OEB 2015 - Tomorrow's New World: Extending the Reach of Learning - Lia Commissar

(Lia Commissar) Hi! This morning

I'm going to talk about education and
neuroscience,

both generally as a field
that's developing

but also, the specific work
that we've been doing in this field.

The Wellcome Trust -- OK --

the Wellcome Trust, for those of you
who don't know,

is the second largest charitable
foundation globally,

with the aim of improving health.

And it does that by funding lots of
bio-medical research, but also

by funding work in the social science
and humanities,

funding lots of education work,
doing lots of engagement work

and also lots of policy work.

So I'm going to talk through a few things
this morning.

Firstly, what has neuroscience got to do
with education?

What impact does it have on education
at the moment?

The work that we've been doing and then,
thinking about the future.

So, what has neuroscience got to do
with education?

Well, if education is about
learning something,

be it knowledge or a skill,

and neuroscience is the study of
the nervous system and the brain,

then they're pretty linked, in my opinion.

And it's not new to kind of talk about
the brain, in relation to education.

People have been discussing this, critiquing it, debating it for lots of years. There is lot of research papers out there with titles such as "A Bridge too far", "Its a Prime time to build a bridge", "A two-way path is possible", "Booting the bridge from by thence". So lots of people have been talking about this bridge but not many people have been building it. And, this is kind of understandable because its probably only really in the last 10 years that neuroscience is, the understanding from neuroscience has evolved significantly that we can start to think about how it may have implications for the classroom. And, this is really exciting and there is lots of potential and its really understanding, you can understand why teachers, why policy makers, why technologists wants to start applying some of these ideas to education. But my word of warning that will go throughout this presentation really is about waiting and doing the research and finding out whether these things are actually going to be helpful and impactful in the classroom. And the other thing that I must say just before i go on is that i am not saying in any way that neuroscience alone is the answer and its going to solve all our problems or can tell us everything about the classroom, that's a very complex ecosystem. But, neuroscience is kind of a new-ish field where we can start using that alongside psychology, alongside educational research and alongside teacher's knowledge to build something really good for the future and see if we can start improving learning in the class room. 2.51