The Neuroscience of the MentorLearner Relationship

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The Neuroscience of the Mentor-Learner
Relationship

• Judith E. Cox
• Mark Y. J. Wang
• Fei-Fei Hwang
• Professor Gary R. Low
• EDLD 6323 EI An Adult Learning Model for
  Managing Life Transitions and Change
• Texas AM University-Kingsville

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• Recent discoveries in cognitive
  neuroscience and social cognitive neuroscience
  reveal to educators and mentors of adults the
  neurological effects and importance of creating a
  trusting relationship, a holding environment, and
  an intersubjective space, such as the ZPD, where
  reflection and abstract thinking can happen. If
  mentors are to assist learners on the journey
  from dualistic to multiplistic to contextual
  thinking, it means choosing to be the guide who
  points the way through the fire (Daloz, 1999,
  p. 244).

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Promoting Development through Trust

• Learning promotes development
• Development means successively asking broader and
  deeper questions of the relationship between
  oneself and the world (Daloz, 1986, p. 236).
• Development happens through discerning,
  exploring, and challenging ones own underlying
  assumptions about the self, society, and reality
  (Brookfield, 1987, p. 134).

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Promoting Development through Trust

• A mentor facilitates the journey by inviting
  learners to question and challenge their
  assumptions and by providing emotional support.
• During the uncomfortable period of uncertainty
  and self-questioning, mentors hold out hope by
  offering a vision of who learners are becoming
  and of how they will feel (Daloz, 1999).

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Promoting Development through Trust

• Learners transitions from (1) shifting to (4)
• (1) only believing what authorities say
• (2) authorities clash and there is no answer
• (3) each truth has its own context, meaning,
  connections
• (4) contextual relativism, where our view of
  the world is transformed (Daloz, 1999, p.
  75).

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Promoting Development through Trust

• The first step on this developmental journey with
  the learner is to engender trust (Daloz, 1999,
  p.122).
• The mentor builds a nurturing relationship and a
  holding environment, which foster development.
• Holding environment describes how the
  psychological presence of a caregiver can support
  a child in beginning to develop her own sense of
  self (Winnicott, 1965) .

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Promoting Development through Trust

• A holding environment enables us to consolidate
  each new sense of self so that we can maintain
  meaning and coherence in the world and yet remain
  open to a lifetime of fresh wonders (Daloz,
  1986, p. 190).
• This new field of educational neuroscience can
  now demonstrate the vital role of a trusting and
  safe holding environment in promoting learning
  and development.

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A Neuroscientific Understanding of Trust and
Learning

• A secure attachment processone in which trust is
  establishedresults in a cascade of biochemical
  processes, stimulating and enhancing the growth
  and connectivity of neural networks throughout
  the brain (Schore, 1994, Cozolino, 2002, p.
  191).
• Caring and encouragement from trusted others
  promote change in these neuronal networks because
  the brain is plastic in the sense it can be
  remodeled or physically molded (Zull, 2002, p.
  116).
• any change in knowledge must come from some
  change in neuronal networks (Zull, 2002, p. 92).

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A Neuroscientific Understanding of Trust and
Learning

• A mentor offers an optimal learning
  environment-supportive, caring, encouraging, and
  enthusiastic.
• Learners move their thinking activity into the
  frontal cortex
• where reflective activity and abstract thinking
  take place.
• leading to greater brain plasticity and hence
  more neuronal networking and meaningful learning.

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• Social interaction and affective attunement
  processes stimulate the brain to grow, organize
  and integrate (Cozolino, 2002, p. 213).
• Dialogue, raising questions, can stimulate the
  neuronal process of reflection.
• Reflection makes neuronal connections after such
  connections, we have a restructured neuronal map
  or mental representation of the knowledge.

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• The more neurons there are firing together, the
  more complex is our neuronal representation of
  the topic and the longer that neuronal
  representation will last (Shors and Matzel,
  1997).

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• These four developmental abilities are the
  evolutionary underpinnings for reflective social
  interaction between a mentor and learner.
• (1) Engage in affective attunement or
  empathic interaction and language
• (2) Consider the intentions of the other
• (3) Try to understand what another mind is
  thinking
• (4) Think about how we want to interact
  (Stern, 2004).

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• The notion of affective attunement a mentors
  intervention supports development.
• An educator needs to have that sympathetic
  understanding of individuals as individuals which
  gives him an idea of what is actually going on in
  the minds of those who are learning (Deweys,
  1938 1997, p. 39).

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• The brain actually needs to seek out an
  affectively attuned other if it is to learn.
• Affective attunement alleviates fear, which has
  been recognized by many in the field of adult
  learning and development as an impediment to
  learning (Brookfield, 1987 etc.).
• Our conditioned survival and fear responses come
  from our primitive brain, also known as the
  limbic system.

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• A dialectical reflective process can strengthen
  the connections between the limbic system and the
  higher areas of the brain these are called
  orbitofrontal-limbic connections (Cozolino,
  2002).

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Social Interaction and Affective Attunement

• Daloz (1986) discussed the need to help our
  students to accept the confusion and uncertainty,
  to feel safe with it if we encourage them to
  enter the darkness to explore those terrifying
  opposites fully enough, there is a good chance
  they will begin to move through them on their own
  and begin to discern a meaning in the starless
  air (p. 83).

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Inside The Brain

• http//www.alz.org/brain/overview.asp
• http//www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/intera
  ctives/organs/brainmap/
• http//www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/intelligenc
  e/index.shtmldefinition

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Creating Spaces of Support

• Gallese believes that an infant andcaregiver
  enter an intersubjectivespace (Frith and
  Wolpert, 2003).
• This space is created by the infantand caregiver
  through the process of emotional resonance
  (Schore, 2002),or affective attunement.
• In this space, the emotional supportof the
  caregiver brings an infantrelief from the
  intense anxiety andfears that originate from
  theprimitive survival mechanismsin the limbic
  system.

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Creating Spaces of Support

• Children cannot do this for herself. They are
  born with evolutionary physical brain
  mechanismsthat enable them to seekout such
  attachment andreceive support.
• These brain processes continue to develop across
  our life spanbecause we continually seekout
  attachment figures withwhom we can
  engage(Stern, 2004).

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Creating Spaces of Support

• When the learner feels her mentorscare and
  support, her fears start to subside.
• If she looks into her mentorseyes and sees
  reflected whatshe can become, she will
  borrow(take in) that confidence until shecan
  produce her own.
• In other words, mirror neurons willenable her to
  feel the confidence thather mentor has in her
  and tojoin in that confidence.

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Creating Spaces of Support

• A particular type of neuron,a mirror neuron,
  contributesto affective attunementbecause it
  enables us toknow empathically whatanother
  person is feeling(Stern, 2004).

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Creating Spaces of Support

• Our orbitofrontal cortex canactually be
  stimulated througheye contact because
  specificcells are particularly responsiveto
  facial expression and eyegaze (Schore, 1994).
• Caring social signals activatethis higher region
  of the brainand promote learner safety.

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Creating Spaces of Support

• ZPD Another specialized space in the mentoring
  relationship is the zone of proximal development
  (Vygotsky, 1978).
• Although this place shares many features with a
  holding environment (including being safe), the
  ZPD is where scaffolding takes place.
• Scaffolding can be seen as a process in which the
  new information is taken in, the learner searches
  for neuronal connections, and the learner then
  integrates the old and new knowledge into a
  reconstructed mental representation.

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Creating Spaces of Support

• Creativity or abstract thinking as carried out by
  the brain reflects and manipulates (or
  rearranges) the reflected information to create
  new knowledge or new belief systems.
• The ZPD can thus be seen as an incubator of
  abstract thinking or creativitya place where the
  power of a still tender self can speak her way
  into being (Daloz, 1986, p. 222).

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Supporting the Development of Creators of
Knowledge

• How does a mentor lead a learner into the
  exhilarating power of her own creative process?
• Calling the students voice to emerge is of
  central importance, because we do not learn to
  speak unless encouraged to do so, or think
  without practice (Daloz, 1986).

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Supporting the Development of Creators of
Knowledge

• Abstract thinking can be frightening learners
  are afraid that their ideas may be wrong and
  there will be trouble if we all have different
  ideas (Zull, 2002, p. 179).
• With the emergence of her own voice through the
  mentors support, the learner can contribute
  through the action of her unique ideas in a new
  world, feel the power of her creative spirit,
  understand the evolvement of the creativity, and
  perhaps eventually assist another on the evolving
  journey.

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• Thank You

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