Critical Culturally Relevant Synergism in Higher Education: Equitable Educational Experiences Through Neuroscientific Curricula

Abstract

Educators in higher education around the world are engaging rapidly diversifying educational settings, where underserved, transnational students, with racial and differing backgrounds are not receiving equitable post-secondary education experiences. When educationalists in these multicultural schools appreciate neuroscientific models of the mind and emotions, they may begin to construct critical culturally relevant pedagogies and opportunities for students to achieve unbiased treatment that generate synergism. This chapter argues that incorporating the emotions of culturally diverse students as pedagogical resources will facilitate improved academic performance, socio-emotional intelligence, and brain development. Specifically, we will show how critical culturally relevant pedagogies that utilize a student’s daily life experiences are highly effective in stimulating the brain’s emotional centers. As a result, through engaging pedagogical praxis, stimulating intellectual motivations, and developing socio-emotional aptitude curriculum can empower students to be historical agents in an ever-challenging and diversifying world.

Appendices

Appendix: The Giver Lesson Plan

This lesson plan is for an undergraduate level preservice teacher education course that focuses on literacy skills at elementary levels. The class will be learning how to use Lois Lowry’s fiction novel, The Giver to help their students learn about “mood” and “inferencing.” Not only will the preservice teachers be providing an emotionally stimulating experience for their students, but the undergraduate students will also experience the benefits of SE learning as they begin to connect culture and curriculum.

Narratives like The Giver are important for stimulating brain integration, which leads to more efficient emotional regulation (Cozolino, 2014). High-quality fiction recruits diverse structures of the brain, including systems involved in emotion, memory, knowledge, emotion, and sensations. The stimulation in the neural networks make narratives a unique way for both synthesis of emotion and knowledge. The neurons between emotion and knowledge fire simultaneously so that neural connections are made among networks that were not previously established. Stories also give preservice teachers and the children they will teach, frontal lobe stimulation, that allows them to an outline for coordinating successful strategies to manage and overcome life challenges (Cozolino, 2014). The adversity that the protagonist experiences allows us to use our imaginations in relating how we seek to overcome our own mountains, while developing empathy.

In The Giver, the fictional society has no knowledge of the past, and an old man known as “the Giver” is designated to retain those memories as part of imaginary third space. Memories are emotionally charged, and in the Giver’s society this done to prevent suffering and promote peace. There is no happiness or pain, color or music, anything relating to emotions is absent from this world. The job of the Giver is seen as an arduous task. Yet, the next Giver, Jonas, is a boy that is meant to hold the memories and emotions of the past. He feels they are not a burden but an empowerment for a meaningful and adventurous life.

The Giver Lesson Plan

To begin the lessons on mood, the professor will introduce the preservice teachers to art pieces from different cultures such as paintings⁵ such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), Claude Monet’s Woman with the Parasol- Madame Monet and Her Son (1875), Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother (1936), Amrita Sher-Gil’s Self-portrait (1931), Diego Rivera’s Dance in Tehuantepec (1928), or Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876). The lesson will be more effective if the professor chooses paintings that reflect student’s culture or experiences (e.g., students from Mexico may find Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo relevant). This exercise supports the student’s cognitive ability to identify emotional underpinnings of a situation or of a person and be able to empathically relate. Particularly, this lesson stimulates the anterior cingulate cortex (one of many structures stimulated), which facilitates “monitoring personal, environmental, and interpersonal information…shifting attention based on conflicting or changing information, as well as the use of past learning for rapid decision making” (Cozolino, 2014, p. 103). The development of this area allows the students to develop social-emotional intelligence and emotional attunement by experiencing a sense of self.

The professor utilizes this identification/discussion exercise in moods to relate it to The Giver. Asking students to then form groups and to identify the moods of certain scenes in the book allows the students to generalize the process from the painting exercise. Together, students begin to hear their own thought process and those of peers, with relevant information being linked to this new skill. With each mood discussion of painting, the students may also begin to learn about their heritage culture. Groups can work to learn about different cultures while sharing pieces of their own. It is important to have preservice teachers experience the lessons they wish to create for their students. When preservice teachers are mindful of the emotions within a lesson and culture, it may provide opportunities to modify the lesson to their future classroom’s needs. Then the professor transitions into work on inferencing.

Inferencing is the student’s ability to draw conclusions based on evidence, deduction, and reasoning. While in group discussion and written reflection, students may begin to compare cultural values of either those discussed in the paintings or their own, while relating it to The Giver. In the book, “sameness” has replaced all the emotional breath from the lives of people, including things like love and color. Students begin to reflect on the meaning of their cultural values for color and such things as love, laughter, family, music, and language. Revisiting paintings reinforces the skills of mood finding as well. In the discussion of color, bringing up Claud Monet’s work can be beneficial. Monet had a fascination with how colors appeared at certain times of daylight—seen in his usage of bright, vibrant paints, and short brush strokes. Tying this into the mood lesson, the teacher asks, “how would our art/life be different if we didn’t have color as a form of expression?” The students realize the emotional underpinnings of these cultural elements and how important they are in daily life. Accessing the emotional memories of these elements, the students begin to inference themes of the book’s absence of color, emotions, love, etc. Utilizing this critical culturally relevant approach to developing literacy skills ultimately helps the preservice teachers and their students become literate in school and the world.