. So if we look at this idea as language, as a cultural artifact, it's probably THE cultural artifact. If we agree that language does influence the way you think about the world, you can't have good thoughts without strong language, and depending on the language that you have, you also think slightly different about things, right? And so there's now studies in cultural neuroscience that look at this. How do people with different language systems process their world? How do they understand things? How are different neural networks changed by the languages that we use, and perhaps more importantly by the symbol systems that we use to express language in written form? This is also very true in math as well, math is a cultural artifact. If we know things in brains of people that speak English or French, for example, we realize there's something that's called a triple code. This triple code means that the Arabic number 3, the word 3, and 3 dots are actually in slightly different neural networks in the brain, which is kind of crazy, right? So we know that certain conceptual knowledge can be put into the brain in distinct neural tracks, which gives us the hint that, and it's been confirmed now, that brains that are learning different number systems because of those symbols are also processing math concepts, for example, slightly differently. So for example, nijuichi, 2, 10, 1, is this concept, it's the idea of 21 in Japanese. That's a very different way to think about it than just 2, 1 in English, which doesn't have the same kind of a visual construct of understanding or the multiplication or the addition that might be in the Japanese sense. So we know that that information is being processed slightly differently in the brain based on culture. So we look at this very idea of culture and learning. We now see that the cultural neuroscience is this interdisciplinary field, but it's mixing up this idea of understanding values and belief systems that are shared by whole groups of people and how those values change our perceptions of the world. How is it that our relationship with the land or with the homes we live in or with the people that are in our community, how does that cultural element change our brain's potential to learn different types of things? We now know very, very clearly is that a child's environment can actually change gene potentiation, which physically reshapes the brain. And this is a new idea for neuroscience, looking at cultural neuroscience. Before we were very much preoccupied at the individual level, looking at one person's brain and the neural networks or at a molecular level, what's happening at one brain. But now there's this fantastic new area trying to look at how groups of people's brains change each other's brains based on the culture they create together, right? So we know that the culture person grows up and impacts the way that he or she can learn. And this is for multiple reasons. Some of them seem pretty obvious, but cultural norms influence the way teachers' expectations work with their students, whether or not you push people hard or whether or not you give them the autonomy to decide to do something or not, or whether or not you choose to be on their case all the time or if you allow them to be autonomous in their own learning structures. There's a lot of differences in the way people have relationships with the teacher and the learners. And so those things are very culturally bound as well, right? And similarly, curriculum choices, what we decide to give more time to or how we decide to prioritize certain types of topics in different schools. For example, some schools have a very strong civics program that really pushes a nationalist agenda and others simply don't. Others have more art in their curriculum than they might have in other topics, right? So based on what governments decide or prioritize as being important for the society and what reflects good cultural values, are things that are given more time within curriculum structures. So we know that culture impacts learning in the way that teachers interact with students and what we choose to teach to those students themselves. We also know that communication at the level of schooling is also very, very mediated by culture. So we know that communication immediacy, so how quickly do you respond back to another person? Are you in a society that's constantly looking for debate and interrupting each other? Or are you in one of those very quite polite cultures that waits and doesn't say anything and hesitates and better not say anything than to say something stupid and just don't open your mouth? Those are also very much bound by cultural norms, right? And the reason communication patterns are so important related to culture is because communication using language is very much a reflection of culture. So there's a direct link between culture, the language you use, and also the way our brains are thinking as languages always use as a proxy for intelligence. So as we mentioned before, there's differences in number processing by individuals for different languages. I failed to mention, however, there's no group is better than any other in doing math. I know that lots of people would jump to that conclusion just because they're different. Having different processing systems does not mean that one is superior to another. But that's exciting and understanding that there's different ways to process numerical understanding should excite us, at least it excites me as a teacher to think about what are those other ways that we are not using that we might be able to take advantage of in our classrooms to teach through different networks to solidify different types of conceptual understanding in the brain. So not only do numbers and language have a difference here, but also in the brain there's also a different processing of different types of visual stimuli. So for example, for faces or the way you interpret houses, but also the huge cultural variance related to how we understand or don't understand different people's emotional states, which is hugely important in the teaching and learning dynamic because we know that there is no cognition without emotion. And so if we're putting people off by our communication strategy or because we've misinterpreted the way somebody else is understanding our words, word fault, and we really need to become more aware of those different cultural norms and distinct societal structures that will frame that kid's learning in my class, for example. So here's where we get to this bigger, broader hypothetical that I'd like to throw out to you for some reflection. The idea is that if you have a sustained experience, for example, you live in a certain cultural environment, it is reasonable to posit that this sustained exposure, because your brain adapts to what it does most, right, will change the neural structure of the brain as well as its functioning. So this is why we believe that the community, a child who grows up in shapes not only his or her values, based on those stories that we told them, the fairy tales, the books that we read them when they were little, but the culture shapes the threshold that that person has for stress, or their openness to novelty, or their reaction to emotional stimuli, or to challenge. So culture, due to habituated experiences, changes neural networks in the brain which then potentiate or not new learning. So two big ideas. The brain adapts to what it does most, remember that. But also, what you know influences what you can know. So this gets us to the most philosophical slide of the whole presentation. But does this mean, does this neuropsychobiology, understanding the mind, the brain, and the body as a whole genetics, is that determinant of what it is that you're able to do? Or is it possible that free will plays a role here? And there's growing evidence that free will does play a role here. You're not just your biology, you're not just your zip code. You get to choose what you are, or what you become in the world. Okay, so now we're going to transition to the last big idea of this presentation which has to do with the Baldwin effect. And good old James Mark Baldwin was somebody who came a little bit after Darwin and the ideas here had to do with how is it that human beings adapt to changes in their environment? What does that do? And how does that actually happen? And so it's basically this adaptive feature, the brain's ability to be plastic and to change that sparked this theory that is seeing some new traction in recent literature. Back in the day, 1896, Baldwin said that he had identified a new factor in evolution, which was kind of very cool and interesting, right? He basically posited that if animals or humans entered a new environment, or if their old environment changed really rapidly, those animals or those humans who could flexibly respond by learning new behaviors or by adapting would naturally be preserved. So adapt or die kind of a thing, right? So this ability to adapt, if it was used over and over again over several generations, would create in subsequent generations the higher probability of potentiation for that adaptive behavior. So sort of in some, it would look like those acquired traits had sunk into the hereditary substance in a Lamarcan fashion, but the process would really be neo-Darwinian, okay? So basically, going back to this whole evolutionary concept, the idea would be that if you found a behavior that was beneficial to your survival and you did this and your children did this and your children's children did this over time, then your brain would become more and more able to do that particularly adaptive behavior.