We have started the Social Brain Lab to develop some practical tools to use in communities.
All the projects we study at Social Spaces involve connecting people at local level. The projects often have multiple effects: raising awareness of environmental issues, introducing new ways to encourage informal learning or starting enterprises.
However, we know that connection itself is important for two primary reasons:
1. Positive relationships, trust and denser networks lead to new things happening
2. Creating social connection is valuable in itself.
More detail on this here.
Drawing on our existing research and knowledge in metacognition, collaboration and learning... plus our long running study of emergent community projects which, by design, fundamentally change how people interact face-to-face, the Social Brain Lab aims to collaborate with others to condense the large volume of research and data (social capital, social neuroscience, wellbeing etc) into a number of tools designed specifically to give a practical working knowledge of these important insights and stimulate further project ideas in a community workshop setting.
My interest in knowledge really grew doing the research and analysis for my MA Ed. I used Lewin’s Equation to describe the overarching question “does knowledge about how we function change the way we behave?”. Lewin’s Equation states that
B=ƒ(P,E) Behaviour = Function of (Personality in their Environment).
Do specific pieces of knowledge add to the influences of personality and environment?
Are there automated human responses that can be drawn into more conscious decision-making processes with knowledge?
Does knowledge help us to interpret life situations more accurately to inform our choices and subsequent behaviours?
Tracking knowledge through cognitive processes is a pretty complex and time consuming process. The research that I undertook involved teaching 200 teenagers over 2 years in a number of very different schools a set of experiential lessons on human functioning from many different disciplines. I interviewed students at various stages, looking for cognitive patterns and learning processes in the analysis.
I took my emergent results to a number of specialists to help understand what the analysis was revealing, including long time friend and inspiration Colleen McLaughlin from Cambridge University… and Ian Morris, Head of Wellbeing at Wellington College, who had worked with me with the original student lessons.
The final learning model that emerged is described in the diagram below which I called Informed Autonomy, a model which I believe to be original in this type of research and strongly supports the idea of teaching young people about human functioning, as I expressed in this RSA article in 2008.
The most significant results of the research were as follows:
- Knowledge matters – knowing about how we function can change behaviour firstly on a conscious level .. eventually at a judgement level.
- Knowledge matters more when you process it fully, connecting it to your personal experiences. Knowledge + cognitive processes + experience is the essential combination required for learning.
- Knowledge triggers self-observation, repeated instances of self-observation lead to building personal knowledge.
- You don’t need to use therapeutic methods (such as group self-disclosure) to build personal knowledge.
- Higher level cognitive processes are required. In Blooms Taxonomy terms this equates to ‘Applying’ upwards… which comes after ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’.
Worth noting here is the brilliant work of the RSA's Social Brain project who have also done some work since on the value of teaching people about how their brains work.
So what has all this got to do with the Social Brain Lab?
In the same way that knowledge was condenced into the most relevant elements for the original research we are hoping to do the same for people designing community social projects. What knowledge from neuroscience and social neuroscience could help when applied to this setting? Can this type of knowledge help people collaborate better, design projects better ...?
We would like to develop these new tools in collaboration with other people because we know there is a lot of deep understanding out there about what knowledge is most up-to-date in research terms, and what tried and tested methods and social processes continue to work. We think that mixing this up with some design thinking could create some really helpful open source tools for communities to use.
There is an open invitation to take part in this work, so if you are interested please do get in touch!
If you are interested in new ways of building knowledge, and want to see how this might work in a social context, please join us in the Ad Hoc Enquiries!
{NB If you are an organisation that would like to use the learning models above in your work, for non commercial purposes only, please do get in touch for permissions and more detail on the research process}
You should come and study Elsie, Progress School and Results Factory. They all essentially build connections and the power and intentionality of individuals in their participation in that network.
Posted by: Mike Chitty | February 16, 2012 at 07:43 AM