The easy
response is that because it is important to see connections and
interdependence.
That is
true, but we can go much deeper to understand its real importance in learning –
we can have a tour inside our body.
We are
learning through experience. It is basicly true when we use experience-based
teaching, but is is true any time – when we are in a classroom, listening to a
lecture, or at our table at home, reading a textbook, these are also experiences.
Our body
and our brain are constantly working – parts of our perception will not be
switched off even when we are not conscious about them. It means that during
reading a book still we perceive temperature with our skin, the textures of the
materials we are wearing, sitting on, keeping in our hands. Our brain is
getting impulses from all of our muscles, from our ears, mouth, and stomach. Our
body is constantly working.
These
momentary impulses activate neurons, neural structures – making up temporal
neural nets. So our „first hand” learning from that textbook contains a lot of
extra information about temperature, the feelings of our muscles, and the smell
of the cookie our mother bakes in the kitchen. Definitely it is not very
effective way, because the cookie usually has nothing to do with the history
lesson we want to learn. No problem – this neural network is setting up only
momentarily – next moment a new network develops on the basis of the old and
the new perceptions.
Hebb’s rule
in neurology is that those neurons which fire together, wire together. That
means if the same neurons are firing together several times, their relations
strengthen, and they more easily activate each other the next time. That is
basicly the learning process – strengthening specific neural activation
networks. So we never learn a single fact – we always learn the patterns of
situations.
If you are
learning maths several times when your mother bakes a cookie, then cookie smell
will be a part of your “math network”. For example when I was preparing for my term
exam on history, I was learning about the First World War, and I was listening
to the same Mike Oldfield album again and again. Even now, nearly twenty years
later when I hear the song “Shadows on the Wall”, I start to think about the
First World War and the trench warfare – the music actives “trench warfare”
network.
So we learn
patterns of perceptions that usually take place together. It is easy to see its
importance from evolutionary aspect: an animal has to recognize a situation (a
pattern of the environment) where it can find food or there is a danger of any
kind. What is even more important for the animal is to recognize the
differentiation of patterns: to be able to decide that those leaves on the
right part of that bush are moving because of the wind or because of the
carnivore. Our brain is evolutionary
developed to recognize patterns and pattern change, not facts.
One of the
first things our brains learn in life is the recognition of human face, and the
pattern of our mother’s face. Scientists proved that very young babies are
already longer looking at patterns that resemble a human face – even if it is
just a “symbolic” drawing that hardly resembles a face anyway. They can really
make a difference between their mother’s face and other people. Even earlier –
already “within” their mother – they learn to recognize voice patterns
(=rhythms). A new born baby’s brain
actively reacts for non-rhythmic voices and show recognition for rhythmic ones
(even if these are new for them).
When we use
system thinking in education, we teach to see and analyze patterns in a
conscious way. To see the facts and their relations, how these make up specific
patterns and what is the way these patterns change. That makes factual
knowledge more brain-friendly to catch, and also makes it convertible to real
world use – to recognize the same, similar, or nearby patterns in our every-day
lives.
It also
develops creativity. During arts or
non-artistic kinds of innovations and research, usually pattern-recognition and
re-use takes place. A painter sees a pattern, and emphasizes the parts s/he
finds important or interesting. A composer composes a musical pattern and its
changes. A natural scientist see a parallel and differences between two
patterns, and based on these develops a new material or medicine. A politician
sees a pattern of social life and based on this, develops a new strategy to
approach it.
Patterns
have a cross-domain characteristic as well: they can be transferred from one
domain to the other. A pattern of nature can be used in engineering, or to
understand social life (for example non-linear networks can be found within the
body cell, in the electricity network and in Facebook). If you see how these patterns are set up, and
how they change, you also have an opportunity to manipulate them (which can be
very important in arts, medicine or engineering, but for politicians as well).
We use
patterns in our everyday life – to find our key, to make a coffee, to organize
our things, to find the milk in the shop to buy. To recognize if something has
changed. Definitely it is much more effective if we can do it consciously.
System
thinking is not new approach to learning as we see now. This is the learning
process itself. That is why in education we have to emphasize it, to empower
our pupils to use patterns and their recognition more consciously and effectively.
