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© 2002, 2010 Susan Rich Sheridan
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© 2002, 2010 Susan Rich Sheridan |
Saving Literacy: Early experience and later development
Early experience and later development How the brain learns to think determines how that brain will think. We know that not all of the neural networks established in childhood become hard-wired. The brain is “plastic.” It can change. Still, we are becoming increasingly aware that young, impressionable brains learn fast and well and that early learning “sticks”. When I began to study neurobiology in the 1980’s, we thought that brains did not grow new neurons. A brain “came with” about 10 to the 11th power neurons and then, at mid-life, started to lose thousands of neurons a day. Later, research corrected that position: the brain did grow new interneurons, or insulatory glial cells.32 Now, we believe that the brain grows new neurons. Recent findings even suggest that adult stem cells can “morph into many types of cells.”32 The brain grows itself, builds itself and repairs itself in childhood and in adulthood. The brain makes and breaks billions of connections, remembering, forgetting, learning, unlearning The brain uses its right and left hemispheres in cooperative, if not co-equal exchanges. The goal of caregiving, education and a well-lived life is using our brains to the fullest. Using our brains to the fullest means using images and words, numbers and graphs, sharps and flats to think. Do we want to think this way because it is a worthy endeavor? Of course! But we also want to think in all these ways because symbolic thinking is fun. Dopamine and opioids and other brain chemicals make thinking its own reward. By now, everyone knows that there are "windows of opportunity", or critical periods for certain kinds of neural connections to grow in the brain, including the circuits for vision and for language. These windows of opportunity are not as narrow as we thought. A child can learn to speak later in childhood, even up to the age of eleven. But the later speech is acquired, the harder it is to acquire and speech acquired late will not be as fluent as language learned in early childhood. After about the age of eleven months, babies stop being able to distinguish certain sounds if they do not hear them in the speech around them. Think of how hard it is for a Chinese-speaker to say the letter “r.” Think about how hard it is for an English-speaker to pronounce the “eu” in French or the umlaut or the “ch” in German. We are also learning that something as pervasive as the emotional tone of childhood has lifelong influence. One thing is sure: Adult personality shows the effects of childhood abuse and neglect. People can survive abuse, but their brains suffer damage. One commonly damaged area is the amygdala, a brain area connected with rage-control and memory. Studies of the brains of incarcerated males (autopsied after death) show amygdalar damage. Many criminals suffer abusive childhoods. Cortisol, the stress hormone, literally acts as a mordant, eating brain tissue. Criminals who say they cannot remember their crimes are often telling the truth. Their memory centers, along with their ability to control rage, were compromised in childhood. Criminal abuse of children produces criminal adults, who cannot control negative emotions, much less remember their crimes. Adult personality takes many of its cues and traits from childhood experience, both positive and negative. How the adult brain learns in childhood to feel about literacy will influence the emotional tone as well as the expressive and communicative skills of that adult, determining, in a very real sense, that adult’s “quality of life.” Toward a new, brain-based science of early childhood:
Bi means “two” and hemi means “half.” The brain is an organ with two halves. These halves are interconnected and communicate with each other. The brain is designed to work as a whole. Its parts remain in many instances equi-potential; they can assume some other brain function, if need be. And many brain areas contribute to any one thought or action. Skills are not strictly localized. There is always hope for remediation and healing. Still, in many brains, we know that if the right brain is cut off from the left brain and sees a ball, it can grab it, but it can not read the word “ball” nor connect that word with the ball. Similarly, if the left brain is cut off, or entirely severed from the right, it can read the word “ball,” but it would not be able to reach for a ball as a recognized or “read” object. That is, visual and verbal skills are localized in a very general sense, according to the right or the left side of the brain. Bihemispheric brain development, or, more accurately, whole brain development, requires reciprocal, or back and forth input between spatial thinking and verbal thinking. This cooperative effect is responsible for what we recognize as effective, functional human speech and literacy. The program Scribbling/Drawing/Writing puts whole-brain science into practice by bringing spatial and linguistic brain skills into cooperative play in early childhood. Scribbling/Drawing/Writing is Neuroconstructivist. The term Neuroconstructivism first appeared in the 1991 Sheridan dissertation. The word neuro means “brain,” and the word constructivism means “to build together.” The brain constructs itself according to genetic blueprints and experience. Infancy and early childhood are extremely sensitive and influential times for brain growth. Anyone who has suffered a childhood trauma knows the far-reaching effect of that trauma. The same is true for any infant or young child’s experience with nurturing. Childhood is hugely formative for a human’s lifetime capacity for and confidence in loving and learning. The young brain is extremely susceptible to damage and to learning. No matter how young or how old the brain is, it benefits from strongly attentional, bodily, bilateral, integrative activities, like Scribbling/Drawing/Writing.
Neurobeneficial intervention Beneficial literally means “making good,” and so the term neurobeneficial intervention means parenting and/or early childhood education which is committed to actively helping the child make or grow his own “good brain.” For a human, a good brain is able to speak language and write language, with the understanding that the word “language” includes not only the written form of spoken languages, but the symbolic, marks-based languages of art, mathematics and music. Neurobeneficial caregiving Neurobeneficial parenting might sound like a forbidding, technical term, but it simply means participating in responsive exchanges with young children in love and conversation and play for the sake of nurturing a good human brain. Neurobeneficial parenting and caregiving include some new elements, like emotional coaching, and scribbling and drawing, but caregivers can easily learn to do these things, one baby step at a time. Neuroconstructive experience In the human child, Neuroconstructive experience includes certain goals, or cognitive skills: the ability to pay sustained visual attention, to self-regulate emotionally and to think using meaningful marks.
Scribbles and Meaning Without the early, pleasurable, and increasingly meaningful creation of symbols in the form of scribbles, the human brain can only react to its ancient repertoire of mammalian survival emotions ---FEAR, ANGER, PANIC, SEEKING9 ---like an animal ---that is, as a mammal and a primate. Behavior conducted at an animal’s level of survival is intelligent, but it does not occur at the level of consciousness and therefore of control and discrimination available to humans whose brains can override instinctual emotions through symbolic reasoning, that is, speaking and writing and reading. Think of a time when you’ve been most troubled; did you talk about with someone? Did you write about it in a journal? Did the talking and writing help you make good decisions in bad situations? Or did you let anger or panic carry you away? We are learning that emotion drives reason, not the other way around. We can learn to talk about the logic of emotions and to cultivate this emotional logic. On a television show (“Good Morning America,” Feb. 10, 2003), pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton talked about calming fretful babies. Pretending to hold a crying baby in his arms, he rocked it back and forth. I paraphrase his advice as follows: “Sing to your child louder than your child is crying. As your child’s cries get softer, sing more softly. By showing your child how to calm down, she will learn how to calm down all by herself. Emotional self-control is the key to a successful adulthood. She will have it made.” Does a successful adulthood really rest on the control of emotion rather than the use of reason? That’s what the neuroscience on emotional intelligence is telling us. That’s what the eminent pediatrician is saying, too. How we feel determines what course of action we choose from a range of possibilities. Emotion may convince us to choose an unreasonable course of action, even a destructive course of action. Has this ever happened in your life? Have you ever said to yourself, “If I had just calmed down... none of this would have happened.” We have no perspective on our emotions, no control over them without the distancing ability language provides. Without perspective or, literally, “seeing through” the situation (per means “through” and specto means “to look” or “see”), it is very hard for us, if not impossible, to resist the emotion driving the moment, even if giving in to that emotion is destructive. So, Neuroconstructive experience influences levels of attention, and degrees of emotional selfcontrol, through increasing ease with language and literacy. This book is about learning emotional self-control through marks of meaning. It is about a good deal more, but this is a big part of the message. Neuroconstructive childcare A Neuroconstructive childhood may also sound intimidating, but it simply means a childhood where there is time and support for scribbling and drawing and talking and emotional interaction. The time that parents and other caregivers spend with children is important and what they do with that time matters. Parents know this. They call it “quality time.” Marks of meaning --- a natural activity in little children --- is an important part of quality time. In fact, scribbling and drawing are almost as important as hugs and kisses and talking and reading with children. Markmaking and marks-based talk are not more important. They are as important. Love and literacy are co-equal in importance and how each occurs in childhood strongly influences the emotional tone in adult life, as well as a host of “logical,” “rational” thinking skills. Caregivers of young children benefit by knowing about Neuroconstructive childcare.
Words and images are neurally connected. The “slashed” term Scribbling/Drawing/Writing used to describe this literacy program, means that pictures and words are related and alike, near stand-ins for each other --- in fact, requiring and needing each other. As the term wave/particle describes the complex phenomenon we call light (which acts like a wave in certain situations and like a particle in others), the term Scribbling/Drawing/Writing describes the complex behavior we call literacy. The degree to which images and words are allowed to connect in the life of the child depends upon parenting and other educational experiences. Literacy is not ruled by the laws of physics the way light is, though there are quantum aspects to moments of intense selfclarification through literacy. (See “The Scribble Hypothesis,” www.drawingwriting.com and also page 244 in this book, Research Question FIVE, "Toward a Quantum Theory of Scribbling".) Literacy is an evolved mental phenomenon with its own rules. Still, drawing can turn into writing and writing can turn into drawing, as light becomes a particle here, a wave there. The brain is jury-rigged; like a renovated house, parts are kept, parts are added, parts are removed. Evolution does not take a wrecking ball to brains every time new environmental pressures ask for a modification. We think with the old bits and the new bits. We think with both sides and all sides of our brains. As soon as ancient children scribbled in the dust and pictographs and cave paintings appeared on cave walls at a time when speech, too, was part of hominid expression, our modern verbal, literate brain was born. Like literacy, electronic technology will alter the brain again, changing its settings and parameters for attention, connection and literacy and new brain states will give rise to different modes of expression and communication and being. We must be hopeful about these changes. Because our brains are within our control, we can play a part in these changes. This guide introduces a new social science: Neuroconstructive childcare. By demystifying the science of child-care and early education, we give caregivers confidence in what they do every day, while sensitizing them to the importance of one special milestone in children’s lives: scribbling. As we join in the child's mark-making activity, we’re fulfilling one of our most important roles, too, as a human being: mark-maker of meaning.
32 - Holden, C.; Vogal, G. 2002. "Plasticity: Time for a Reappraisal?" Science 21 June 2002, Vol. 296. No. 5576, pp. 2126-2129. |
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Please e-mail your questions or comments for Dr. Sheridan at susansheri@gmail.com |
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