Systemic Cognition and Education: Empowering Students for Excellence in Life 303124690X, 9783031246906

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
About the Author
1 Systemism
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Systemic Worldview
1.2.1 Systems and Systemic Schema
1.2.2 Systems Taxonomy
1.3 Systemic Mindset
1.4 Systemic Advantages
1.4.1 Order
1.4.2 Patterns
1.4.3 Stability and Efficacy
1.4.4 Synergy
1.4.5 Ontological-Epistemological Consonance
1.4.6 Pedagogical Efficiency
2 Systemic Profiles
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Knowledge Dynamics
2.3 Systemic Habits and Competencies
2.4 Normative Profiles
2.5 Systemic 4P Profiles
2.5.1 Progressive Mind
2.5.2 Productive Habits
2.5.3 Profound Episteme
2.5.4 Principled Conduct
3 Systemic Cognition
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Transaction with the Real World
3.3 Brain Plasticity, Flexibility, and Discrete Functionality
3.4 Memory
3.4.1 Engrams
3.4.2 Taxonomy
3.5 Memory Encoding
3.5.1 Brain Readiness
3.5.2 Selective Adaptive Encoding
3.5.3 Reiterative Ontogenetic Encoding
3.5.4 Long Active Encoding
3.5.5 Lifestyle Dependent Encoding
3.6 Memory Consolidation
3.6.1 Distributed Collective Consolidation
3.6.2 Rehearsal Dependent Consolidation
3.6.3 Pattern Embedded Consolidation
3.6.4 Insightful Challenging Consolidation
3.6.5 Differential Dynamic Consolidation
3.7 Memory Retrieval
3.7.1 Differential Memory Processes
3.7.2 Mutually Dependent Memory Processes
3.7.3 Mnemonics Dependent Retrieval
3.8 Memory Modulation
3.8.1 Attention
3.8.2 Motivation
3.8.3 Emotions
3.8.4 Control
3.9 Metacognition
4 Systemic Pedagogy
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Pedagogy for Meaningful Learning
4.3 Systemic Knowledge
4.3.1 Taxonomy of Learning Outcomes
4.3.2 Middle-Out Knowledge Structure and Development
4.3.3 Knowledge Evolution
4.4 Experiential Learning
4.4.1 Experiential Ecology
4.4.2 Systemic Learning
4.5 Learning Cycles
4.6 Insightful Dialectics
4.7 Learning Mediation
4.8 Assessment and Learning
4.8.1 Item Maps
4.8.2 Assessment Rubrics
4.8.3 Maps and Rubrics for Authentic Assessment
5 Systemic Education
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Transcending Traditional Curricula
5.3 Systemic Curricula
5.4 Differential Convergence
5.5 Scope and Sequence
5.6 Praxis
5.7 Technology
5.8 Educational Systems
5.8.1 Paradigm Shift
5.8.2 Middle-Out Systemic Governance
5.8.3 Partnerships
5.8.4 Teaching Profession
5.8.5 Exchange Platforms
5.8.6 Student Certification
5.8.7 Culture of Excellence
Glossary
References
Index

Citation preview

Ibrahim A. Halloun

Systemic Cognition and Education Empowering Students for Excellence in Life

Systemic Cognition and Education

Ibrahim A. Halloun

Systemic Cognition and Education Empowering Students for Excellence in Life

Ibrahim A. Halloun H Institute Jounieh, Lebanon

ISBN 978-3-031-24690-6 ISBN 978-3-031-24691-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Making sense of our own selves and of the world around us has always been the prime concern of human beings, for the sake of survival, progress, and prosperity at the individual and collective levels, for curiosity’s sake, and for various other purposes. All along, and at least since the dawn of civilizations and humans’ invention of image drawing and carving on stone, hieroglyphs, and then alphabets, came the concern to systematize our quest for meaningful knowledge and its sustainability in memory, as well as its documentation and exchange with others in readily accessible forms and its deployment in efficient and creative ways. Systematization of knowledge construction, dissemination, and deployment became crucial with the emergence of formal education, at first for ancient philosophers and astronomers to form disciples who could sustain and carry forward their vision of the world and for craftsmen and other professionals to form apprentices who could make their crafts, trades, and services thrive in society. It became most crucial when enlightened rulers and decision-makers wanted formal education to become an institutionalized, widespread endeavor to transfer knowledge accrued throughout generations to youngsters at large so that they may take advantage of it for their own welfare and the welfare of their communities and humankind. Human knowledge has already so much proliferated and diversified in constituents, organizational modes, and procedural modalities, and it continues to do so at a fast and unprecedented pace that no individual or community can keep up with. This is true for knowledge about the physical world, including humankind and all organisms and species we are part of, all products, processes, and services we have invented, as well as for knowledge about the abstract realm of our own imagination, like in the case of music and mathematics. Systematization of learning how to learn in general, and of learning about professional knowledge in any community of practice, academia included, becomes then far more crucial than ever before in formal and informal education. Systemism, as introduced in Chap. 1 and elaborated throughout this book, is a worldview and a mindset that can serve us best in this respect in cognition and various aspects of formal education.

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With a systemic worldview, we conceive everything within us and around us as consisting of interacting physical or conceptual systems or parts of systems (or of subsystems). Simply put, a system is an ordered unit or totality consisting of interconnected and interdependent physical or conceptual entities that come together or that are brought together in order to serve specific purposes under specific conditions. With a systemic mindset, we learn about, interact with, and modify both the physical world and the abstract realm through appropriate conceptual systems that we construct to represent and investigate patterns of interest in either world or realm and/or to make changes in these patterns or bring about new patterns altogether. Systemism is of great value to experts working in a given discipline and to students learning about that discipline. Looking at any discipline in any field with systemic conceptual lenses (e.g., the disciplines of physics and biology in the field of natural sciences, algebra and geometry in mathematics, music and painting in arts, philosophy and literature in humanities) brings for experts and students alike coherence and consistency to content and process (or declarative and procedural) knowledge in that discipline, and efficiently systematizes knowledge construction and deployment. More importantly, systemism efficiently systematizes disciplinary convergence, i.e., bringing and connecting together different disciplines in the same and different fields in order to tackle issues that neither discipline helps tackling well enough independently of other disciplines. Such convergence is behind major inventions and disciplinary advances we have witnessed in the last few decades, and it is, and will continue to be, at the very foundations of most new careers and all other developments affecting our lives that have emerged and that will keep emerging in the twenty-first century. These developments have necessitated major paradigmatic changes in numerous professions, changes that have been quite revolutionary in some instances like in the case of digital technology. Meanwhile, paradigms that go back to the nineteenth century, and that the developments in question have turned obsolete in many respects, continue to prevail in all aspects of formal education at all educational levels, and in many parts of the world, from pedagogy and curricula to structure and governance of educational institutions and of entire educational systems. Alternative paradigms of systemic nature help education resonate well with both human cognition and the changing realities of the century in the workplace and elsewhere in daily life. Each community of practice (CoP) or professional community is characterized with a particular paradigm that governs how the community goes about developing its content and process knowledge and deploying it in tackling issues of concern to that community. In academia, a CoP is usually concerned with one distinctive discipline, and disciplines in the same field may share one or more common paradigms. For example, in natural sciences, two paradigms prevail across the board, the so-called classical and modern paradigms that are adapted in specific respects to the particular needs of every discipline. Scientific paradigms are systemic par excellence, though implicitly for most scientists, because science is primarily concerned with the description, explanation, and extrapolation of patterns in the structure and behavior of physical systems. CoPs

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concerned with non-scientific fields can similarly conceive and deploy their disciplinary knowledge in the framework of systemic paradigms for better systematization within and across disciplines and fields, particularly for convergence purposes, and most importantly for pedagogical purposes. The prime function or mission of formal education is about helping students develop appropriate profiles for self-fulfillment, success in life, and significant contributions to the welfare of others and the ecosystem. That mission is best fulfilled when students are empowered with systemic profiles as discussed in Chap. 2. At the core of a systemic profile are habits of looking at the world and dealing with it with systemic worldview and mindset. These habits evolve from gradual development of systemic competencies needed to tackle certain tasks that may fall within the scope of a particular discipline or cut across different disciplines. A systemic competency consists of an appropriate mix of conceptions (concepts and relations among concepts), reasoning skills, sensorimotor skills, and axio-affective controls (in particular, a good value system and constructive attitudes and dispositions) that are necessary to successfully achieve similar tasks with a systemic mindset. Systemic profiles are further distinguished with particular traits that turn them into what we call 4P profiles. A person with a systemic 4P profile is characterized with a progressive mind that seeks to develop and constantly enhance productive habits for systematizing and optimizing the person quest for, and deployment of, profound knowledge that concentrates on substantial and generic conceptions and processes in any domain, all with a commitment to principled conduct in all aspects of life. Learning involves cognition and is most meaningful and productive when experiential, i.e., when it takes place through transaction with real-world situations and other people, teacher and peers included. Cognition, as discussed in Chap. 3, is about memory development that takes place to adapt to new demands through conscious and unconscious mind and brain processes induced or not by external signals detected by our senses. Cognitive outcomes affect how we think, perceive people and things, feel and act in the future, and thus determine the course and outcomes of prospective learning experiences. Memory development begins with encoding new knowledge in working and shortterm memory and then follows with gradual reinforcement of the new knowledge for integration with existing memory patterns and consolidation or permanent sustainability in the long-term memory. Newly encoded memory is consolidated only after successive retrieval for rehearsal in a variety of situations that continuously impose new but reasonable cognitive demands and that engage a mix of brain regions of distinct functions regarding knowledge construction and deployment. All memory processes from encoding to consolidation are modulated by particular brain regions concerned with attention, motivation, emotions, and other metacognitive factors that control how learning proceeds and determine the quality of outcomes it brings about. Pedagogy is about systematizing how students learn and about optimizing learning conditions and outcomes. As discussed in Chap. 4, pedagogy is most effective when systemic, i.e., when it conforms to human cognition and when it helps students develop systemic 4P profiles in systemic learning ecologies. In the first respect, systemic pedagogy helps students explicitly learn how to learn through conscious

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and systematic encoding, deployment (retrieval and rehearsal in novel contexts), and consolidation of generic content and process knowledge. Special attention is then given to systemic knowledge organization and pattern-focused systemic processes for knowledge construction and deployment. In the second respect, systemic pedagogy engages students individually and collectively in experiential, hands-on, mindson, learning activities pertaining to real-life situations and carried out insightfully in structured but flexible learning cycles with proper teacher mediation. Insightful experiential learning involves continuous evaluation and regulation of student knowledge throughout every learning exercise, and particularly through assessment that is not an end by itself, but means for a worthy end: meaningful learning of course materials and development of systemic 4P profiles for success, even excellence in life. The latter end is the ultimate goal of systemic education that transcends traditional education in practically every respect as discussed in Chap. 5, from curriculum design and implementation, teacher training and working conditions, to governance of educational institutions and entire educational systems. In systemic formal education, teachers teach not to the test and not to inform students about specific disciplinary knowledge as passed along from one generation to another in traditional textbooks. Instead, teachers insightfully implement systemic curricula that they helped developing under mind and brain-based pedagogical frameworks and that they keep regulating to meet their students’ needs and prepare them to cope with the changing realities of the twenty-first century. Any discipline is organized in any curriculum at any level around a limited set of powerful conceptual systems and systemic processes that meet students’ cognitive potentials at a given age and preserve and reveal, to the extent that is possible, the paradigmatic rigor of the discipline. As such, systemic curricula allow systematization of learning in the context of individual disciplines and across different disciplines to the extent of realizing what we call differential convergence education, which is about bringing together knowledge from different disciplines, while preserving the integrity and sovereignty of each discipline, in order to tackle real-life issues. Differential convergence education may take place, for a start, in the context of traditional disciplinary curricula, and is optimized through experiential learning that culminates in suitable educational modalities of praxis. Students would then be immersed into praxis, beginning at least at the secondary school level, in order to learn how to bring theory and practice systemically and systematically together like professionals do in given CoPs, and how to tackle issues students are themselves interested in, using actual CoP conceptual and physical tools, modern technology included. Under propitious conditions, traditional disciplinary education would then be transcended into systemic, praxis-immersive, convergence education (SPICE) that ultimately forms graduates who know how to think outside the box and excel in practical real-life situations in the most innovative ways possible. SPICE, like any other form of education that meets the realities of the century, requires across the board transcendence of traditional education, including the way educational institutions and entire educational systems are structured and operated. In particular, rigid top-down authoritative governance should be given away in favor

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of truly systemic governance that allows all organisms and stakeholders in an educational system to readily and autonomously adapt to any change within and outside the system and constantly operate with a hive-mind spirit and shared responsibility. Systemic governance should also provide for educational institutions and all other organisms in the system to work in close partnership with each other and with all sectors of society, particularly for SPICE sake. For, these sectors are most concerned with the specification and realization of student profiles that are necessary to succeed and excel in respective careers and operations. For optimal systemic education, and for students’ excellence in various aspects of life to become an ultimate part of the mission of formal education, educational systems and various sectors of society need to work systemically and systematically together on engraining a culture of excellence throughout society. Systemic Cognition and Education (SCE) brings together philosophy, cognition and psychology grounded in neuroscience, and reliable educational theory and research to provide substantiated pedagogical premises for learning and instruction, and sustain premises and ensuing practice with viable paradigmatic foundations for the entire educational enterprise. SCE is about what it takes for education to resonate well with the way the world within us and around us is and works in order to bring about graduates who are empowered to excel in various aspects of life and not conditioned to pass school and high-stakes exams. SCE relies on systemism to provide a seamless paradigmatic perspective on education. According to systemism, we can best conceive and deal with the world within us and around us when we look at ourselves as biological and cognitive systems that constantly affect and are affected by local and global environments made of different sorts of systems. SCE calls then for education to transcend all traditional paradigms and settings, for systemism for excellence to prevail instead throughout educational systems, from pedagogy to governance and from curricula to institutional organization, and for achieving and sustaining the systemic transcendence in partnership with various sectors of society, ultimately in the direction of systemic, praxis-immersive, convergence education (SPICE). Jounieh, Lebanon

Ibrahim A. Halloun

Contents

1 Systemism: Coherence and Consistency in Thoughts and Actions . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Systemic Worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Systems and Systemic Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Systems Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Systemic Mindset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Systemic Advantages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.2 Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.3 Stability and Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.4 Synergy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.5 Ontological-Epistemological Consonance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.6 Pedagogical Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 5 6 10 12 17 17 18 20 21 23 24

2 Systemic Profiles: Habits and Traits for Excellence in Life . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Knowledge Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Systemic Habits and Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Normative Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Systemic 4P Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.1 Progressive Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.2 Productive Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.3 Profound Episteme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.4 Principled Conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37 37 38 41 46 48 50 52 54 57

3 Systemic Cognition: Mind-and-Brain Based Lifelong Learning . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Transaction with the Real World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Brain Plasticity, Flexibility, and Discrete Functionality . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 Engrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.2 Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3.5 Memory Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 Brain Readiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Selective Adaptive Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.3 Reiterative Ontogenetic Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.4 Long Active Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.5 Lifestyle Dependent Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Memory Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.1 Distributed Collective Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.2 Rehearsal Dependent Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.3 Pattern Embedded Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.4 Insightful Challenging Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.5 Differential Dynamic Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Memory Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7.1 Differential Memory Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7.2 Mutually Dependent Memory Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7.3 Mnemonics Dependent Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Memory Modulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.1 Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.2 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.3 Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.4 Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Metacognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 78 79 82 85 87 88 89 92 93 95 98 100 101 103 104 107 108 109 111 113 115

4 Systemic Pedagogy: Experiential Ecology for Meaningful Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Pedagogy for Meaningful Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Systemic Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Taxonomy of Learning Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Middle-Out Knowledge Structure and Development . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Knowledge Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Experiential Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Experiential Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 Systemic Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Learning Cycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Insightful Dialectics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Learning Mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Assessment and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.1 Item Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.2 Assessment Rubrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.3 Maps and Rubrics for Authentic Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Systemic Education: Curricula and Governance for the Twenty-First Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Transcending Traditional Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Systemic Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Differential Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Scope and Sequence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Praxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8 Educational Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.1 Paradigm Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.2 Middle-Out Systemic Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.3 Partnerships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.4 Teaching Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.5 Exchange Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.6 Student Certification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.7 Culture of Excellence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

About the Author

Ibrahim A. Halloun is recognized worldwide for his seminal contributions to education. He is particularly known for his work on students’ intuitive ideas about the physical world and their novice views about knowing and learning science, and for turning scientific models and modeling into pedagogical tools and methodology for experiential, meaningful learning of physics and other STEM disciplines at the secondary school and university levels. Prof. Halloun has contributed to curriculum reform in many countries around the globe and was behind several initiatives for systemic reform. He has been focused lately on systematizing the entire educational enterprise under systemic paradigms that meet the realities of the twenty-first century and that empower students to think outside the box and excel in various aspects of life. Systemic, praxis-immersive, convergence education (SPICE) is at the core of his attention, especially cross- and trans-disciplinarity that efficiently bridge traditional divides among disciplines from different fields like arts and science that are often misconceived as remotely related to each other. Details at: www.halloun.net and www.hinstitute.org.

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Chapter 1

Systemism Coherence and Consistency in Thoughts and Actions

Contents 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Systemic Worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Systems and Systemic Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Systems Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Systemic Mindset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Systemic Advantages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.2 Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.3 Stability and Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.4 Synergy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.5 Ontological-Epistemological Consonance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.6 Pedagogical Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1.1 Introduction Our thoughts, perceptions, and actions are governed by our own paradigms. A paradigm consists of foundational premises and fundamental knowledge that we fall back upon, explicitly or implicitly, to interact with the world around us and develop all sorts of knowledge about various parts of this world and ourselves. A person usually holds a mix of paradigms (Halloun, 2004/6). Each paradigm (or set of paradigms) is often dedicated to a particular field (vocational, artistic, social, philanthropic, religious, etc.) and presents some idiosyncratic aspects along with other aspects that are common to the person’s own paradigms and/or shared by other people paradigms. People sharing common interests and working for common goals (Community of Practice, CoP), especially those practicing a particular profession and sharing a common career, usually come to a consensus about most if not all aspects of the paradigms that govern their thoughts and common practice. Depending on the nature of a CoP field of practice, and especially on the extent to which it is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. A. Halloun, Systemic Cognition and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3_1

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affected by local culture, heritage, and values, the consensus may be restricted to a local community or it may sweep across many communities to the extent of being sometimes universal. Academic professionals working in long established fields and disciplines share and deploy the most systematically the most coherent and most powerful universal paradigms in each field and discipline (Box 1.1). The universality is though often limited to a particular field and hard to realize systematically across different fields. Systemism is a worldview and a generic mindset, a sort of overarching, universal paradigm that cuts across cultures and fields, academic included, and that efficiently helps bridging different paradigms and particularly bringing the idiosyncratic paradigms of ordinary people in harmony with CoP paradigms, especially professional paradigms. Box 1.1 Professional paradigms Every professional community or community of practice (CoP), and especially every academic community, is characterized by one particular paradigm (or a couple of complementary paradigms, like the classical and modern paradigms of natural sciences). The paradigm consists then primarily of: • ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological (ethics and value system included) tenets of axiomatic nature, corroborated principles, and other foundational propositions commonly accepted by all members of the concerned community and hereby collectively referred to as paradigmatic premises; • an episteme, or conceptual or content knowledge, that consists of a repertoire of conceptions, i.e., concepts, laws, theorems, and other relationships among concepts, along with related semantics, and syntax; • a methodology, or repertoire of process or procedural knowledge that includes cognitive and sensorimotor skills and procedures of specific rules and guidelines, along with necessary tools and resources chosen or developed in accordance with specific norms and standards. Paradigmatic premises govern the inception of conceptual and procedural knowledge for serving specific purposes, as well as the corroboration, deployment, and continuous evaluation and regulation of such knowledge, and thus of the paradigm altogether. Because of their generic nature, some if not most of these premises often cut across different disciplines in the same field or different fields. Disciplines in the same field (e.g., dance and music in arts, biology and physics in natural sciences, and geography and sociology in social sciences) would then be distinguished more by their episteme and some of their procedures than by their paradigmatic premises. That is why the word

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“paradigm” is often reserved in the literature to refer exclusively to paradigmatic premises within the same discipline or the same field, without including episteme and methodology. Ordinary people paradigms are predominantly intuitive paradigms that are often called common sense, folk, or naïve paradigms in the literature and that are at odds in many respects with professional paradigms. For instance, and unlike their professional counterparts, ordinary people’s intuitive paradigms are mostly implicit and idiosyncratic, and lack the clarity, order, coherence, and consensus of professional paradigms, especially disciplinary paradigms in academia. Furthermore, and when it comes to the reality of things, the world, people included, is considered under intuitive paradigms to be actually the way it appears to our senses, whereas under professional, and especially scientific paradigms, the reality of things may be completely different from the way they appear to our senses and from what common sense might suggest about them. For example, and contrary to what it looks like from “sunrise” to “sunset”, Earth turns around the Sun and not the other way around. Similarly, and contrary to what we experience in everyday life about getting warmer when we come closer to a source of heat, Earth is the farthest away from the Sun during summer in the northern hemisphere, and the closest to it during winter in that hemisphere. Professional, and especially disciplinary paradigms in academia are thus counterintuitive in many respects for ordinary people and subsequently hard for them to adopt or even appreciate. The top priority in education is then to help learners1 realize the limitations of their own intuitive paradigms, and offer them alternative paradigms in appealing forms and contexts that resonate with, and take advantage of, the nature of the human mind and brain and the order of the natural world around us and within us. This is however seldom done in education, if any, and alternative disciplinary paradigms are often kept implicit leaving it to students of all levels to figure out the paradigmatic foundations of their course materials and resolve incompatibilities with their own intuitive paradigms, which they are incapable of doing on their own. That is why, and because of many other reasons discussed throughout this book, students are often unable to learn meaningfully what they are required to learn. They often develop dysfunctional rules of thumb instead of productive learning habits that can be systematically deployed within the same discipline and across different disciplines. As a consequence, they often follow a piecemeal approach and end up with compartmentalized knowledge about anything they are taught. They loosely put together course materials about any particular discipline and do not establish significant relationships between different disciplines. 1

Unless otherwise specified or implied by the context of discussion, we hereby use the term “education” to refer to both formal and informal education as well as to both general and vocational/career and technical education; the term “learner”, to refer to anybody who learns anything under any type of education, including explorers, apprentices, pupils, and students; and the term “instructor”, to refer to any teacher, professor, mentor, trainer, or any other competent person that helps learners achieve what they are after.

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One though has to recognize that connecting different disciplines is not a straightforward matter even among different CoPs, academia included. Paradigms in different disciplines, and especially when from different fields (e.g., natural and social sciences), may be distinguished from each other to the extent that concerned professionals cannot readily come together for joint ventures on issues of common interest or issues that they may need to tackle together for the welfare of humanity and the ecosystem at large. They need first to find common paradigmatic grounds and exchange channels to make it possible to embark on such joint ventures that are increasingly becoming a necessity, perhaps the norm, in our century. All these professional and educational issues may be resolved when disciplinary paradigms and related courses in education are revisited and brought together under the umbrella of systemism. Systemism is a worldview and a generic mindset. It helps systematizing how we go about developing and deploying knowledge about the world around us and about ourselves as individuals and in relation to others, and thus how we go about interacting with others and the rest of the world and producing conceptual (mind related) and physical artifacts (products and processes). As a worldview, systemism is governed by the ontological tenet stipulating that every reality in the universe, whether living or inert, and whether natural or artificial, human made, and every human abstract conception (concept or relation among concepts), to be a system, a subsystem, or part of a system or subsystem that may be physical, conceptual, social, industrial, or of any other nature (Bunge, 1979, 1983a, 1983b, 2000; Forrester, 1968/1971; Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6, 2019). In simple terms, and unless made of a single constituent (e.g., monoatomic elements and unicellular organisms), a system is an orderly unit of connected, related, or interacting real (physical) or conceptual (abstract) elements that come together or that are brought together in order to serve specific purposes under specific conditions. As a mindset (for thought and conduct), systemism is governed by the epistemological tenet that we can best, and most systematically,2 make sense of the world, think about it, and exchange our respective ideas with others through systemic conceptual lenses and vehicles, i.e., through conceptual systems or abstract models that we construct mentally, and reproduce physically in one form or another, to represent physical systems in specific respects and to certain extent. As a consequence, with a systemic mindset we proceed methodologically to take advantage of these conceptual systems or models in order to systematically: (a) carry out our quest for viable (i.e., realistic, valid, reliable, useful, efficacious, affordable, feasible, reasonable, unambiguous, harmless, dynamically sustainable, etc.) knowledge about the 2

“Systemic” and “systematic”, and thus “systemically” and “systematically”, “systemize” and “systematize”, are not synonyms for us. Systemic refers to systemism or systems, whereas systematic refers to a consistent and often orderly way of doing certain things like exploring certain entities and territories or developing knowledge about them. With a systemic mindset, we do everything systematically through, say, system exploration or construction, system extrapolation or deployment.

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world around us and within us as humans, individually and collectively, and subsequently, (b) rationalize, describe, explain this world, and make all kinds of sound inferences about it, and (c) come up with all sorts of innovative ideas and artifacts for our own welfare and the good of our social and natural environment. Under systemism, we proceed the same way in the abstract realm where, in complete dissociation from the physical world, we rely systematically on conceptual systems or abstract models in order to come up with and deploy our own imaginary, abstract ideas and operations, logico-mathematical included. As such, systemism becomes a truly way of life as it will hopefully become gradually evident in this book.

1.2 Systemic Worldview We, as humans, are part of the universe without which we would have not existed, at least not without our planet Earth in our solar system. Meaningful understanding and sustainability of our very existence on our planet cannot be achieved in dissociation of other people and the ecosystem with whom and in which we live. We can understand ourselves and survive only in relation to other people and to various other entities surrounding us and affecting us in one aspect or another of life. We hereby hold that such relationships can best be understood and sustained with a systemic worldview whereby we consider ourselves as socio-biological cognizant subsystems that are part of broader systems. With a systemic worldview we hold that both the real world around us, and within us (our mind, brain, and body), and the conceptual realm of human thought consist primarily of well-defined real and conceptual systems respectively. This goes from the atomic scale to the astronomical scale, from inert objects to living organisms, from all social to all industrial sectors, and from the human brain and body to the human mind. Every real or conceptual entity, human beings included, is then considered to be a system, a subsystem, or part of a system or subsystem. Let us illustrate our point with the human body. Every human being is a complex living system. The body of each of us consists of many subsystems or constituent systems without any of which life cannot be sustained. These include the nervous system, the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system, the digestive system, etc. Each of these subsystems consists of a number of parts that are connected to each other in specific ways to exercise specific functions within the human body and in relation to sustaining life and enabling us to interact with the surrounding world. The performance of each of these subsystems depends on its parts, their individual properties, and the way they are connected to each other, interact with each other, and operate in tandem with each other. That performance also depends on the way each subsystem is connected to, and interact with, other systems in the human body, as well as on the surrounding environment in which we

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live. Any change in any bodily subsystem or in the surrounding natural or social environment may affect our entire body and thus our mental and physical health, and we may similarly affect other people and entities in our environment. For instance, your capacity to read this text and understand it depends primarily on the state of your perceptual system, mainly your vision, and the state of your mind and brain, all of which depend on how well other bodily subsystems function to sustain your vision and your mind and brain. This also depends on the physical environment surrounding you (including how comfortable you feel where you are sitting or standing and with the surrounding light, temperature, sounds, etc.), as well as on any human and physical resources you might have at your disposal to help you understand any unfamiliar technical term or idea you might come across in this text. Your understanding of the entire text depends on your prior knowledge. For instance, understanding what has just been mentioned about the human body depends on related knowledge you may have already learned, say, in biology. What you know in biology would then offer you the framework, the background (paradigmatic) knowledge you need, to properly interpret stated terms and ideas, make sense of the last two paragraphs, and draw certain conclusions. In particular, because of that framework, you can realize what each subsystem in your body is about: you can tell where it is located in your body, what function it fulfills in relation to sustaining your health and life, what parts it consists of and how these parts relate to each other, how it operates in relation to other bodily subsystems and the surrounding environment, what it generates or produces in your body, etc. What we have briefly said about the human body applies to any real or conceptual system, and leads us to define a system of any nature.

1.2.1 Systems and Systemic Schema A system made of more than one element is an orderly whole or unit delimited in the context of an appropriate paradigmatic framework and consisting of a number of interdependent elements (of concrete or physical nature in real systems, and of abstract or conceptual nature in conceptual systems) that are connected or related to each other, or that interact with each other, within conveniently set boundaries that separate the system from its environment without necessarily isolating it from that environment, so as to let the system exist, operate or behave, in certain ways, and under certain conditions, in order to serve certain purposes that no one element can serve alone and independently of other elements in the system, at least not as adequately. That statement can be further expanded to define systems more comprehensively and systematically using a generic template that we call the systemic schema. The systemic schema is a generic four-dimensional template that serves to “define” a system of any sort, in both the real world and the conceptual realm of human knowledge. The schema may also serve to define system constituents as indicated at the end of this section. The four schema dimensions pertain to a system’s scope,

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Fig. 1.1 Systemic schema. The schema serves to define all sorts of systems, as well as any system constituent, whether a physical or conceptual entity

constitution, performance, and framework that governs the specification of the former dimensions for the delimitation of existing systems and construction of new ones (Fig. 1.1). Each dimension may be broken down into two or more facets, and all facets are constantly evaluated and regulated based primarily on the system performance as discussed in Sect. 1.4. 1. The framework of a system consists of all: (a) foundational premises and provisions typically drawn from the paradigms of professional communities (Box 1.1), and (b) ensuing strategic choices that, along with premises, help delimiting the system scope as discussed below, and specifying the system constitution and performance, as well as its deployment for any physical or conceptual purpose. 2. The scope of the system helps choosing the proper framework and specifies: (a) the system domain, or the field or area in which it exists and is of importance; (b) the system function, or the specific purposes it is meant to serve in that domain. 3. The constitution of the system specifies: (a) the system composition, i.e., its primary constituents (often referred to in this book as “organs”) and the primary properties of each constituent, these being real or conceptual entities that are within the conveniently delineated boundaries of the system and that are responsible of the system endo- and overall structure and performance, thus determining its function, as opposed to secondary entities or properties that may actually be part of the system but that may be ignored because we deem them irrelevant to the considered system function; (b) the system endo-structure (or inner structure), i.e., primary connections (interactions or relationships) among primary constituents and properties

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Fig. 1.2 Open system

that determine the system performance and thus how the system fulfills its function; (c) the system environment (or settings), i.e., its primary agents (as distinguished from organs making up its composition), those being real or conceptual entities outside the system boundaries, other systems included, along with their primary properties, that may significantly affect the system endostructure and performance (called then open system), and thus its function, and that may sometimes be separated into two clusters, local in the immediate vicinity or of direct impact on the system, and global in relatively distant or remote areas or of indirect impact (Fig. 1.2); (d) the system exo-structure (outer structure, ecology, or contextual influences), i.e., primary connections (interactions or relationships) between individual primary agents and organs, and/or between the system as a whole and its environment, that bear significantly on the system function and determine how the system affects its environment. It is worth stressing here that, because of pedagogical reasons discussed later, the composition and environment facets are distinguished from the endo-structure and exo-structure facets respectively. The former two facets only list system organs and agents, along with their primary properties, without establishing connections among them. Such connections are the object of the latter two facets that make up together the system structure (i.e., inner and outer structure). 4. The performance of the system specifies: (a) the system processes, i.e., mental or physical actions (operations, mechanisms, maneuvers, etc.) which organs, and/or the system as a whole, might

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be engaged in, on their own (isolated system) and/or under external influence of the environment (open system), in order to fulfill the function of the system following specific rules of engagement; (b) the system output, i.e., products, events, or any other result or effect (services included, when the system is, say, of social or industrial nature) that the system actually brings about within itself (changes in the system composition and endo-structure) and/or outside the system, on its own or in concert with other systems as a consequence of its ecological interactions and processes, and the impact of which may extend beyond the original scope of the system. The four dimensions are constantly evaluated and regulated while defining existing systems or constructing new ones as discussed in the following section. Usually, we begin by setting the scope of the system of concern, and particularly its function based on which the proper framework is drawn from appropriate paradigm(s). System constitution and performance are subsequently identified under that framework to fulfill that function, and its scope may be refined in the process (Sect. 1.3). Four tables are given at the end of this chapter to illustrate the use of the schema in defining real and conceptual systems. Table 1.1 outlines a natural system (Fig. 1.5) with specific natural phenomena of concern, while Table 1.2 outlines a human-made, micro educational system, or an educational subsystem (Fig. 1.6). Tables 1.3 and 1.4 outline two conceptual systems, a particular type of literary texts and a particular scientific model of the atom respectively. Every time we define a system, particularly a real system, we end up actually de-constructing and re-constructing that system conceptually through a series of realist-rationalist transactions or processes that we discuss at length in Chap. 3. When we deal with any system, we begin by setting the system boundaries in a way to suit best what we want to know about, and/or accomplish with the system, hence primarily in terms of the system function. We then de-construct the system conceptually, i.e., we break its constitution into primary and secondary aspects (entities, properties, and connections) through the conceptual lenses of the chosen framework. As mentioned in the systemic schema and illustrated in the aforementioned four tables, we concentrate in the system constitution only on aspects within and outside the system boundaries that we deem primary, i.e., pertinent to our work with the system, and thus aspects that are particularly pertinent to the system performance and function. Meanwhile, we ignore secondary aspects that may actually exist inside or outside the system, from a realist perspective, but that we rationally deem irrelevant to what we want to know about, and/or accomplish with the system, or of insignificant contribution to, or impact on, the system performance and function. We subsequently re-construct the system conceptually—and then reify it physically, if necessary—in terms of only those aspects that we have rationally deemed primary. Our knowledge of any system is thus always partial knowledge limited to certain aspects of the system, and this knowledge is viable only to certain extent (and to certain levels of precision and approximation). The rationally re-constructed system

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makes up a conceptual system that we have conceived or designed in our minds in order to represent in certain respects and to a certain extent the system we are interested in, and often to represent a set of systems that share common primary aspects, common regularities, and that we normally classify within a given category (e.g., classical music, impressionist paintings, narrative texts, atoms or chemical elements, humans, schools, liberal or conservative parties, planets, etc.). Our knowledge of and about any system(s), including our own selves, thus consists of a conceptual model that is never a complete ontological replica of this or those system(s). The same can be said about subsystems and individual system entities that can also be defined using the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1. The schema can be readily adapted to define such entities, namely by preserving all schema dimensions and facets but re-interpreting them to suit individual entities instead of systems (or subsystems). The same framework that served to define a given system is used to define any entity needed for that system. The scope now specifies the domain and function of the entity of interest. Composition is about whether the entity (object or property) is an elementary or a prime entity that does not derive from any other entity (e.g., free morphemes in language and the electron in atoms) or a composed or derived entity otherwise (e.g., bound morphemes in language and protons in atoms). Endostructure is about how the entity constituents, if any, are put together to form the entity in question, while environment and exo-structure are about the relation of that entity to entities other than its constituents. It may be sometimes convenient to change the labels of the latter two facets to settings (environment) and context (exostructure) respectively, especially when dealing with, say, linguistic or literary entities as indicated in Table 1.3. Performance is about how the entity can be manipulated and taken advantage of, in relation to other entities, in order to bring about specific results.

1.2.2 Systems Taxonomy From an ontological perspective, and as mentioned before, a system may be real or conceptual. Real systems may be natural or artificial. Natural systems exist on Earth (or originate there at first) or elsewhere in the universe without human intervention. They stretch from the subatomic scale to the galactic scale and include various living systems (from micro-organisms to humans and other species taken separately or collectively in local or global eco-systems) and planetary systems (e.g., our own solar system). Artificial systems are human made and include, among others, technological, industrial, financial, social, and educational systems. Conceptual systems are mentally conceived by humans, and they may be idiosyncratic (particular to a given person) or shared by a number of people that may form together a distinguished community of practice (CoP) or any other local or global group of people. Conceptual systems are often distinguished from mental systems (like any other conceptual and mental construct), the former being consciously held and may be explicitly exchanged and negotiated with others, while the latter are unconscious and implicit.

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Conceptual systems may be, among many others, of artistic, literary, philosophical, or scientific nature. This ontological taxonomy of real and conceptual systems may be further ramified by classifying systems of any particular ontological type into a number of categories following particular classification schemes and criteria. For instance, in biology where the term “taxonomy” originated to indicate the classification of living organisms, an eight-level hierarchical scheme is followed (from domain to species) to classify these organisms based on similarities in composition and endo-structure. We hereby follow an all-encompassing scheme to classify all real and conceptual systems in accordance with specific criteria pertaining to the last three dimensions of our systemic schema (scope, constitution, performance). The framework may stem from a single paradigm or from a multitude of paradigms in the manner discussed in Chap. 5, and it usually applies to many systems of the same or different ontological nature. That is why this dimension of the schema is not hereby considered for distinguishing, and contrasting, various categories that cut across different real and conceptual systems, and across different CoPs and academic fields and disciplines. At the scope level, a real or conceptual system may be, among others: local or global (restricted or not respectively to a particular domain in existence or utility), conservative or progressive (its function remains unchanged or it may change subsequent to changes in its domain), cultural or a-cultural (its function and outcomes depend or not on the culture that characterizes its domain). At the constitution level, a system may be, among others: simple or compound (composed respectively of one entity or many entities), closed or open (isolated or not from any outside influence), immune or adaptive (the system endo-structure, namely when open, remains the same or it may change subsequent to external influence). At the performance level, a system may be, among others: rigid or flexible (the system operations and output remain the same or they may change subsequent to new functional demands and structural adaptation), static or dynamic (the system operational and overall states are conserved or they evolve in space and/or time), specific or generic (the system may operate or be operated or processed only within its original scope or it may be deployed innovatively, for creative or inventive purposes, outside this scope). We are hereby primarily concerned with progressive, open, adaptive, and thus flexible, dynamic, and generic systems, especially when it comes to educational systems, schools, and curricula. We are also mainly concerned with compound not simple systems, i.e., systems the composition of which consists of at least two organs that may be either simple entities or subsystems, and thus the endo-structure of which involves significant connections (relationships, interactions, etc.) that make a system gains its significance and many advantages over its individual organs as discussed in Sect. 1.4. Each category of real or conceptual systems may be represented either comprehensively by a prototype or partially by a model. A prototype is a particular system in a given category, usually the most familiar to a given person, that bears the exact

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same features as all other systems in that category (e.g., the robin as a bird prototype or your own car or home as car or home prototypes). In contrast, a model is an artificial real system or conceptual system that we construct to display in concrete or abstract ways particular but not all features that are common to all systems in a given category, and that we intentionally concentrate on in the constitution and performance of these systems to serve particular purposes under a given framework. This is in fact the case of all four tables presented in this chapter. For further illustration, you, the reader, are a human prototype. You share with all humans the same physical and mental features and functions, notwithstanding individual differences in any respect. Our solar system consisting of our Sun and the surrounding nine planets and their Moons, Earth but not Pluto included, is a prototype of the trillions of solar systems that exist in the billions of galaxies in the universe. In contrast, a photograph of yours or a statue or caricature of a human being are real human models, i.e., partial physical representations of humans. They depict only in certain real respects and in certain ways, analogous or not, certain apparent structural but not functional human features. The same goes for our systems in the aforementioned four tables, and especially Tables 1.1 and 1.4. Systems illustrated in these two tables are conceptual models of solar and atomic systems respectively; they partially represent in abstract, scientific terms these two types of systems only in limited respects and to a certain extent. System taxonomy and representations have important pedagogical implications discussed later in this book.

1.3 Systemic Mindset Human beings have constantly yearned and worked to better and better understand the world around us and improve the conditions of human life. Human knowledge has lately so much ramified, diversified, and multiplied that it has become impossible to keep up with individually and collectively, even in CoPs and various academic disciplines. Each of us needs then to have a generic and insightful mindset that would allow us to critically pick judicious knowledge needed for self-fulfillment and success in everyday life, systematically acquire such knowledge, sustain it meaningfully in memory and deploy it effectively whenever necessary, and readily accommodate ourselves to any life change and challenge while holding on to, and taking advantage of, constructive heritage and local and global orders. A systemic mindset can best do so and more. Cognitive and educational research reveals that accomplished individuals, especially professional experts, are distinguished from other people in knowledge construction and deployment mostly by: (a) concentrating, under the “less is more” maxim, on powerful core conceptions and processes that they can efficiently take advantage of for continuous knowledge development, (b) organizing their knowledge coherently and consistently in judicious structures, and (c) developing generic skills that they deploy systematically across different contexts and situations for knowledge construction and deployment, that they share in certain respects with experts

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in different professions and CoPs, and that allow them to think outside the box. System-based organization is found to be in this respect among the most effective and efficient for structuring epistemic knowledge (content or conceptual knowledge), if not the optimal one, and systemic skills to hold a superior standing when it comes to process (procedural) knowledge.3 With a systemic mindset, we look at the world and deal with it conceptually through systemic conceptual lenses (systemic thinking), and behave and carry all our physical endeavors with systemic tools (systemic conduct). We concentrate on connections (relationships, interactions) among physical or conceptual entities rather than on isolated entities or loose aggregates of entities, and on patterns (common regularities) rather than on situation-specific or idiosyncrasies in such connections and subsequent processes (operations, events, etc.). We then build our knowledge of and about the world around conceptual systems or abstract models that we conceive in our minds, and that we may reify in one concrete form or another (e.g., on paper, through computer simulation, or with physical models), in order to represent and/or simulate the systemic patterns of interest. Conceptual systems or models become our main thought vehicles for all physical or conceptual endeavors we undertake, and we carry then any endeavor consciously and purposely, and eventually almost intuitively, as a systemic endeavor for system identification, analysis, construction, refinement, corroboration, and/or deployment for tackling any issue of concern and coming up with sustainable, systemic answers and solutions. Basic systemic endeavors with existing realities are about the delimitation of systems (or parts of systems) and the specification, in accordance with the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1, and validation of their constitution and performance in their specified scope, and about controlling and changing system constitution and performance and extrapolating system scope in specific respects, all in the context of an appropriate systemic framework. These and other systemic endeavors are carried out insightfully so as to constantly evaluate and regulate all facets of any given system (or system organ) based primarily on the system performance as indicated in Fig. 1.3. Any physical or conceptual system is delimited, if existing, or constructed, if not, to fulfill a particular function in a well-defined domain. Once the system scope (domain and function) is set, an appropriate systemic framework is chosen for setting the system boundaries and specifying or putting together its constitution as indicated by the solid arrows in Fig. 1.3. The system performance primarily determined by its constitution would then establish whether or not it fulfills its function appropriately. As indicated by the feedback dashed arrows in that figure, and if necessary, the system may then change its constitution if it operates autonomously on its own (like when the human body reacts to a wound or sickness to heal itself or in any other homeostasis process that biological systems undergo to adjust to changes in their environments 3

See, for example, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 1990, 1993), Assaraf and Orion (2005), Bachelard (1934), Bower and Morrow (1990), Bunge (1979, 2000), ˇ cula et al. (2015), Clement (1989), Chi et al. (1981), Giere (1992, 1994), Glas (2002), Halloun Canˇ (2004/6, 2007, 2011), Hmelo-Silver and Pfeffer (2004), Hmelo-Silver et al. (2007), Johnson-Laird (1983, 2006), NGSS Lead States (2013), National Research Council (NRC, 2012), Reif and Larkin (1991), Rodriguez (2013) and Vallée-Tourangeau and Vallée-Tourangeau (2014).

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Fig. 1.3 Insightful definition and operation of a system, especially when open and adaptive. All facets of the system are constantly evaluated and regulated based primarily on the system performance as indicated by the feedback dashed arrows

and survive), or we may change its constitution if we are in control (like in the case of technological and social systems, schools included). In the latter event, we may also need to refine the system scope and even refine or change the systemic framework under which we are working. Feedback is a crucial and critical aspect of any systemic endeavor. It involves constant evaluation and possible regulation of any facet of the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1) and provides insight about the system and the way we deal with it. Feedback and insight are indeed major characteristics of all systemic endeavors, and thus of a systemic mindset. Most efficient and meaningful systemic endeavors are about identifying, describing, and explaining patterns (aspects we find repeatedly and regularly in space and time as discussed in Sect. 1.4.2) in the constitution and performance of different systems that typically make the object of a given paradigm in a given CoP or of a given theory in academia. Systemic endeavors culminate in taking advantage of those patterns for controlling or changing existing realities and ultimately in extrapolating them in innovative ways (think outside the box) so as to creatively ask and answer new questions and define and solve new problems, and to invent new physical and conceptual systems, subsystems, or parts of systems. Systemic endeavors we are most concerned about in education, particularly for the development of a systemic mindset, relate to everyday life and fall in one of the following three categories (Fig. 1.4): Exploration, which begins with a quick survey of a given real or conceptual situation and follows with the situation deconstruction (analysis) to tease out primary from secondary entities (objects and their primary properties) and/or events or processes and their properties. Primary entities (or events/processes) are entities that we deem pertinent to what we want to accomplish in that situation, whereas secondary entities are those that we deem irrelevant for that particular situation and that can be subsequently ignored in this but not necessarily other situations.

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Fig. 1.4 Endeavors that can be best undertaken with a systemic mindset (Fig. 1.3) and that should make the object of formal education in real life settings, at appropriate age and educational level, to help students develop such a mindset

Investigation, which begins with the exploration of a given situation as just mentioned and follows with a systemic formulation of the situation, i.e., a reconstruction of that situation (synthesis) in the form of conceptual system(s) that consist only of primary entities (events or processes included) or their conceptual representations, and that serve well-designated functions to meet at best our ends in that situation. Formulated systems are then processed for desired investigative ends that may be of factual, inferential, and/or judgmental nature. Factual investigation brings about a factum (a testimony or an attestation) about the situation as observed. It provides a valid and reliable descriptive and/or explanatory account of the current state (constitution and performance) or change of state of identified systems and primary entities they consist of, by answering “what” and “how” questions (description) and/or “why” and “what causes, if any” questions (explanation). For example, we can directly realize that there is light in a room (description) when we can see things around and because of daylight and/or a lit lamp (explanation). Both cause (sunshine or lamp) and effect (light, seeing things) can be actually observed and attested to. Explanation is best when causal, i.e., when we can determine the cause(s) of things. However, there are instances when explanation can only be correlational in statistical terms.

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Inferential investigation is about the description or explanation of a given situation in terms of system constitution and performance that are not exposed directly to our mind and senses, and that we have to correctly guess about (infer) through if (apparent)—then (non-apparent) statements. As such, we may infer possible effects from a given apparent cause (e.g., if the electric power is down, then we cannot run any appliance), and/or infer possible cause(s), if any, from apparent effects (e.g., if a working appliance does not run, then, possibly, it is not plugged in, the power may be down, or the main circuit breaker may be switched off). Inferences may also consist of the postdiction of a situation’s past and/or the prediction of its future based on the present state of various systems/entities. Judgmental or axiological investigation is about the assessment of a given situation in terms of how well identified systems serve their designated functions given their constitution and performance. The assessment may be instrumental (utility related), aesthetic, ethical, etc. Innovation, which includes (a) creative extrapolation of an already existing system for answering new questions or solving new problems that have not been tackled before (widening the scope of a system) while preserving the system constitution and carrying out new system processes, (b) transcendence of current or traditional practices (changing system constitution and/or performance) for providing significantly different answers or solutions to old and new questions or problems, and (c) invention of totally new real or conceptual systems for fulfilling new functions and perhaps old functions more efficiently. All systemic endeavors rely significantly on the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1). The constitution of any system, namely the choice of primary entities and connections among entities, depends primarily on the function(s) we want the system to serve in the domain of interest (the situation at hand) and thus the output it is expected to provide once appropriately processed. Patterns (Sect. 1.4.2) we are used to in familiar systems, especially in their constitution and performance, are crucial for properly identifying and delimiting and specifying systems in any real or conceptual situation. Systemic endeavors are always carried out in appropriate systemic frameworks derived from systemic paradigms and they always involve insightful feedback (Fig. 1.3). Exploration and investigation deal with systems as they exist or identified in a given situation without any change in the actual overall constitution or performance of any given system. Endeavor evaluation may then lead us to change the choice but not the actual nature, makeup and properties of what we considered as primary organs and/or agents. Innovation always involves a change in certain constitution and performance aspects, and it may even involve invention of totally new systems under the same or different framework. Any exploratory, investigative, or innovative endeavor is constantly evaluated by correspondence to what we need to accomplish in a given situation, and regulated should we be not satisfied with the outcome (Fig. 1.3). Details about carrying out physical and conceptual endeavors meaningfully and insightfully for the development of a systemic mindset in educational contexts are discussed in Chap. 4.

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1.4 Systemic Advantages Real or conceptual entities have little significance when existing in isolation from each other. According to Poincaré (1902), things gain their significance only when related to each other. An entity gains significance when it interacts with other entities, or when it is related or connected to such entities in a well-defined structure. For instance, a heap of stones has little importance and utility. To borrow Bunge’s words (1979, p. 3), the heap is an “aggregate or assemblage … a collection of items not held together by bonds, and [it] therefore lacks integrity or unity”. Stones become far more important when used in constructing a wall, and even better, a house. It is how the stones are stacked, how they are connected to each other, that turns the heap into a significant and useful structure. The same entities can thus result in different structure and function (utility) depending on how they are related to each other. In this case, the stones may bring about a barrier or a complete dwelling system. Similarly, the same relationship may result in different outcomes when established between different entities. For instance, no two married couples enjoy exactly the same life together under wedlock. Connections (relationships, interactions, etc.) among various real or conceptual entities, and functions they may subsequently serve and outcomes they may bring about, are best conceived and reified in the framework of systemism. Philosophers and cognitive scientists4 have long argued that a systemic worldview helps us infuse order in both the real world around us and the cognitive realm of our thoughts, realize the order where it exists in both domains, and subsequently bring the two together in congruence systematically and meaningfully. Some of such ontological and epistemological advantages that could not be garnered, at least not as significantly, outside a systemic worldview are discussed next. More advantages, especially of methodological and pedagogical nature, are discussed in subsequent chapters.

1.4.1 Order Systematization of knowledge development and deployment5 has always been at the heart of any profession, especially academic professions. One driving force 4

See, for example, Bunge (1967, 1973, 1979, 1983a, 1983b, 2000), Casti (1989), Gentner and Stevens (1983), Giere (1988, 1992), Harré (1970), Hempel (1965), Hesse (1970), Johanessen et al. (1999), Johnson-Laird (2006), Lakoff (1987), Laszlo (2015), Liu et al. (2015), Nagel (1979), NRC (2012) and Wartofsky (1968). 5 Unless otherwise specified, we hereby use the word “knowledge” in the large sense to refer to all sorts of episteme, skills, and dispositions. Knowledge “development” may involve the quest for new knowledge and/or the evaluation, regulation, and enhancement of existing knowledge. Knowledge “deployment” may involve the exploration of existing knowledge in new contexts, the application of such knowledge in familiar or new contexts according to already established rules, or the innovative use of such knowledge following improved or new rules inside and outside its original scope. As discussed in different parts of this book, knowledge deployment always involves knowledge development from both cognitive and practical perspectives.

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behind the creation of various disciplines has been to put order in each discipline, a strict order that makes professionals in the discipline follow systematically the same rules in developing and deploying all sorts of disciplinary knowledge. These include semantic and syntactic rules for interpreting and relating various conceptions (concepts and relationships among concepts) and communicating and negotiating ideas objectively. As discussed in Chap. 5, the trend is being reversed lately in the direction of disciplinary convergence, i.e., in the direction of bringing back together traditionally segregated disciplines without necessarily integrating them in ways to make them lose their distinguishing identity and sovereignty. Systemism helps us best systematize knowledge development and deployment, whether within the confinement of individual disciplines or, and especially, across different disciplines. In all events, systemism does not infringe in any way on the sovereignty and integrity of any discipline. It does not deal with disciplinary content per se. Instead, it provides means and ways for better organizing this content and taking advantage of, and especially for bringing about organization and deployment compatibility, hence order, within and across disciplines. Take for example the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1). As illustrated in Tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4, the schema is a template for organizing knowledge about any topic in any discipline in the “form” of systems. Disciplinary content (episteme) is not infringed upon in any foundational way. It is simply rearranged, re-ordered, so that concerned people can organize and subsequently exchange and deploy that content efficiently within and across disciplines. This is especially important for curriculum developers, textbook writers, instructors,6 and, of course, students in formal education. As mentioned above, educational research has long shown that students often complete various courses with compartmentalized piecemeal knowledge that they put loosely together and deploy randomly following mostly rules of thumb. When the schema and other systemic tools and methods discussed in this book are used properly, students, like professionals and members of any community of practice (CoP), would be empowered to systematically develop and deploy any knowledge in orderly manner. They would become capable of discerning primary from secondary aspects in any situation, capturing regularities and patterns in entities and processes, and realizing the big picture within and across disciplines. They would then develop meaningful, coherent knowledge that they can readily relate and transfer within the same and different courses and disciplines, and deploy efficiently and productively, and eventually innovatively (creatively and inventively), in different and unfamiliar situations.

1.4.2 Patterns Patterns are the best manifestation of the existence and importance of order in both the real world and the conceptual realm of our mind and thoughts. In the real 6

See Footnote 1.

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world, patterns are morphological or phenomenological regularities in space and time pertaining respectively to structural connections within and among physical entities, or to the behavior of such entities. Patterns predominate in the universe, from the microscopic to the astronomical scales, which makes our world interesting and comprehensible. The day and night recurrence and season cycles on Earth are examples of patterns, and so are the morphology and birth-life-death cycles of humans and other species. The mentioned earthly patterns are best understood in the context of our solar system (or the Earth-Sun and Moon subsystem of Table 1.1), and the life patterns, in the context of the species’ ecological systems. Patterns and patterning also prevail in our thoughts, actions, and memories as discussed in Chap. 3. We have a natural tendency to look for patterns, for order, in the world around us, and even to impose patterns in this world beginning with our own perceptions (e.g., when we try to identify a pattern in a telephone number or a car license plate number to help us memorize them, or when we encounter people, objects, or events for the first time and try to match them, or look for similarities, with whom and what we are familiar with). Thanks to structural and behavioral patterns already developed in our memories about various species, we can tell whether a living organism or creature is a human being, an animal, or a plant, and further tell what type of species that is. Meaningful understanding of any species can be reached when treated as a complex system. This is for example the case when we look at a human being as a complex system consisting of the nervous system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, and other subsystems, and at human cognition as the main function of our mind and brain systems (Chap. 3). Patterns prevail in all human abstract and concrete creations and inventions, from literary and artistic works to social organization and technological products. Any literary or artistic school that has been known across the centuries, and up to our present day, is characterized with a distinct style. The same style can be traced over and over again, as a pattern, in the works of people belonging to a given school in different places on Earth and at different times. Narrative texts outlined in Table 1.3 manifest in their constitution and performance dimensions a literary pattern that prevails across countries and years in the production of a particular type of texts. Similarly, schools outlined in Table 1.2 manifest a social pattern that prevails in space and time, though to variable extents, in different educational institutions. Structural and operational patterns can likewise be identified in computers, cars, airplanes, appliances, and all other technological products. Patterns are best processed and consolidated in our minds through systemic thinking, i.e., by deliberately and systematically exploring the world around us in the form of interacting real systems and organizing our thoughts and actions around conceptual systems that serve well-defined purposes. The predominance of patterns in both the real world and the conceptual realm of human minds highlights their significance and especially the significance of systems and systemic thinking that reveals them from cognitive and thus pedagogical perspectives. The systemic schema helps reveal patterns shared by many real or conceptual systems along each dimension and each facet of the schema. It also helps compare and contrast different patterns shared

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by the same or different systems, and ultimately figure out how and to what extent systemic convergence may be carried out systematically among different patterns. Take for example Tables 1.1 and 1.4. When we compare and contrast every facet in each of the four schema dimensions in these two tables, we can readily tell how celestial systems and microscopic systems are governed in certain respects by the same scientific paradigms, and how all physical objects at all scales in the universe interact with each other according to the same laws and principles. We can also tell how microscopic systems differ from macroscopic systems, say, in quantum respects. Similar common and distinguishing features can be revealed with the use of the systemic schema when the educational system of Table 1.2 is compared and contrasted to other types of systems (e.g., social and industrial), and when the literary type of text of Table 1.3 is compared and contrasted to other types of text. Therefore, we can tell how universal some patterns are, and how different systems and subsequently different patterns may be distinguished from each other.

1.4.3 Stability and Efficacy Natural systems, from atoms to galaxies, and especially biological systems on Earth are relatively stable, unless some major environmental event wipes them out altogether or forces them to significantly change their endo-structure. In the absence of such disturbing and destabilizing events, the constitution and performance of natural systems remain virtually the same in time. Stability refers here not strictly to a static state of a system, which may sometimes be the case. It also refers to the dynamic state a system may maintain throughout its existence, and to the possible evolution of the system in either or both constitution and performance along a well-defined evolution path to accommodate normal intrinsic or external demands and adapt to normal environmental changes. Under certain internal or external conditions, the properties of certain organs of a natural system may change without necessarily affecting the system as a whole (state conservation), or they may change enough to induce some changes in the structure and/or certain processes of the system (change of state). Induced changes may or may not be reversible. The system may find a way to recover and get back to its original state under external influences or even autonomously. Such level of stability is especially true of living systems, and ensured through innate self-regulatory processes we rely upon for survival like homeostasis and autopoiesis. Homeostasis is the process our body organs go through when we get sick in order to recover autonomously or as a consequence of treatment and return our body virtually to the same healthy state it was in before sickness. Autopoiesis is the process an organism goes through in order to renew itself, like in the case of generating new neurons to replace dead neurons in the brain. Such self-regulatory processes may sometimes fail to reverse the course of induced changes, like in the case of terminal illness or death, of natural disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, that may damage an ecosystem in irreversible ways, or of a school or a corporation

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the performance of which goes so bad that no choice is left but to close them down for good. Stability does not imply determinism in the state of a system as a whole and of its individual constituents. Under propitious conditions, a system may change its state or its evolutionary course. This is the case of living organisms’ adaptation to environmental changes, and particularly of humans deciding to change the course of their lives once dissatisfied with their lifestyle and of social organisms, schools and industry included, to change their constitution and performance in order to take new directions in their operations and output. The stability of a system is determined primarily by its structure (inner and outer), i.e., by how well various system organs are connected to each other and to agents in their environment (i.e., how well they relate or are related to each other, how they interact with each other and mutually affect each other, and/or how they work together). Organs’ connections also determine the system efficacy, i.e., how well various processes take place in the system and how valuable its output is (Fig. 1.3). Efficacy is especially important for social systems, i.e., systems where collective endeavors are undertaken by different individuals or groups of people to bring about particular ends. This applies to all sectors in a society, especially the educational sector. In addition to synergy discussed below, collective work is supposed to provide individual people or individual groups growth opportunities that they could not enjoy on their own. As such, individual people or groups of people in collective work should bring certain added value to all those engaged in the work in question and to the output they all bring about and get individual benefits they could not get independently of the other individuals or groups. Stability and efficacy of collective structures and processes are more significant when different entities are connected together as coherent and cohesive systems of well-defined constitution, and especially of established structural and ecological laws and rules of engagement, rather than as aggregates of any other form. This is especially true for educational and other endeavors in various sectors of society. When an educational system is run under a truly systemic governance at all levels in the manner illustrated in Table 1.2 and discussed in Chap. 5, and when curricula are explicitly designed and implemented under systemic frameworks in the manner also discussed in Chap. 5, educational system and curricula will experience a relative stability (while evolving in a desired course and autonomously regulating any structural or procedural disruption to stay the course) and a high level of efficacy that they may not experience as significantly under non-systemic paradigms.

1.4.4 Synergy Every primary entity, real or conceptual, that is part of a system composition or environment has its own intrinsic properties, and thus its own value and merits independently of other entities. However, the entity gains significance when related to other entities inside and outside the system to contribute to the system endo- and

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exo-structure respectively, as well as to its performance. In fact, when an entity takes part of the structure of a system, a systemic synergy arises that allows the emergence of new properties, new processes, and, thus, new functions and added value, to the entity itself, to other entities, and/or to the system as a whole. Emergent properties are new properties that an entity or an entire system gain because of inter-entities connections (relationships or interactions) within the system structure (inner and outer structures), and that could not have been gained in the absence of the system. Take for example life on Earth. Should our planet not be part of our solar system or any other solar system, i.e., should it not enjoy sunlight under specific conditions, no form of life would have been possible, even when all terrestrial elements that we know of are there. Thus, life is an emergent property that Earth enjoys because it is part of our solar system. In return, our globe contributes to the very stability of the entire solar system. Life on Earth is also an example of another synergetic aspect of system structure, holism. Holism is about properties, processes, and functions that cannot be attributed to any single entity, or set of entities, inside or outside the system when separated from the system. The same chemical elements enter in the composition of living organisms and inert objects. What distinguishes the former from the latter is the endo-structure of each, not the composition. It is primarily how certain chemical elements are connected together that determines whether the emerging system is living or not. In a sense, holism is about a system as a whole being more import than the mere sum of its parts or that a system properties and functions cannot be simply determined by looking at its parts independently from each other. A system has emergent properties (e.g., life on Earth or the shape of a house) and synergetic functions (e.g., reproduction or dwelling respectively) that no constituent (e.g., a stone or a chemical element) can possess individually or with some but not all system constituents. The two holistic features may not be entirely attributed to individual parts of a given system and may not be fully understood and appreciated by simply breaking the system into parts (by analysis or following a reductionist approach). “The meaning of a message cannot be found in the chemistry of the ink”. In contrast, if any primary part is left out of the system, the entire system will be significantly affected. This is a consequence of wholism, as opposed to holism. Wholism is, for us, about the interdependence of various parts in a system and the importance of the integrity, the wholeness, of a system in its totality. Various primary entities of a system interact or relate to each other so as to form a cohesive and coherent whole that depends on each entity. When any primary entity is taken away from a system, or when the entity loses or changes any primary property, the system may no longer enjoy the same properties, processes, and functions it used to have in the presence of that entity or its original property, whence the importance of individual entities mentioned at the beginning of this section. All in all, a system owes some of its features and merits to its individual constituents and others to the synergy that comes about from parts of and, especially, the entire array of connections or relations among these constituents. As such, no system can supervene upon any of its constituents, and no constituent can supervene

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upon other constituents. In the latter respect, authoritarian top-down governance and dictatorship in social organisms do not sustain true systemic structures and processes.

1.4.5 Ontological-Epistemological Consonance Systemism allows us to bring into harmony the real world around us and the conceptual realm of our thoughts and knowledge about this world through realist-rational dialectics or negotiations between world and realm. In particular, system-based ontology of our surroundings and of our mind and brain, and thus of our own knowledge, particularly our epistemic knowledge (content or declarative knowledge, disciplinary episteme included), allows us, from an epistemological perspective, to develop systematic rules of knowledge development, especially of knowledge organization, and establish clear ontological-epistemological correspondence between what our knowledge is actually about and the inherent conceptual makeup of this knowledge. Subsequently, a system-based perspective makes it cognitively efficient to conceive things of interest, comprehend how they are and what they are about, and sustain related knowledge meaningfully in long-term memory. Systemic ontology and epistemology readily marry realism and rationalism in the sense many philosophers like Bachelard (1949) have argued for. It has often been argued that “we see the world through our conceptual lenses”, i.e., we make sense of what we perceive and we rationalize our perceptual experience and its outcomes using knowledge already retained in memory. According to Johnson-Laird (1983, p. 402), “our view of the world, is causally dependent both on the way the world is and on the way we are”, and, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 163), properties we attribute to physical objects “are not properties of objects in themselves but are, rather, interactional properties, based on the human perceptual apparatus, human conceptions of function, etc.”. Our knowledge of the world, according to Dewey (Archambault, 1964), is the result of transaction between physical realities (living and/or inert entities and phenomena, humans included) that exist in the real world independently of how we might perceive them and the conceptual realm of our human mind. Similarly, Bunge argues that empirical experience “is not a selfsubsistent object but a certain transaction between two or more concrete systems, at least one of which is the experient organism. Experience is always of somebody and of something” (Bunge, 1967, p. 162, italics added), and the resulting knowledge “is attained jointly by experience (in particular experiment) and by reason (in particular theorizing)” (Bunge, 1973, p. 170). As discussed in Chap. 3, the transaction involves inputs from both knower and known, and the resulting knowledge reflects not only the ontological reality of the known, but also the reality of the knower, in particular her or his perceptual landscape and conceptual realm and the underlying epistemology. Our systemic worldview is the ultimate outcome of the realism-rationalism marriage or transaction. The order in the universe (and in our human mind and

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brain as discussed in Chap. 3) reflected through patterns is a real order that is best manifested to us through real systems. However, the way we break the world around us and within us into systems, and particularly the way we set the boundaries of each system is a rational, human choice that we make to conveniently suit our needs. As illustrated in Tables 1.1, 1.2 and 1.4, all elements, properties, and relationships included in the constitution of each system are real. However, we have chosen those particular entities out of many other entities because we have rationally determined them to be primary, i.e., the ones relevant for the functions we are interested in. As such, entities are real, but the boundaries of each system are rationally—even artificially—set to suit our needs. To illustrate this point, let us quickly consider two earthly patterns, the day and night cycle and the ocean or sea tides discussed in Table 1.1. To explore the first pattern, it is enough for us to consider an isolated composite system consisting of the Earth and the Sun, or a simple system consisting of only the Earth with the Sun as the sole agent in its environment. Either way, we can come to realize that the day–night cycle is due to the rotation of the Earth around itself with sunlight reaching only around half of its surface at any time of the day. To explore the tides pattern, we further need to bring the Moon into the picture inside either system boundaries or outside in the environment. In all cases, the three astronomical objects are real, their interactions and behavior are real, and so are the systems they make up within the boundaries we delimit rationally. Systemism is in this sense a realist-rationalist worldview and mindset that establishes a powerful epistemological order into our conceptual realm that resonates well with the natural ontological order of the world around us and within us, especially within our human mind and brain. It systematically establishes viable correspondence between what our knowledge is about and what it consists of, and thus reasonable and propitious ontological-epistemological consonance between the known and the knower. This consonance can be made possible, even optimized, with the systematic exploration of the world and development of valid and reliable knowledge about this world in the form of conceptual systems using the systemic schema and other systemic tools and rules discussed later in this book. These systems, like those in the four tables presented in this chapter, can bring us into harmony with the world around us, especially our ecosystem, and, more importantly, they can help us through innovative deployment to make this world a constantly better world to live in, provided that we conduct ourselves constructively in accordance with values, ethics, and norms of substantial merits as discussed in Chap. 2.

1.4.6 Pedagogical Efficiency Along with the ontological and epistemological advantages discussed above, and somewhat because of these advantages, systemism comes with methodological

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advantages in all conceptual and practical respects, especially in education. These advantages are discussed at various points in the coming chapters. Let us at least point out quickly here how efficient knowledge construction and deployment can be when carried out with a systemic mindset. The aforementioned four tables are about systems from different disciplines all constructed with the same template, the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1. When disciplinary knowledge is taught and learned in the context of a limited set of coherent systems that are systematically constructed following templates like the systemic schema, it becomes easier for teachers (and all instructors7 ) to prepare and teach meaningful lessons, and for students to achieve, among others, the following: 1. To put individual realities (entities and events and their properties) and conceptions (concepts, laws, theorems, etc.) into appropriate real and conceptual contexts and relate different realities and conceptions in coherent and meaningful structures (systems). 2. To construct a coherent picture of materials offered in a given chapter and across chapters in a given course. 3. To compare and contrast systemically and systematically different disciplinary materials in a given course and different courses and appreciate the value of each within their own scope (the scope of individual systems and set of systems in a given discipline). 4. To compare and contrast systemically and systematically different disciplines and identify systemic ways for bridging them in certain respects. 5. To bring together (converge) different materials from the same or different disciplines and take advantage of the resulting synergy. That is how students and teachers alike can develop systemic mindsets that help them, in addition to the above, to come together from similar or different background to synergistically tackle issues of common interest. This goes for teachers of the same and different disciplines coming together in the same or different schools, as well as for students coming together from the same or different courses, of different competence levels, different interests, or different tracks or majors. It also goes for teachers and their students working systemically together. Such collective synergy is amplified when all concerned parties systematically approach issues with systemic tools and methodology in the manner discussed in Chaps. 4 and 5. As a consequence, teachers and students alike can: (a) better ask and answer usual questions and better define and solve usual problems, (b) come up with new questions and new problems, and with optimal ways for tackling them, (c) insightfully heed and efficiently accommodate more and more changes and meet more and more challenges, (d) think outside the box to come up with innovative ways for handling all these matters and more, and subsequently (e) be prepared to help individuals and communities in increasing numbers, issues, and quality.

7

See Footnote 1.

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Table 1.1 Partial systemic outline of Earth in the Sun-Moon environment Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks

Framework

Classical planetary theory stemming primarily from the works of Kepler and Newton

Scope

Constitution

Domain

The system partially outlined here refers to • Our planet Earth as part of our solar system • All possibly similar planets in the universe

Function

Description and explanation of many phenomena, including (for illustration purpose) but not limited to • Day and night • Seasons • Tides

Composition

For describing and explaining the three phenomena above • Earth can be considered, to a very good approximation, a “simple” spherical object the physical constituents of which may be ignored • Necessary (primary or relevant) properties include Earth mass (if gravitational forces need to be studied), its quasi-spherical shape, its axis of rotation, and its position at specific times relative to the Moon and Sun

Endo-structure • The inner structure (relations among its physical constituents) of Earth can be ignored when studying the considered phenomena • In 2022, the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted at an angle of about 23° 26' with respect to the normal to the plane of its elliptical orbit around the Sun (see the processes facet) • The tilt angle of the Earth’s axis of rotation constantly changes, though slightly, throughout the years Environment

• The primary agents of Earth (objects in its local environment that are relevant to and affect the phenomena of interest) that need to be considered are: Sun for the first two phenomena (day and night, seasons), and the Moon for the tides phenomenon. No other agents need to be considered. No global environment • Aside from their position relative to Earth, and only if gravitational forces need to be evaluated, the mass of each agent is the only intrinsic primary property to take into consideration

Exo-structure

• For the three considered phenomena, we only need to consider the actions on Earth of its agents, Sun and Moon, and not the reciprocal action of Earth on its agents • Kepler’s laws and Newton’s laws of mechanics govern the motion of all three celestial objects • The change of position, from day to night and from one day to another, of a given spot on Earth relative to the Sun and the Moon causes a change in the net gravitational interaction at this spot with the two agents (continued)

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Table 1.1 (continued) Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks for Earth in the Sun-Moon environment

Performance

Processes

Primary processes pertinent to the considered phenomena are respectively the Earth’s rotation around its axis (day and night), its elliptical orbit around the Sun, with attention to its inclined axis of rotation (seasons), and the Moon’s elliptical orbit around the Earth (tides) • Earth rotates around itself (around its virtual axis of rotation) once every almost 24 h, and its rotational motion is governed by Euler’s laws • Earth moves in an elliptical orbit, with the Sun at one of the foci, once every almost 365 days • The Moon orbits around Earth in an ellipse, with the Earth at one of the foci, once every almost 27 days (same period for the Moon rotation around itself) • The translational motion of Earth around the Sun and that of the Moon around Earth are governed by particular Kepler’s and Newton’s laws

Output

• The day–night cycle results from Earth rotation around its axis in front of the Sun • Because of the quasi-spherical shape of the Earth and the tilt of its axis of rotation, sunlight hits Earth at an angle of incidence that differs: (a) from one spot to another on Earth at a given time of a day, and (b) from day to day at a particular spot • The change of seasons in a given country results from the change, from day to day, of the angle of incidence of sunlight and not of the position of Earth relative to the Sun (Fig. 1.5) • Sea and ocean tides result from the differential gravitational attraction by the Moon on different points on Earth (which is more significant than that of the Sun)

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Fig. 1.5 Earth in the Sun-Moon environment. The three celestial bodies are loosely depicted to show their relative positions on two specific days of the year when Earth is closest to the Sun (3 January) and farthest away from it (4 July), and when, contrary to popular belief, the northern hemisphere is in its winter and summer seasons respectively. Note how the tilted axis of Earth rotation makes sunlight hit the northern hemisphere almost vertically on July 4 but not on January 3. The opposite is true in all respects for the southern hemisphere

Fig. 1.6 A systemic perspective of educational institutions. Interactions with reciprocal feedback and influences take place, individually and collectively, between all people within the institution as well as with all those concerned in the local environment. The institution is often affected by the global environment without necessarily having a significant reciprocal effect on that environment

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Table 1.2 Partial systemic outline of a school Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks

Framework

Systemic pedagogy and governance (Chaps. 4 and 5) whereby all dwellers (students, teachers, and all other personnel) work together (Fig. 1.6) with a hive mind, shared responsibility, and commitment to each other success. The governance serves a clearly defined national vision for education and development in accordance with well-defined policies

Scope

Domain

Any institution of formal education, from early childhood to post graduate education, whether for general education, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), or adult education, and whether for pre-service or in-service professional development

Function

Providing quality education that equitably empowers all learners with systemic profiles for self-fulfillment, lifelong learning, and excellence in life, and turns them into well-rounded, global citizens who live with and for a strong national identity and who can significantly and willingly contribute to sustainable development at the local and national levels

Constitution Composition

A school consists of • Learners/students • Instructors (teachers, professors, mentors …) and other learning agents (principal/dean, coordinators, and all other personnel) • Physical resources including the school premises, facilities, settings, and all sorts of equipment and learning means and devices (textbooks included)

Endo-structure All learning agents interact with each other and with students, and so do students with each other (Fig. 1.6), in accordance with research-based systemic, pedagogical and administrative tenets, principles, and rules that resonate with how human mind and brain are and work (Chaps. 3 and 4) and meet immediate and prospective needs and challenges of individuals, community, and the job market at large Environment

The local environment of a school consists of (Fig. 1.6) • Students’ parents/legal guardians • Public and private education authorities that are directly involved in the school daily operations • All educational and non-educational organisms and individuals in the local community with which the school is engaged in one form or another The global environment of a school includes, among others • Concerned governmental authorities, other than educational • Professional organizations in which learning agents are involved • Local and international organizations on which the school draws for various reasons • National and global factors that affect the socio-economic conditions of school dwellers and its local environment (continued)

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Table 1.2 (continued) Systemic dimension/facet

Sample school benchmarks

Constitution Exo-structure Learning agents and students under the guidance of agents interact systemically and systematically with their local and global environment to optimize the efficiency of all school operations and the reification of all outcomes, especially in relation to continuous development of students’ and agents’ systemic profiles Performance Processes

Output

All school operations are undertaken primarily to foster student experiential learning in the context of systemic dynamic curricula whereby learning, instruction, and assessment (more “as” and “for” learning than “of” learning) are carried out harmoniously in tandem, and in accordance with research corroborated pedagogical tenets, principles, and rules (Chap. 5) Students’ development of systemic profiles (Chap. 2) that empower each student for • Self-fulfillment, lifelong learning, and continuous success, even excellence, in all aspects of life • Genuine and effective care for the welfare of others and the ecosystem • Upholding and sustaining global citizenship with a strong national identity and pride • Significant contributions to sustainable local and national development Profiles in question have, among others, the following characteristics • Dynamic systemic traits with a widely acclaimed value system • Systemic, cross- or trans-disciplinary, twenty-first century competencies that are readily and successfully deployable in real life situations • Conscious metacognitive controls for turning every experience in daily life into an efficient learning (profile development) experience • Creative and constructive executive functions for making and successfully carrying out fair, just, and judicious decisions in all aspects of life • Insightful and critical axiological controls for the appreciation, accommodation, and support of significant and aesthetic accomplishments in arts, science, and all fields directly related to profile development and personal and collective welfare Learning agents’ continuous development of their professional profiles in line with, and to efficiently serve, the above purposes

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Table 1.3 Partial systemic outline of narrative texts Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks

Framework

Literary, linguistic and aesthetic, premises that govern the production of self-contained informative texts of interest to a specific audience or the general audience with a cohesive and coherent style Most of these premises underlie various types of texts. Some of them cut across many languages and cultures while others are dictated by local cultures and the semantic and syntactical principles and rules of the text language (and by the author worldview, ethics, agenda, and style)

Scope

Domain

Account of a real or fictional sequence of events that take place in particular spatiotemporal settings under a specific theme and including news, historical events, scientific events and discoveries, particular personal experiences, biographies, novels, children stories, folktales, etc.

Function

Description and explanation of events for (among others) • Informing, entertaining people, or developing their abstract thought • Spreading particular ideas (ecological, social, political, etc.) • Sustaining or changing certain situations • Commemorating certain people or events • Providing different perspectives on specific entities (people included) or events

Constitution Composition

Primary elements that are directly responsible of, or concerned with, the narrative theme and that include • Real and/or fictitious main characters and/or objects • Physical characteristics of objects and characters (bodily features, looks, attire, etc.) that relate significantly to the narrative theme • Characters’ personalities, psychological traits (temper, mood, attitudes, etc.), and motives and other driving factors that relate significantly to the narrative theme Appropriate terms are chosen to refer to all the above so as to reflect what the author actually intends to accomplish by focusing on certain elements and features and not others

Endo-structure Primary relations and reciprocal actions and influence among primary elements that reflect the plot and that include • Characters’ points of view and feelings about each other and about main objects • Characters’ behavior and the impact of their individual personalities • Possible conflicts among characters and/or respective conflict of interest regarding specific issues • Particular highlights through structural key features, clues, symbols Appropriate style and syntax are chosen to relate primary elements and reflect the above relationships in ways that serve the author purposes (continued)

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Table 1.3 (continued) Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks for narrative texts

Primary auxiliary elements (local and global) other than main Constitution Settings (environment) elements that contribute to the plot without being entirely part of it include • Characters and objects affected by, or somehow affecting, the course of events • Time frame, sphere of activity (social, economic, industrial, etc.), and social milieu • Physical background and atmosphere and surrounding circumstances • Emotional atmosphere or overall mood Appropriate terms are chosen to refer to all the above so as to reflect what the author actually intends to accomplish by focusing on certain elements and features and not others Context Primary relations and reciprocal actions and influence between (exo-structure) primary and auxiliary elements that affect the plot and that include • Auxiliary elements stance and behavior vis à vis each other and especially vis à vis main elements in relation to the plot • How various auxiliary elements set the overall context for the plot • Direct impact of auxiliary elements on main elements and vice versa Appropriate style and syntax are chosen to relate primary and auxiliary elements and reflect the overall context of the plot in ways that serve the author purposes Performance Processes

Presenting an account of events while • Following or not a standard format (e.g., exposition, complication, and resolution in story telling) • Following or not a straightforward storyline • Including or not dialogues among characters • Including or not graphical/pictorial representations • Reporting how each character/object evolves during the narrative time frame and the sequence of events with or without flashbacks • Reporting things while (or not) emphasizing particular individual and collective traits and features, and/or playing down others, to make a specific point • Making certain points explicitly while leaving others implicit to let the reader figure out (or not) specific things • Offering different perspectives/points of view • Using or not metaphorical discourse • Presenting things subjectively or objectively, with or without the author personal thoughts or feelings, with or without rhetoric • Addressing readers (or not) to engage them in specific ways in the interpretation of events (continued)

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Table 1.3 (continued) Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks for narrative texts

Performance Output

Readers are brought to (some or all of the following) • Be informed (or mis-informed and mislead) about the text theme and course of events • Raise their awareness about certain facts and issues (or make them encumbered with certain myths and fallacies) • Stir their imagination about certain topics • Be influenced in specific ways, intentionally or not • Take a stance and perhaps certain actions about particular situations • Be motivated to spread the word and raise other people awareness about what they have been told • Develop their language competencies

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Table 1.4 Partial outline of the Bohr’s model of the atom Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks

Framework

Bohr’s atomic theory: a mix of classical theory and old quantum theory The former includes Newtonian theory of mechanics and select aspects of the classical electromagnetic theory (namely Coulomb’s electrostatic interaction but not the radiant energy emitted by accelerated particles) The latter theory works in certain respects in contradiction with Schrodinger’s quantum theory (e.g., it assumes that electrons move in well-defined orbits), yet it works well to a very good approximation with the model referents

Scope

Domain

Hydrogen atom (H) and one-electron (hydrogen-like or hydrogenic) atoms/ions with small Z Model referents also include, though not to as good an approximation, alkali elements (Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs, Fr) in the same group with H The model applies throughout the universe that consists mostly of isolated hydrogen atoms

Function

Description and explanation of certain, but not other, aspects of a single electron bound to a significantly heavier nucleus (with small Z) on an assumed circular orbit, whether in a stable state or making discrete transition to certain other orbits of limited energy levels

Constitution Composition

A nucleus with one proton (hydrogen atom) or more (hydrogenic ions with small Z), and a single electron for hydrogen-like atoms Properties of interest include mass and quantized charge of the considered particles, as well as energy mostly of the electron

Endo-structure Classical interaction between the nucleus and the electron partially represented by a central (binding) Coulomb force, under the assumption of a fixed nucleus with a mass of about 2000 times that of the electron and a concentration of all positive charge Despite its acceleration, the electron does not radiate electromagnetic energy, and its total energy remains constant on stable orbits, the most stable orbit being at the ground level (energy level 1, energy value − 13.6 eV) The total energy of the electron is quantized in line with the quantization of its orbital angular momentum Environment

Isolated atom with no environment to consider when in stable condition, especially at the ground level Fields and neighboring atoms (local environment only) in the case of respectively orbit transition and atomic combinations to form molecules and other compounds and large matter structures

Exo-structure

No exo-structure for the isolated atom Interaction between a given hydrogen-like atom and other atoms it is combined with (compounds), or other types of environment (e.g., electromagnetic field) (continued)

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Table 1.4 (continued) Systemic dimension/facet

Sample benchmarks for the Bohr’s model of the atom

Performance Processes

When isolated or in stable condition, mostly classical state properties and laws describing the electron’s orbit around the nucleus are considered (e.g., velocity and Newtonian law of uniform circular motion) Otherwise, quantized energy levels would be needed under quantum theory

Output

Matter cohesion when interacting and bound with other atoms Energy absorption or emission when changing orbits/energy levels

Chapter 2

Systemic Profiles Habits and Traits for Excellence in Life

Contents 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Systemic Habits and Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Normative Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Systemic 4P Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.1 Progressive Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.2 Productive Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.3 Profound Episteme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.4 Principled Conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37 38 41 46 48 50 52 54 57

2.1 Introduction The value of any system is primarily determined by its output, its contributions to the good of its organs and whomever and whatever it is supposed to serve outside its composition. The output of prime concern in educational systems pertains to students in relation to everyday life. The value of any educational system cannot, and should not, be ascertained in terms of student performance on school, state, standardized, or high-stakes exams of any type and scale. Instead, it should be ascertained in terms of the overall exit profiles students graduate with and of how appropriate the profile of each graduate is for self-fulfillment, lifelong learning, and individual and collective welfare and prosperity. This chapter discusses what such a profile looks like from a systemic perspective. Global changes that began with the digital revolution in the late twentieth century and that continue to take place in this century at dazzling and dizzying pace demonstrate the futility of making passing traditional exams an end by itself in formal education and of encumbering students with a vast array of academic knowledge that is mostly good only for passing such exams. These changes, especially those imposed on various aspects of everyday life by the 2019 Corona virus pandemic, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. A. Halloun, Systemic Cognition and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3_2

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demonstrate the need to empower students of all educational forms and levels with powerful skills and dispositions for meaningful learning and efficient organization of any knowledge they might eventually need in life, and for creative and constructive knowledge deployment in new and unforeseen situations. These skills and disposition would be at the core of generic profiles for value-laden success in life and not just at school, and particularly for readily and constructively facing any challenge and adapting to any sudden and unprecedented change in any aspect of life. The idea of success in life is being approached from different perspectives with a variety of norms and standards for ascertaining the level of success. For instance, philosophers who approach it from an epistemological perspective focus on the conditions that allow people to develop valid, meaningful, and durable knowledge. Psychologists and educators who approach success from a cognitive and pedagogical perspective delineate the differences between experts (mostly experienced professors) and novices (students of different levels) in knowledge construction and deployment. Sociologists and economists who look for efficient practice in the workplace investigate the habits of accomplished professionals and/or identify habits that employers consider critical for success in the job market with a focus lately on the critical impact of one’s value system. Cognitive scientists and especially neuroscientists who look at how the brain is and works identify cerebral networks and processes concerned with particular thoughts and actions and those concerned with affects and values that govern our thoughts and actions and that can actually be conditioned to take us in productive and constructive directions. In this chapter, we look at the conditions of success, or rather excellence in life, from a normative perspective that allows us to spell out broad traits of systemic profiles that educators and educationists can take advantage of in curriculum design and deployment. The chapter comprises five sections. It begins with a common everyday life experience that provides a concrete context for our discussion in this and following chapters. Systemic competencies are subsequently discussed as the pedagogical vehicles for developing systemic habits of life at the core of systemic profiles. The idea of normative profiles is introduced in Sect. 2.4 and developed in the last section with systemic 4P profiles, i.e., profiles of systemic people with progressive mind, productive habits, profound episteme, and principled conduct.

2.2 Knowledge Dynamics Our knowledge is continuously put into practice in our daily lives, and it gets developed in the process. Any task we undertake engages some prior knowledge and brings about changes in this knowledge as well as possible addition of totally new knowledge. Task success and subsequent knowledge development depend on the state of required prior knowledge in a person’s memory and especially on the ease of access to this knowledge and the efficiency with which it can be retrieved from memory

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and deployed. All of these factors are determined by the person’s profile, particularly for us the broad traits or overall characteristics of the person’s entire repertoire of knowledge. To put things in context, let us consider one particular common experience, a grocery shopping experience. One day, you decide to go shopping in a new grocery store (a supermarket) you have never been to before. In the following, we highlight some main points that you go through during such an experience and that relate directly to our discussion in this chapter and beyond. You go inside the store with a shopping list in hand, and you discover that there are no signs marking the aisles content. Before you ask for assistance, you decide to figure out on your own the location of each item. Upon your entry, you find yourself in front of an aisle that contains, say, an item A in your list. You walk straight to the shelf that contains the item, pick it up, perhaps feel it and take a closer look at it to ensure that this is actually the item you are looking for. Once satisfied, you put the item in your shopping cart. Now you decide to look for an item B on your list that you “know”, from previous experience in other grocery stores, that it should be in the same or an adjacent aisle. In other words, you know that there is a “pattern” or a regularity in setting items A and B next or close to each other in all grocery stores. You then walk through that same aisle looking for item B. Should you not find it there, you go look for it in an adjacent aisle. The ease of access to any item depends on the “system” of this new store, i.e., its overall layout or floorplan, the way aisles and shelves are set and spread in the store, how items on a given shelf and in a given aisle relate to each other, how easy it is to get an item off its shelf, how easy to go from one aisle to another, etc. How convenient the system is for you depends primarily on the extent to which it follows the “patterns” you are used to for item distribution in familiar grocery stores. The closer those patterns are matched, the easier it will be for you to find what you are looking for. To put things into perspective for what follows, let us pinpoint major things you have to go through to find your way around the new store. As we do so, we will concentrate on things that are most critical for our discussion in this and subsequent chapters, introduce some technical terms of interest between quotation marks, and begin classifying the main types of knowledge we rely upon and develop in this or any other experience. 1. Once inside the store and decided to figure out your way around on your own, you go through a “process” that involves dynamics and skills of three types, namely: (a) perceiving, thus involving “sensory skills”, like looking around and seeing things, or feeling items in your hand and/or smelling them; (b) thinking, involving “reasoning skills”, like contemplating to hold a given item and then to keep it or not, to go look in another aisle, and so on until you come to conceive your own “conceptual image”, your own blueprint of specific aisles in the store and of the entire store;

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(c) acting or behaving (taking physical action), involving “motor skills”, like walking across aisles, pushing the shopping cart, lifting an item from its shelf, holding it for scrutiny, and putting it in the cart or returning it to the shelf. All dynamics and skills you deploy in such a process, whether spontaneous or deliberate, reflexive or reflective, are part of what we call “process knowledge” or “procedural knowledge”. 2. In all three dynamics above, you rely on (and develop) prior “content knowledge” or “epistemic knowledge” (from “episteme”), often referred to in the literature as “declarative knowledge”. This type of knowledge includes facts you already know about items you had on your list like item categories and types (e.g., produce or meat in the food category, laundry or dishwashing in the detergent category), brand names, specifications or norms and standards that satisfy you about every item, layout of grocery stores you are familiar with, and many other ideas and information you already have about grocery stores and shopping. 3. Your entire shopping experience at the new store is governed by some emotions and other “affective” factors that make you feel at ease or not, satisfied or not with your experience. It is also governed by some values and other “axiological” (value and utility related) factors which, combined with the affective factors, bring you at the end to like the store or not, and to judge whether or not it is worth going back to in the future. All such factors make up together what we call “axio-affective knowledge”. We do refer to axiological and affective factors as “knowledge” despite the fact that some affective factors like fear and rage are instinctive and innate. For, as we shall see in Chap. 3, we can actually “learn” through personal experience how to instill and develop some of these factors, and how to control, change, and develop innate others. “Metacognitive controls” that govern any learning experience we go through are part of axio-affective knowledge. They govern, among others, the decision to pay attention or not to a given perceived object or event, e.g., a teacher lecture or a new item on the shelves of a grocery store, rely on particular prior content or process knowledge, and “deploy” such knowledge, i.e., use it or put it into action one way or another in order to bring about specific ends to a specific level of success and satisfaction. All in all, and like any other experience in life, the above shopping experience involves two complementary processes. The first process is about successfully achieving certain task(s), in this case, acquiring certain grocery items, and the second is a “learning” process, a process of developing one’s own knowledge related to the tasks in question, namely here about the particular store you have visited and grocery shopping in general. In this chapter, we concentrate on what it takes to achieve the first process in any experience to the best level of success and satisfaction possible. In particular, we concentrate on how task-oriented knowledge can be organized and deployed to bring about an overall person’s profile for value-laden success in life. The second process, learning and how such knowledge can be developed (reinforced, changed, elaborated, built upon, etc.), makes the object of the following chapters.

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2.3 Systemic Habits and Competencies The three types of knowledge distinguished above, procedural, epistemic, and axioaffective, can be rearranged and grouped in different categories, including cognitive and behavioral knowledge. Cognitive knowledge pertains to thinking dynamics. It involves predominantly reasoning skills necessary to complete certain tasks, along with epistemic knowledge (content or declarative knowledge), axio-affective knowledge (values, ethics, emotions, dispositions), and sensorimotor knowledge mostly as auxiliary (e.g., to read a text or to express what you are thinking about verbally or graphically, handwriting included). Behavioral knowledge pertains to physical action. It involves predominantly sensory and motor skills (or sensorimotor skills) along with necessary reasoning skills, axio-affective knowledge, and epistemic knowledge. For example, reading this text and interpreting it requires cognitive knowledge, whereas going to pick up, say, a dictionary or a related reference book from a bookshelf requires behavioral knowledge. Similarly, moving around a grocery store to pick up certain items requires behavioral knowledge, whereas deciding to go to a given aisle or to keep an item or not after locating it in the store requires cognitive knowledge. At early stages of knowledge development, any type of knowledge is stored temporarily in short-term memory as discussed in the next chapter. After a series of successful deployment, and also as discussed in that chapter, knowledge may get sufficiently reinforced to become permanently sustained in long-term memory. Furthermore, and after continuous successful deployment, one becomes able to deploy sustained knowledge almost spontaneously and intuitively without significant cognitive processing. We say then that knowledge deployment turns into habit. For example, when you learn swimming, riding a bike, or driving a car, you have at first to think carefully about each move you need to make to complete such behavioral tasks successfully. After enough practice, you become able to complete these tasks spontaneously, and almost reflexively, with little thinking, if any. Similarly, after shopping enough times at the same grocery store, you will readily find your way through to acquire various items on your shopping list, and you do so in a certain sequence you are used to, i.e., in a pattern of picking up items in a given order. Your behavior then turns into a habit in each case, and more specifically a behavioral habit or a habit of conduct. The same happens with cognitive knowledge that you come to successfully deploy with little conscious effort. Such knowledge then turns into a cognitive habit or a habit of mind. For example, after repeatedly using the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1 successfully in identifying and defining systems, you will get into the habit of looking at any set of connected entities that serve specific purposes as systems of specific constitution and performance within specific scope under specific framework. You would then develop a systemic habit of mind which would eventually help you sustain a systemic mindset! The ultimate goal of education is to turn cognitive and behavioral knowledge that one learns under specific conditions into habits of life, i.e., habits for thinking and conducting oneself in everyday life. Our call is to further turn these habits into

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systemic habits. For either type of knowledge to turn into a habit in educational contexts, learners should be purposely and repeatedly engaged in meaningful tasks that are related to everyday life and that are carefully designed to turn certain knowledge clusters into particular habits of life. Our daily lives usually involve practical tasks, like grocery shopping, each of which requires a specific mix of both cognitive and behavioral knowledge that makes up what we call a competency. A competency consists of cognitive and behavioral knowledge necessary to successfully achieve a particular type of tasks like grocery shopping, riding a bicycle, writing an announcement about particular events, writing a report about an event or about a particular type of experiments, solving a particular type of problems, assembling a particular piece of furniture or a particular type of electric circuits. In other words, a competency consists of epistemic knowledge, procedural knowledge (reasoning and/or sensorimotor skills), and axio-affective knowledge (points 1, 2, 3 in the preceding section) necessary to achieve certain similar tasks. A competency is what it takes to successfully achieve those tasks from the perspective of concerned experts. It can, and should, then be defined ahead of time by those experts, especially those in communities of practice, so that educators (primarily, curriculum and curriculum materials developers and instructors1 ) design and mediate appropriate learning experiences for target learners to develop the competency and eventually turn it into a habit of life. A competency has a mix of specific and generic epistemic and procedural knowledge, in addition to axio-affective knowledge that is or that can be turned into generic knowledge. In formal education, whether general or technical and vocational (or career and technical, CTE), specific knowledge usually pertains to a particular discipline or even to a particular branch in a given discipline (e.g., the branches of optometry and radiology in health care, dance and music in performing arts, semantics and syntax in linguistics, algebra and geometry in mathematics, classical mechanics and electrodynamics in physics, and ontology and epistemology in philosophy). In contrast, generic knowledge cuts across different branches in a given discipline, different disciplines in a given field (e.g., nursing and medical diagnostics in health sciences, performing and graphic arts, physics and biology in natural sciences, language and philosophy in humanities), or even in different fields. Generic knowledge helps transferring specific knowledge into new domains (within the same branch, discipline, or field), and thus extrapolating existing competencies into new domains and building upon them for the development of all new competencies. Every community of practice (CoP), whether vocational, artistic, cultural, social, recreational, or else, is characterized with a set of competencies. A given CoP competency includes specific epistemic and procedural knowledge that is mostly particular to that CoP, as well as generic knowledge that may be common, at least in some respects, to many CoPs. Some professional communities, beginning with those concerned with health care back in the middle of the twentieth century, have formally defined limited sets of competencies that are indispensable to perform various tasks

1

See Footnote 1 in Chap. 1.

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in their respective professions. Competency-based education emerged as a consequence to design and implement appropriate pre-service tertiary education curricula and in-service continuous professional development programs for professionals in those particular communities. National and local attempts followed in many parts of the globe, with different levels of success, to extrapolate the process to primary and secondary education. We do not hereby subscribe to the pedagogical philosophy (paradigms) of any of those attempts, and we do not promote any form of competency-based education. Our interest in competencies is related to their instrumental utility for developing habits of life, and particularly for organizing all sorts of knowledge in practical systemic clusters that efficiently contribute to systemic profile development under systemic pedagogical frameworks and in the context of systemic curricula as discussed in the following chapters. A competency in formal education is, for us, a system of cognitive and behavioral knowledge required to accomplish certain tasks that fall within the limited scope of a particular branch of a given discipline (we may then speak of a specific competency) or that cut across different branches and, possibly, different disciplines in the same or different fields, and that students can readily transfer from one branch to another or from one discipline to another (we may then speak of a generic competency). Students who master a specific competency can successfully: (a) carry out specific tasks in familiar real or conceptual contexts, and (b) transfer what they have learned in the process to new tasks involving similar objects and/or events in similar contexts. In contrast, students who master a generic competency can successfully: (a) carry out a variety of tasks, in familiar and novel real or conceptual contexts, and (b) transfer what they have learned to new tasks involving similar and different objects and/or events, in a variety of familiar, similar, and novel contexts. Table 2.1 provides a partial outline of a generic systemic competency for investigating any situation (Sect. 1.3 and Fig. 1.4). The competency can be gradually developed beginning as a specific subsidiary competency for investigating a particular category of situations that fall within the domain of a particular CoP or academic discipline, e.g., a social event in the context of a social study or journalism course, or a natural event or laboratory experiment in the context of a science or engineering course. It can subsequently be further developed in a variety of contexts that make the object of the same and different CoPs or courses. The competency in question is partially outlined in the table in terms of investigative procedures and the deployment of some major cognitive and behavioral knowledge they entail. These procedures go from the exploration (survey and analysis stages) of a situation of interest to a redesign or re-making of that situation (formulation stage) in ways to viably come up with necessary conclusions (Sect. 1.3) and draw cognitive and practical implications within and beyond the scope of the competency in question and of any situation in which it may be deployed, all under an appropriate systemic framework. All procedures in Table 2.1, like in any other competency, are constantly subject to evaluation and regulation along the lines of Fig. 1.3.

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For optimal efficiency, we advocate systemic competencies, i.e., competencies that are originally developed for the construction and deployment of particular systems and that subsequently enable us to approach any task with a systemic mindset. Systemic competencies are predominantly generic in the sense that they allow us: (a) conceive or even reconstruct all entities that a task is about as systems or parts of Table 2.1 Partial outline of a systemic investigation competency Procedure

Declarative and procedural knowledge in action

Axio-affective knowledge

Throughout any investigation, the investigator Sticks to high ethics and codes of conduct Maintains an open and critical mind, and keeps evaluating and regulating every thought and action Looks at things from different perspectives, and puts self in the shoes of other people involved in the situation whenever appropriate Considers the repercussions of any action on every person The situation at hand is Analysis or situation deconstruction (system analyzed (deconstructed) into and on other elements in the situation, and avoids any bad composition and environment) elements (physical and/or conceptual entities and events impact of any sort on any of or processes, along with their them Perseveres in carrying out properties) distinguished as every step to its fruitful ends primary and secondary in Remains objective, and avoids relation to what needs to be accomplished in that situation any sort of bias in drawing any conclusion … and in accordance with appropriate norms and criteria implied by the framework. Only primary elements and their primary properties are retained for consideration in further actions, and appropriate concepts are chosen to refer to any retained primary physical element and property Appropriate physical tools are chosen and used, if necessary, to safely and precisely discern primary elements and measure their primary properties Survey and framework specification

Any situation under investigation is quickly surveyed at first in order to determine physical and/or conceptual entities of concern, along with events or processes they are part of, in order to specify an appropriate systemic framework, implied by or derived from particular professional paradigm(s), under which to carry out the investigation and draw appropriate implications

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Procedure

Declarative and procedural knowledge in action

Formulation or situation reconstruction (system structure)

Appropriate conceptions (e.g., laws and principles) are chosen to establish conceptual connections among all primary elements (and their primary properties) as part of the constitution of appropriate conceptual system(s) in terms of which the situation is conceptually reconstructed, and to process those systems to bring about desired output If necessary and possible, primary elements and connections are reified or put together in the form of physical artifacts (prototypes or models) that can be processed or operated adequately enough to come out with proper conclusions about the situation under investigation

Depiction and operation tools

The constitution of conceptual systems made up of chosen primary entities and connections is depicted with appropriate representations (e.g., pictures, diagrams, graphs, mathematical formulas), if necessary, and appropriate operators (e.g., scientific and mathematical) are chosen to adequately process those systems conceptually If necessary and possible, digital systems may be resorted to with appropriate computer simulations

Processing (system performance)

Conceptual (graphical representations included), physical, and/or digital systems are duly processed in accordance with appropriate laws and rules (and safety precautions wherever needed) in order to allow proper description and explanation of the situation

Axio-affective knowledge

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Procedure

Declarative and procedural knowledge in action

Conclusions

Results are obtained (system See above output), and factual, inferential, and/or judgmental conclusions are made as mandated by the situation (Fig. 1.4)

Interpretation and extrapolation

Results are properly interpreted regarding the situation at hand and in accordance with the chosen framework, and extrapolated, if necessary, beyond the scope of that situation

Systemic synthesis

Lessons are drawn regarding the entire investigation and the competency it entails; invoked and related prior cognitive and behavioral knowledge is regulated and elaborated as necessary, conceptual systems/models included; newly developed knowledge is systemically integrated with prior knowledge; concerned habits and entire profile are regulated and transformed accordingly

Axio-affective knowledge

systems delineated in accordance with the systemic schema and scheme of Figs. 1.1 and 1.3 respectively, and in the manner outlined in Table 2.1 and the four tables presented in Chap. 1, and (b) carry out all endeavors as systemic endeavors (Figs. 1.3 and 1.4) in the manner described in Chaps. 4 and 5. As such, systemic competencies are well disposed to turn into systemic habits of life in a person’s systemic profile.

2.4 Normative Profiles The idea of a profile as a set of particular personality traits that drive or determine a person’s performance in specific jobs, or behavior in certain situations, has long been of interest to psychologists and cognitive scientists. In parallel, some philosophers, especially philosophers of science, have turned their interest to discipline-related types of profiles. For instance, Bachelard (1940) introduced the notion of an “epistemological profile” as the set of ideas a given person might hold in relation to a given concept. In particular, Bachelard argued that, when it comes to learning science, each person holds a specific epistemological profile regarding every scientific concept, a profile that consists of a mix of scientific and intuitive, non-scientific ideas that are at different levels of maturity and that may complement or contradict each other in various respects.

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Mortimer developed Bachelard’s notion into what he called a “conceptual profile” (Mortimer, 1995; Mortimer & El-Hani, 2014). According to Mortimer, “the problem of generating new meanings in science teaching is framed [within the context of conceptual profiles] in terms of the interplay between modes of thinking and ways of speaking”. In this respect, “conceptual profiles are models of different modes of seeing and conceptualizing the world used by individuals to signify their experience. They are built for a given concept and are constituted by several zones, each representing a particular mode of thinking about that concept, related to a particular way of speaking” (El-Hani et al., 2015). In an attempt to bring together the works of Bachelard and Mortimer on epistemological and conceptual profiles, along with the work of Kuhn (1970) on scientific paradigms, this author had once advanced in science education the idea of a “paradigmatic profile” that pertains not to a particular concept but to a set of paradigms. “A given conception (concept, law or any other theoretical statement) may be confined to a single paradigm, or it may have different alternatives distributed across different paradigms … that may or may not be compatible with one another and with scientific paradigms. Various components of a paradigmatic profile may be at different levels of maturity and complexity depending on the individual’s personal experience” (Halloun, 2004/6, 2007). A broader, comprehensive idea of a person’s profile is hereby proposed to pertain to general habits of life and not to personality in the psychological sense, nor to a particular field or discipline in the academic sense, and certainly not to what is referred to in the literature as behavioral or learning styles. More specifically, our profile is about considerable general traits of a person’s habits of life, i.e., about dominant characteristics that prevail across various habits and that turn them into enduring constructive patterns of success in thought and action once completing a certain level of education. The profile may thus be termed as a graduate’s profile. Cognitive and educational research shows that, despite distinguishing features among various fields (professional careers and CoPs included): (a) there are patterns in the processes of knowledge construction and deployment among experts in different fields, and that (b) these patterns significantly contribute to the success of these experts in their respective fields and to the success of any person who embodies them in various aspects of everyday life.2 Employers in different sectors have always been looking for such patterns in the profile of their employees. However, they have been lately increasingly complaining that job applicants, even those with the solicited university degrees, fall short of demonstrating these patterns (Brennan et al., 2014; Council for Aid to Education, 2014; Hart Research Associates, 2013, 2015). This should come to no surprise because the patterns in question are not innate, and require purposeful and systematic training to be developed. Yet they are being seldom targeted expressly in applicants’ education. Those patterns are at the core of systemic profiles we are advocating. 2

See Footnotes 3 and 4 in Chap. 1.

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Systemic profiles are not about any particular field as already mentioned, and not about any particular content or context-related knowledge. They are of universal normative and qualitative nature. They specify cross-cutting quality norms or standards that knowledge construction and deployment should meet in any field in order to succeed constructively in that field and various aspects of life, education and work included. In particular, these are norms that various graduates’ profiles should meet so that learners may be empowered upon completion of their education to turn into committed and satisfied citizens who thrive, individually and collectively, with fulfilling career and life, and who can significantly contribute to the welfare of the world around them and thus to sustainable development of their communities and nations, while upholding widely esteemed values and ethics. The norms in question have been derived from the aforementioned research about constructive success in a variety of fields, and especially comparative research between experts, i.e., accomplished professionals in education and other professional communities, and novices, i.e., students, apprentices and other ordinary people with little or no experience in specific domains. Before we go any further with our discussion, it is important to mention here that systemic profiles are not a one-size fits all profiles as will hopefully become evident by the end of our discussion. They are graduates’ normative profiles defined in terms of broad desirable traits for various habits of life. Habits details are particular to every person, and competencies needed to develop them are defined or supposed to be defined by concerned experts. Concerned decision makers and developers of curricula and curriculum materials are then supposed to make appropriate choices about their detailed programs of study and various means and methods of learning and instruction, assessment included. As they do so, they should recognize and respect cognitive and behavioral differences among learners and help them make and pursue informed decisions about the educational tracks and majors that suit best learners’ individual interests and life and career aspirations.

2.5 Systemic 4P Profiles Systemic profiles are the profiles of people with systemic worldviews and mindsets. At the core of each person’s profile are systemic habits of life that commonly meet four general norms or traits that qualify the profile as a 4P profile. A 4P profile is a dynamic, constantly evolving profile characterized with progressive mind, productive habits, profound knowledge, and principled conduct (Fig. 2.1): Progressive mind refers to an overall systemic and dynamic mindset with clear vision and critical and insightful commitment to empower oneself and others for self-determination and continuous progress in various aspects of life. Productive habits refer to sustained systemic efficient skills and dispositions for wise resourcing and systematic, orderly, and innovative engagement in any individual or collective endeavor and for overall sound conduct in everyday life.

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Fig. 2.1 4P profiles

Profound episteme refers to a rich cohesive corpus of content knowledge focused in any field on generic epistemic essentials that readily lend themselves to practical aspects in the field and to coherence and consistency within and among different fields. Principled conduct refers to constant value-laden drive for beneficiary outcomes that come about in accordance with righteous and constructive individual and collective stance and aspirations and in aesthetic harmony with local and global natural and social orders. Interested readers may readily notice that the four traits somewhat cover the four philosophical dimensions: ontology (state of the mind), epistemology (what content knowledge is about and how it is structured), methodology (what process knowledge is about and for), and axiology (the value and merits of knowledge and the ethics governing its development and use). As already noted above, the four P’s are not absolute traits of a “one-size fits all” profile. They are universal “qualifiers” or “attributes” of distinct individual profiles that reliable research in cognitive science has constantly proven to be necessary for success—and excellence—in any aspect of life and in any era, especially our current era. The 4P’s are further detailed in the following with the acknowledgement and respect of individual and collective differences in all respects while we strive to find common grounds on which different individuals and groups of people can join minds and hands for individual and collective welfare and continuous development. We hereby also acknowledge that the seven sub-attributes or traits associated with

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each P do not necessarily cover all major attributes one might aspire and look for, and that it takes conscious and serious effort, with significant guidance, to develop these and other attributes to one’s own satisfaction. For all these reasons and more, systemic profiles like 4P profiles need to be the prime concern of formal education.

2.5.1 Progressive Mind Our human brain is plastic in the sense that its neural networks can evolve throughout our entire lives, thus enabling us of lifelong learning and of continuously developing our cognitive and behavioral knowledge (Sect. 3.3). People with systemic profiles take full advantage of brain plasticity to enjoy progressive minds that allow them to: (a) continuously regulate, enhance, expand and optimize their entire knowledge, and particularly their systemic competencies and subsequent habits of life, (b) anticipate, heed, and successfully meet individual and collective needs and challenges, and (c) constantly engage with others and the physical world for constructive changes in the conditions of life and the ecosystem locally and globally. Plasticity is a natural innate quality of human brain that makes it possible to develop progressive minds. However, progressiveness along the lines just mentioned and further elaborated below is not innate and not quite intuitive. It is a conscious choice that individuals have to make to deliberately take their overall mind state in the specified direction. In particular, it is about developing constructive and dynamic dispositions and other axio-affective controls to induce continuously insightful evolution of our cognitive and behavioral knowledge and consolidation of the other three traits, productivity, profoundness, and principled conduct. To these ends and more, a person with a systemic 4P profile strives for a progressive mind that makes the person visionary, curious, critical, insightful, proactive, hardy, and autonomous. Visionary. The person holds a clear and realistic vision for individual and collective progress; carries every mental or physical act, as reasonably possible, in light of that vision and under systemic paradigms; sets reasonable targets and priorities, and organizes and plans personal life accordingly; focuses more on long-term than short-term plans and prospects, and more on generic than specific ideas and practices; attempts to foresee how current local and global realities might evolve and develops habits and competencies so as to be able to readily adapt to such or any unforeseen evolution. Curious. The person continuously seeks prospects for profile development; is ambitious and looks constantly for propitious experiences with dedication to excellence and lifelong learning; is never content with any level of achievement, and attempts to take any experience in new directions for continuously better output; looks at any situation from different perspectives; thinks outside the box, asks new questions and defines new problems and tackles them in innovative ways; enquires about worthy ideas and practices; tries willingly new ideas, products, and processes, and ascertains their merits for personal and collective welfare.

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Critical. The person constantly reflects on, and regulates, personal profile to meet the set vision; relies on objective criteria to ascertain any reality and the viability of any idea; does not accept anything at face value or because it was handed down by an authority; does not blindly conform to prevalent norms or popular ideas, and stays ready to diverge from conventional paths if necessary; gives every reality and idea the merits they actually deserve with the diligence to detect and address possible flaws or drawbacks; knows how to differentiate between primary and secondary features and procedures and how to take full advantage of the former. Insightful. The person constantly revisits the vision and refines it if necessary in light of new experience and emerging new realities; plans things carefully to meet clear objectives under systemic frameworks, and carries out any plan systematically and with continuous evaluation and regulation; focuses attention on worthy aspects; strives to engage innovatively in any experience and to come up with, and reify original ideas with significantly added value and constructive practical implications; draws essential lessons regarding personal and collective strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis); appreciates and tolerates divergent points of view and puts self in the shoes of others to understand their perspectives and objectively weighs their merits. Proactive. The person is forthcoming and foresightful; takes the initiative to tackle head-on individual and collective issues; cares about the welfare of others and helps empowering them, like oneself, for success, even excellence in life; is always ready to adapt and help others adapt to new circumstances of any nature, and does so actively and constructively, not by resigning to what these circumstances might entail, but by attempting to adapt those circumstances to individual and collective needs if necessary; prevents any personal, collective, and ecological harm; seeks others’ ideas intentionally, listens to them carefully, and negotiates them respectfully; communicates own ideas clearly, convincingly, and assertively. Hardy. The person engages in any experience with audacity and determination to bring it to optimal ends, with the highest quality standards possible; gives neither in to threats and challenges nor up before obstacles and failures; takes reasonable and calculated risk; sees in competitions opportunities to prove self and come up with original innovative ideas; engages in any endeavor with passion, enthusiasm, grit, tenacity, and perseverance, but knows when to let go and change direction; is resilient and bounces back from failures hardened and more determined to pursue what s/he is after. Autonomous. The person considers self as the main locus of control of every mental or physical act s/he is engaged in; strives for success in any task for personal satisfaction more than for satisfying others or fulfilling enforced requirements; considers every experience a learning experience, and assumes ownership of that experience; looks at, and for, more knowledgeable or competent others as reliable resources for individual and collective empowerment and fulfillment. Progressive mind with the above desired traits and characteristics may not look at first that straightforward in content or feasibility. However, careful analysis of what these characteristics are about, and of how crucial they are for raising systemic

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citizens committed to continuously improving the conditions of their own lives and the lives of others, allows us to realize how worthy it is to make such characteristics an integral part of any educational effort, and especially to transcend traditional, authoritative pedagogical myths and traditions in this direction. Conventional instruction of lecture and demonstration that asks for learners to be obedient listeners and to conform blindly to educational systems and traditions cannot help develop progressive minds. Such trends risk to bring about bottled up rebels who would unleash their frustration in destructive ways, the least of which being discouragement from pursuing meaningful learning and bullying classmates. For a start, we need to provide learners with a truly systemic learning environment whereby they can freely express themselves, be heard respectfully, and critically engage with others, instructors and classmates included, in two-way communication and interactive collective work within and outside classroom and school boundaries.

2.5.2 Productive Habits Brain plasticity is complemented with brain efficiency, namely the brain predisposition to connect different cerebral parts concerned with different types of knowledge and to reinforce connections and make them accessible and ready for efficacious deployment (Sect. 3.6). The entire process, from the creation of knowledge networks to their deployment and subsequent reinforcement, requires repetitive mental and physical acts that a person needs to undertake consciously and deliberately. With due systematic effort, cognitive and behavioral knowledge can be consolidated and internalized enough to turn into habits of life. The more fruitful these efforts are, the more likely they are to bring about the habits in question. Knowledge of all sorts and subsequently habits can be either reproductive or productive. Reproductive habits (and knowledge) usually come with rules of thumb developed through trial and error, and can make us succeed only in situations that we are familiar with or that are similar to such situations, situations that usually make in education the object of a particular field, discipline, or even a branch of a discipline. Such habits cannot serve us readily in unfamiliar and dissimilar situations, especially not when these situations are the object of a different field or discipline. In contrast, productive habits are usually developed systematically following welldefined paradigmatic rules, can readily serve us in all sorts of situations, whether familiar or not, similar to familiar ones or not, and being or not the object of the same field or discipline, and they allow us far more than reproductive habits to be innovative (creative and inventive in the sense discussed in Sect. 1.3). All in all, a person with a systemic 4P profile develops predominantly systemic, productive habits so as to become systematic, orderly, innovative, efficient, a team player, resourceful, and wholesome.

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Systematic. The person relies constantly, and almost intuitively, on the same viable (realistic, valid, reliable, useful, efficacious, affordable, feasible, reasonable, unambiguous, harmless, dynamically sustainable, etc.) and systemic paradigms in all thoughts and actions; adopts and/or develops generic schemes and schemata for systemic learning, and particularly for the development of generic, systemic competencies; avoids rules of thumb and trial and error, and develops instead systemic, generic schemes and schemata for tackling any conceptual or physical endeavor; works purposely on transferring knowledge to new contexts related to a variety of disciplines and fields; sets ahead of time clear and reasonable criteria and related benchmarks for any evaluation and regulation purpose. Orderly. The person seeks and works for order in the real and conceptual worlds; respects and works to strengthen the natural and prolific order in social and ecological systems; concentrates on structural and behavioral patterns in both worlds; strives to understand and work for what brings real and conceptual entities together and circumvent what sets them apart without denying or demeaning their distinctive aspects; organizes personal knowledge coherently and deploys it consistently in accordance with generic schemata and schemes mostly as part of systemic competencies; seeks coherence and consistency to the extent of convergence within and across different disciplines and fields; cares as much about the big picture as about the details in any situation and any disciplinary knowledge. Innovative. The person strives to think outside the box; extrapolates any achievement beyond its original scope; seeks creative ways to answer questions and solve problems; develops imagination in the direction of inventing new entities and processes for tackling existing and potential issues and improving individual and collective life conditions; knows when and how to transcend traditional ideas and practices and divert in unventured directions; approaches any challenge or difficulty as an opportunity for profile development and for coming up with and reifying innovative ideas. Efficient. The person is well-organized; sets priorities and manages time properly; constantly looks for patterns in both the conceptual realm and the physical world; concentrates more on generic than on specific organizations and procedures, relies systemically on generic schemes and schemata mostly as part of systemic competencies, and attempts consistently to transfer knowledge from one context or discipline to another; carefully plans ahead any task and carries it accordingly, but insightfully with the readiness to change plans and improvise if necessary; tackles any situation from different perspectives and in different ways whenever feasible; avoids redundancies and distraction in any thought or action; takes short cuts only when reasonable and not at the detriment of quality; sets reasonably high-quality standards for every endeavor. Team player. The person readily cooperates or collaborates with others for improving personal and collective efficiency and developing own and others’ profiles; engages with others with respect and open-mindedness, and with readiness to reconsider and regulate own ideas and practices and help others do the same; assumes truly systemic, two-way interaction with others, with the spirit of

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interdependence, and with fair task distribution and shared responsibility; synergizes teamwork with a win-win spirit, helps steering it in advantageous directions, and assumes team leadership whenever necessary. Resourceful. The person constantly seeks and shares willingly with others best practices and innovative ideas; seeks critically new viable resources for lifelong learning and continuous professional development; joins to this end appropriate communities of practice (CoPs); develops efficient and systematic means and methods to log and access needed resources; knows how to make the best of available resources and how to take advantage of them in the most efficient, and perhaps innovative ways possible where applicable; knows when and how to develop new resources individually and jointly with others; makes wise and enlightened use and no abuse of any resource, particularly digital technology; lends a hand to others whenever necessary. Wholesome. The person is aware that existence and personal identity can only be and flourish as active member of social and ecological systems; realizes how significantly one’s profile depends on emotional and physical sanity and on sound interaction with others and the world around us; maintains physical fitness through adequate diet, exercise, and good sleep among others; sustains constructive emotions and social relationships; engages actively in CoPs of all sorts; opens up for diverse perspectives for enrichment and empowerment, especially to face challenges and conflicts that inflict universal threats on individuals, communities, and the ecosystem at large. No habits are innate. All habits, good and bad, but particularly productive systemic habits, require diligent effort to be developed and sustained in a person’s profile. Productive habits can best be developed in educational settings through systemic competencies. Once a given competency is well-defined by concerned experts (Table 2.1), learners can be properly engaged to develop that competency and reinforce it gradually until they master it and internalize it well enough to play it out almost intuitively. Like in the case of progressive minds, systemic competencies and their evolution into productive habits cannot be realized under traditional conveyorbelt pedagogy. As discussed in Chap. 4, experiential learning is required instead within systemic learning ecologies, and under systemic pedagogical frameworks that conform to, and build upon, how the human mind and brain are and work particularly in the cognitive respects discussed in the next chapter.

2.5.3 Profound Episteme Epistemic knowledge, i.e., content or declarative knowledge (Sect. 2.2), of any person is structured primarily in terms of and around a set of conceptions (concepts and relationships among concepts) that constitute the vehicle of our thoughts, and that determine to a large extent how progressive our mind and how productive our habits can be. At the early stages of their inception, procedural knowledge and axio-affective

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knowledge are context-dependent and developed in the context of concrete, epistemic knowledge (Sects. 3.5 and 3.6). As we master the former two types of knowledge to the point of turning them into habits or parts of habits, we can gradually dissociate from the original epistemic context and deploy them, and further develop them, in any new concrete or abstract context. The better the original epistemic context is structured, especially in systemic form, the better other types of knowledge can be developed in its context, and the better it contributes to the formation of appropriate competencies and subsequent habits. Different professions and CoPs, and especially when about academic fields and disciplines, are usually distinguished more by their episteme, the coherent and cohesive corpus of their epistemic knowledge, than by their procedural and axio-affective knowledge. This is especially true when it comes to different disciplines in the same field. Disciplinary episteme includes factual and conceptual knowledge. Factual knowledge, as mentioned above in Sect. 2.2, consists of viable information pertaining to the real world, humans included. Conceptual knowledge consists of all sorts of conceptions that we invent to represent factual knowledge and/or to help us think and communicate with each other in abstract terms. People with systemic profiles, like accomplished experts in various professions,3 go deep into a small but powerful corpus of conceptual knowledge and do not spread thin across a vast array of such knowledge. They concentrate on epistemic patterns and rely systematically on generic schemata and schemes for in-depth development of fundamental and generic conceptions that can be readily deployed to construct other conceptions, that provide the firm cement of the desired episteme, and that constitute efficient vehicles of thought for the development of progressive minds, productive habits, and principled conduct. To these ends and more, a person with a systemic 4P profile strives in the development of profound episteme to be astute, articulate, coherent, balanced, diversified, convergent, and wholistic. Astute. The person relies systematically on systemic epistemology in the development of epistemic knowledge; concentrates in any corpus of epistemic knowledge on generic conceptions (concepts and connections among concepts); tries to make the best of any conception and to use it as innovatively as possible in any endeavor; critically analyzes any situation to tease out primary from secondary epistemic aspects, and concentrates on primary aspects to make sense of that situation and insightfully relate newly drawn conceptions to old conceptions; clears out any noise, redundancy, and discrepancy with and within prior conceptions. Articulate. The person systematically develops and deploys any conception in accordance with systemic schemata and schemes, and realizes that conceptions gain their significance in systemic structures; associates clear and efficient semantic and syntactic rules with any conception; tries, to the extent that is possible, to decontextualize any conception so that it can be readily deployed in any new context and transferred to any discipline; pays due attention to epistemic aesthetics for the sake of self-satisfaction and satisfaction of others, and 3

See Footnotes 3 and 4 in Chap. 1.

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for practical purposes; follows systematically clear, concise, and precise style for cogent communication of ideas, particularly in digital media where discourse is losing structure and meaningfulness. Coherent. The person works systematically on connecting conceptions coherently and meaningfully in conceptual systems in accordance with viable syntactic rules; avoids piecemeal fragmentation of epistemic knowledge; looks at the big picture in any situation and tries to connect epistemic details accordingly under systemic epistemology; extrapolates conceptions across different conceptual systems within the same and different disciplines; concentrates on epistemic patterns within and across disciplines; ensures that epistemological premises rhyme well with methodological and axiological premises in a specific paradigm, and that corresponding episteme is well adapted to the paradigm in question. Balanced. The person develops a balanced mix of specific and generic conceptions that are most meaningful in any episteme for all practical purposes; avoids spreading thin across a wide corpus of epistemic knowledge in any field (or discipline); maintains due balance between breadth and depth of epistemic knowledge in any field, and between the big picture and conceptual details in that field, particularly in the context of conceptual systems; maintains due balance between epistemic knowledge and procedural knowledge in any field, and among knowledge in different fields. Diversified. The person is epistemically literate in various fields that relate to practical aspects of everyday life, including mathematics, science, technology, literature, arts, and culture; stays versed and up to date in such fields to the extent that is necessary for individual and collective welfare; avoids compartmentalization of disciplinary episteme and seeks enrichment and harmony in epistemic diversity; compares and contrasts different epistemic perspectives from different disciplines on the same issue and emerges with a corresponding rich and coherent systemic picture; revisits any conception in novel contexts to help deepen it and broaden its scope without redundancy. Convergent. The person brings together under systemic paradigms epistemic knowledge from different disciplines within the same and different fields while acknowledging the distinguishing identity and sovereignty of each discipline; concentrates to this end in any discipline on generic conceptions and related semantics and syntax that can be readily transferred from one discipline to another; establishes systematically coherent conceptual connections within and across different disciplines; builds bridges across specific epistemic aspects that traditionally distinguish and separate disciplines from each other; realizes that disciplinary convergence sometimes requires the transcendence of disciplinary paradigms. Wholistic. The person develops epistemic knowledge as an integral part of an overall systemic 4P profile; develops any epistemic knowledge in relation to procedural and axio-affective knowledge for systemic purposes, and as part of systemic competencies and habits that are crucial for everyday life; makes patterns and patterning central to the organization of epistemic knowledge and its connection with other types of knowledge in an orderly and efficient manner, especially

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to the advantage of generic competencies and disciplinary convergence; develops systematic ways for learning how to learn epistemic and procedural knowledge in connection with each other. Profoundness needs to be explicitly nurtured in a person’s episteme and in close relationship to productivity and progressiveness. Traditional educational systems and curricula, especially in general education, tend to encumber students with excessive epistemic details that do not necessarily relate to everyday life and that impose unrealistic cognitive demands on students, which disenfranchises students and prevents them from meaningful learning of course materials and from retaining these materials in long-term memory. “Less is more” is a dictum that has been flying around in education for decades to no avail. Profound episteme in the sense described above follows that dictum for meaningful and sustainable learning, and desired profoundness may only come about under appropriate pedagogical frameworks that transcend all unsubstantiated and futile traditions in education.

2.5.4 Principled Conduct Axio-affective knowledge, innate and instinctive affective factors included, is always involved consciously or subconsciously in any thought or action. As noted above (Sect. 2.2) and discussed in the next chapter (Sect. 3.8), even the most instinctive factors like fear and anger can be consciously controlled and prevented from taking us in negative and destructive directions. This can be achieved with the conscious intervention of axiological factors like values and ethics that are not quite innate and that are nurtured through experience. A person with a systemic profile can do so and more by ensuring that progressive mind is always geared toward the development of productive habits and profound episteme for constructive and righteous ends. Global changes that are significantly touching the lives of all people have heightened the necessity to deeply focus on issues of morality and other axiological matters in all aspects of life. Educational authorities in more and more countries around the world are making values education part of their school curricula. Colleges and universities are incorporating ethics education in their programs, especially in science and engineering. Professional organizations and major corporations are adopting and branding their own value systems, promoting ethical conduct within their institutions, and raising the awareness of their members and employees about the ethical and moral implications of their innovations and various actions on human welfare and the ecosystem at large. Systemic 4P profiles are meant to empower people for principled conduct in all these respects. A person with such a profile strives then to be empathetic, virtuous, ethical, emancipatory, civic-minded, eco-minded, and aesthetic. Empathetic. The person acknowledges the inherent worth and rights of individual human beings; embraces diversity and benefits from individual and collective differences (social, cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) for self and others’ enrichment;

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consciously works to understand others, puts self in their shoes, and looks at the world from their perspectives; seeks understandings and not conflict with different others; values empathy as more embracing and more dignifying for self and others than sympathy and tolerance; treats self and others with compassion, fairness, and equity. Virtuous. The person strives for righteousness, justice, honesty, honor, heartiness, and humility in every thought and action; elevates such virtues to the highest pedestal, lives by them, and promotes them among others; ensures that no personal achievement comes at the detriment of others and of self-respect; remains measured and disciplined by nurturing positive sentiments (stable emotions) and dispositions, and inhibiting or taming negative ones for constructive ends; avoids double-standards in any act and judgment; naturally demonstrates exemplary conduct. Ethical. The person behaves constructively in all situations; holds on to integrity, and all other ethics, virtues, and codes of conduct in any social or professional engagement; undertakes any task with conscientiousness and productive and constructive professionalism; assumes personal responsibility of own actions; engages in collective work with shared ownership and responsibility; assumes leadership not for love of authority but for collective welfare and progress; objectively weighs the merits and risks on humanity of scientific findings and technological inventions and takes appropriate stand and actions accordingly. Emancipatory. The person values individual and collective freedom of intellect and life; preserves own freedom and the freedom of others; refrains from, and works against, hostility and humiliation (harassment, bullying, snubbing, etc.); rejects and works against discrimination and oppression of any sort; emancipates self and others from any mental or physical demeaning factor; rises above selfishness and pursues altruistic motives; helps identifying the seeds of conflict and oppression and works to inhibit them from flourishing and meeting their ends; considers only peaceful means for resolving any conflict. Civic-minded. The person is a dedicated citizen who lives by and works for a strong national identity; exercises own rights responsibly without infringing on the individual and collective rights of others; stands firmly by and for the rights and the welfare of self and others; contributes to sustainable development at the local, national, and global levels; cherishes and enriches own heritage and culture, and helps regulating them insightfully whenever necessary; engages constructively in any due reform; honors and emulates distinguished figures behind constructive turning points in the history of mankind. Eco-minded. The person lives in harmony with nature and is conscious and conscientious about belonging to local and global ecosystems in which any action affects all other beings in either system; refrains from polluting the environment and from any action with negative or destructive ecological impact; recognizes ecological risks and challenges and helps facing them constructively and sustainably; appreciates and preserves natural diversity and sustains due balance among all constituents; refrains from depleting natural resources and contributes actively to their regeneration and conservation.

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Aesthetic. The person stands by and for high aesthetics standards in all aspects of life; cares for inner and outer beauty of self and all beings; enjoys and preserves beauty in nature; cherishes all that is pleasant and appealing to the senses; works for the surrounding environment to be attractive and conducive of productivity; pays attention to the aesthetics of any personal or collective work and resulting output; seeks and values beauty and artistic touch in the details and the structure of discourse, all sorts of communication, and disciplinary episteme in all fields. More than 24 centuries ago, Socrates argued that, without a value system that guides our thoughts and actions, epistemic and procedural knowledge cannot guarantee alone success in any endeavor. He further showed, in practice with his disciples, how values can become intricate part of cognition and behavior through insightful reflection on personal thoughts and actions (Platon, c. 385 BC). Research in affective neuroscience and cognitive science has been showing lately that, contrary to popular wisdom, innate affects like love, fear, and rage can actually be conditioned and “learned” like non-innate affects (interest, motivation, attitudes, dispositions) and values, and geared toward constructive and righteous ends.4 In others words, principled conduct can and should be the explicit target of formal education, and learners of all levels, guided under appropriate pedagogical frameworks that translate neuroscience and cognitive science findings into classroom practices that take advantage of the Socratic method. Systemic 4P profiles may seem somewhat far-fetched and idealistic in certain respects as outlined above. One though cannot succeed and run a decent and dignifying life in the twenty-first century without a progressive mind, productive habits, profound episteme, and principled conduct. How far and deep one may want to go in developing, and living by, each of the four broad traits (the 4P’s) remains a personal choice that may be admittedly constrained by certain social and other factors. As presented, systemic 4P profiles fall in line with what research about, and practices of, accomplished experts show to be important for excellence in life in our century and beyond, which what formal education should be designed for. It would then be up to individual students to decide, with the help and care of their instructors, parents, and societies, how close they want their profiles to come to our 4P’s.

4

See, for example, Bechara et al. (2000), Boekaerts (2010), Damasio (1994), Davidson (2014), Décamp and Viennot (2015), Immordino-Yang (2011), Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007), Kandel et al. (2013), King et al. (2015), Koob (2015), Shechtman et al. (2013) and Zak (2015).

Chapter 3

Systemic Cognition Mind-and-Brain Based Lifelong Learning

Contents 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7

3.8

3.9

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transaction with the Real World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brain Plasticity, Flexibility, and Discrete Functionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 Engrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.2 Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 Brain Readiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Selective Adaptive Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.3 Reiterative Ontogenetic Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.4 Long Active Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.5 Lifestyle Dependent Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.1 Distributed Collective Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.2 Rehearsal Dependent Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.3 Pattern Embedded Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.4 Insightful Challenging Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.5 Differential Dynamic Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7.1 Differential Memory Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7.2 Mutually Dependent Memory Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7.3 Mnemonics Dependent Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory Modulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.1 Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.2 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.3 Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8.4 Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metacognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. A. Halloun, Systemic Cognition and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3_3

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3.1 Introduction We, humans, keep learning as long as we live, thanks to a large part to the cognition faculty of our minds and our brains faculty to provide the neuronal infrastructure and processes. Cognition, the mental act of knowing, is in many respects the major manifestation of our consciousness and our mental ability to think for achieving specific purposes the most important of which is learning. The human brain works then, subconsciously in tandem, to restructure and even regenerate its neurons and those of the entire nervous system, rearrange neuronal networks, and modify how neurons and networks communicate with each other in order to provide the neuronal substrate of memory creation and changes. Learning takes place at all ages in response to any change or challenge within ourselves or in the surrounding environment so as to adapt to new demands that we may deliberately impose on ourselves or that may be imposed on us by the environment. It involves often some physical actions of sensory or motor nature and always a mix of mind and brain conscious and subconscious cognitive and neuronal processes that bring about explicitly and/or implicitly memory changes that affect temporarily or permanently how we subsequently think, perceive things through our senses, act, and feel emotionally and physically. In this chapter, we look at cognition from a systemic mind and brain perspective to lay the ground for the pedagogical perspective that has direct practical implications on learning as discussed in the next chapter. Educators and educationists, and particularly curriculum developers and instructors1 at all educational levels, need viable (i.e., realistic, valid, reliable, useful, efficacious, affordable, feasible, reasonable, unambiguous, harmless, dynamically sustainable, etc.) pedagogical frameworks under which they may efficiently conceive and implement various aspects of student education, tertiary education included, and of pre-service and in-service teacher education. Traditional education that still prevails in our schools (universities included) is grounded in pedagogical frameworks with detrimental myths and pedagogical tenets that cognitive science and neuroscience have proven lately to be at odds with the way our minds and brains are, evolve, and work, particularly when it comes to cognition (Halloun, 2018a, 2019, 2020a). Alternative pedagogical frameworks are urgently needed with tenets, principles, and rules grounded in reliable cognition research and especially translational research that shows how to practically take advantage of neuroscience in education and that is part of the emerging field termed “neuro-education” or “educational neuroscience” by some and “mind, brain, and education” or MBE by others (Halloun, 2017, 2019). We hereby concentrate on cognition aspects that are critical to learning from two complementary perspectives, the underlying subconscious neuro-anatomical and functional perspective of the brain, and the conscious cognitive perspective of the mind, which some people like to compare, though very cautiously for us, to computer hardware and software respectively. Meanwhile, we acknowledge that learning may involve subconscious cognitive processes, particularly when it comes to implicit 1

See Footnote 1 in Chap. 1.

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learning of some mental acts like arithmetic at an early age and of many physical or behavioral acts like walking and talking in childhood and hammering a nail, riding a bicycle, or swimming at any age. However, and despite their importance, implicit learning and subconscious cognition fall outside the scope of this book. Our focus hereafter is thus primarily on conscious cognitive structures and processes that we label as “conceptual” and that are responsible of explicit learning. Subsequently, and unless otherwise specified, we use the term mind primarily in reference to the conscious conceptual structures and processes of cognition that make up and/or determine our thoughts, actions, and emotional and physical feelings that we are aware of and that we can communicate, exchange, or negotiate with others in verbal, written, pictorial, and other forms, and the term “brain” primarily in reference to the subconscious neuro-anatomical structures and processes underlying such conceptual cognition and subsequent explicit learning, particularly those that provide the neuronal substrate of related memory. There is an interplay between mind and brain development. In certain respects, conscious mind processes may induce brain development somewhat in the Vygotskian sense. In other respects, mind processes cannot proceed until the brain has reached a certain level of anatomic maturity, somewhat in the Piagetian sense. In other words, for certain cognitive processes, maturity of corresponding brain parts is a prerequisite for cognition and learning, while for other types, learning in the explicit cognitive sense is a necessary condition for corresponding brain parts to get developed. This mind-brain development interplay will make the object of our discussion in this chapter. However, we will not engage in any philosophical discussion related to the mind-brain or mind-body relationship, as we do not subscribe in this respect to any particular philosophical school. Cognitive processes and memory aspects that are of particular pedagogical interest to us make the object of the nine sections making up this chapter. Section 3.2 sets the stage for the rest of the chapter through a concise discussion of knowledge construction about the surrounding world through transaction, or empirical perception of, and interaction with, physical realities. Section 3.3 outlines the critical brain properties of plasticity and flexibility that allow us to keep learning as long as we live, along with the anatomical division of the brain into discrete specialized regions dedicated each to a particular cognitive function and a particular role in memory formation and evolution. Engrams, the neuronal substrate of memory in the brain, and a memory taxonomy that bears directly on our pedagogical interests make the object of Sect. 3.4. Memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval, the three mind and brain processes that are responsible of the construction and deployment of knowledge of any sort make the object of the following three sections. A section then follows on modulatory systems in the brain that control the memory processes in question and that determine whether any learning experience goes on a constructive path or on a destructive or futile path. The last section recapitulates the main points discussed in this chapter and bearing directly on pedagogical aspects discussed in subsequent chapters, and

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highlights related metacognitive implications on how to proceed in any learning experience in order to come out with meaningful outcomes that contribute to the development of systemic 4P profiles discussed in the previous chapter.

3.2 Transaction with the Real World Cognition may be induced externally, through interaction with the outside world, like in the case of the shopping example in the previous chapter (Sect. 2.2), or intrinsically and spontaneously, by our own thoughts and emotions without necessarily interacting with anybody or anything in that world. In the first instance, cognition involves perception, i.e., detection and interpretation of sensory input from the outside world. In both instances, cognition may involve physical action. As such, and particularly when we interact with the outside world, cognition engages our senses as well as other body parts, thus involving a wide spectrum of physical processes extending from perception to behavior under mind-brain control. Beginning at birth, and throughout our childhood and early adolescence, cognition is mostly induced by the outside world and instinctive needs and motives, and perception plays a major role in our mind-brain development and thus in our readiness to learn new things. Concrete thinking, i.e., thinking in the context of physical realities (living and/or inert entities and events or phenomena) that we come across in the real world, prevails then in our mind and governs our mind and brain development. Some forms of abstract thinking in childhood, like in the case of language, arithmetic, and music that involve at that stage mostly implicit not explicit cognition and learning, are also critical for brain development. As we grow older, such abstract matters gradually become the object of explicit cognition and learning, and we gradually develop our abstract thinking and our ability to learn in total dissociation from physical realities. However, we always remain more comfortable developing all sorts of knowledge while interacting with, or in reference to, the outside world, and thus resorting to so-called experiential learning (Sect. 4.4) that involves transaction with physical realities. A transaction is a conscious, interactive, and purposeful cognitive experience with a particular physical reality or set of related realities. The experience may involve processing empirical data acquired through perception of input from such realities, exchange of ideas with other people (social interaction), and/or processing information about the realities in question accessed through various paper or digital resources. The learning output (memory change, new knowledge) depends on both our own mental and physical state and the state of what and whom else the transaction involves in the outside world. It especially depends on what for and how well we intend to take advantage of that transaction. According to Johnson-Laird (1983, p. 402), our transaction with, and, thus, “our view of the world, is causally dependent both on the way the world is and on the way we are”, and, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 163), properties we attribute to physical objects “are not properties of objects in themselves but are,

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rather, interactional properties, based on the human perceptual apparatus, human conceptions of function, etc.”. Similarly, Bunge argues that empirical experience “is not a self-subsistent object but a certain transaction between two or more concrete systems, at least one of which is the experient organism. Experience is always of somebody and of something” (Bunge, 1967, p. 162, italics added), and the resulting knowledge “is attained jointly by experience … and by reason” (Bunge, 1973, p. 170). A transaction with any physical reality thus depends to a large extent on our cognitive state, i.e., on what epistemic, procedural, and axio-affective knowledge is available in our memory for processing information made available in the transaction, as well as on our physical and emotional readiness to carry out the transaction and sustain it for a sufficient time. As indicated in Fig. 3.1 and discussed to the extent that is necessary throughout this chapter and in ample details elsewhere (Halloun, 2017, 2019), the transaction begins with the formation of a perceptual image of any physical reality that is the object of the transaction. That image consists of a small proportion of afferent data detected by our senses (empirical data) that concerned regions in the brain filter out unconsciously and involuntarily, and then send for cognitive processing in other brain regions (Sect. 3.5.2). Once duly processed, the brain turns the perceptual image into a conceptual image that helps us make sense of our perceptual experience and that we can consciously and voluntarily evaluate and regulate (refine and/or consolidate) in terms of, and along with, prior knowledge, and by correspondence to the physical reality the image partially represents. The entire cycle going from the formation of a perceptual image to cognitive processing of that image, the formation of a conceptual image, and subsequent evaluation and regulation of the latter image (conscious cognitive processing) is not necessarily linear and is continuously reiterated until we are satisfied with the conceptual image we form of the physical reality (Sect. 3.5.3). The blueprint you develop in mind about the grocery store in the shopping example of Sect. 2.2 is a conceptual image of the store. Following evaluation and regulation of many perceptual snapshots of the store, the blueprint in question would include

Fig. 3.1 Transaction with a physical reality. Cognitive processing engages prior knowledge and involves continuous evaluation and regulation of conceptual image and invoked prior knowledge

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only primary details that you deem pertinent like the relative location and content of aisles. That conceptual image leaves out secondary or unnecessary details, say, about the shelves’ physical properties and the surrounding store environment. A conceptual image of a given physical reality thus partially represents the reality in certain respects and to a certain extent, and is never in any respect a true copy of that reality. The image results from cognitively deconstructing the reality in question (actually, its perceptual image) and reconstructing it to blend in specific ways: (a) select empirical data from the physical reality as relayed to us by our perceptual system and (b) prior knowledge that is called upon in the memory of each of us in order to process data, make sense of it, and produce the conceptual image (Sect. 3.5.2). A conceptual image is thus an emergent image. It is emergent in the sense that it comes with new features that result from blending empirical data (as per the perceptual image) and prior knowledge, and that cannot be attributed to either data or knowledge separately (Halloun, 2017, 2019). A conceptual image is dynamic in two respects. First, it does not only consist of factual information, i.e., epistemic knowledge, about the reality it represents. It also includes related procedural and axio-affective knowledge as discussed in points 1 and 3 of Sect. 2.2 about the shopping example. Second, and as indicated above and in Fig. 3.1, the image in question is constituted through reiterative and cumulative regulatory processes that involve constant evaluation of that image and invoked prior knowledge, and subsequent regulation (change) of everything related to the image in memory (ibid.). The reiterative cycle takes place during the actual transaction with the reality of interest (e.g., with the store layout in our example, while still in the store), but it does not end then. Evaluation and regulation of the conceptual image continues afterwards (once out of the store), possibly through discussion with other people or in reference to related information available through accessible resources, and always through personal thoughts with no necessary interaction with the outside world. In fact, such cycle is characteristic of human cognition whether we are in a transaction with the outside world or not, and whether we are developing cognitive or behavioral knowledge. It is a main driving process behind learning and thus behind the dynamic state of our memory that keeps evolving throughout our lifetime. A transaction with the real world is most efficient and meaningful if carried out consciously and systematically as a systemic endeavor whereby any physical reality in Fig. 3.1 is treated as a system, a set of interacting systems or parts of systems, and dealt with in the manner discussed in Sect. 1.3. Systematization of our transaction with the physical world begins by looking for, or even imposing, order in this world from both ontological and epistemological perspectives (Sect. 1.4). From an ontological perspective, we would concentrate on universal patterns in the structure and behavior of physical systems. From an epistemological perspective, we would represent, in specific respects of interest, various physical systems manifesting a given pattern with a single systemic conceptual image (Fig. 3.2). The image would in fact be a conceptual system (e.g., a conceptual model in various sciences) constructed in accordance with the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1) and consisting of primary aspects that are common to all systems exhibiting the pattern in question. It would be constantly evaluated and regulated in accordance with Fig. 1.3 through insightful dialectics that

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Fig. 3.2 Systemic transaction with the real world

are about critical negotiations with the outside world, other people included, and within one’s own personal knowledge, by correspondence to physical and conceptual systems and especially physical and conceptual patterns (Sect. 3.6.4). The entire process would be carried out under an appropriate systemic paradigm or framework.

3.3 Brain Plasticity, Flexibility, and Discrete Functionality Cognition, and thus learning, involves creation of new memory and/or changes in existing memory, and thus creation of new knowledge and/or changes in prior knowledge of epistemic, procedural, and/or axio-affective nature (Sect. 2.2). Such knowledge development may be induced through transaction with the outside world (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2), or it may take place spontaneously through intrinsic cognitive processes without any such transaction. It may involve concrete and/or abstract thinking, and it may thus take place or not in the context of conceptual images representing physical realities. Memory and knowledge development (creation, expansion, or change) is due to two major brain properties, plasticity and flexibility, that make us innately pre-disposed for lifelong learning, i.e., for continuous learning throughout our entire lifetime. The two brain properties in question are primarily due to the structure and function of individual neurons (Fig. 3.3). Neurons are the main elementary constituents of the human brain. There are of the order of 1011 neurons in the brain and a comparable (perhaps greater) number of glial cells (in addition to other constituents). However, cognitive processes are primarily about unidirectional neuronal impulses that are transmitted from one neuron to other neurons, and memory is primarily about neural networks (connected neurons) in the brain. Glial cells do not transmit impulses. They induce the development of certain anatomical parts of neurons (mainly the myelin cover of axons) and support, guide, and protect neurons in certain respects. Some evidence is beginning to surface about the role of glial cells in memory formation. However, and because of the prime role of neurons in cognition and memory development, and in order to avoid overload with details which we can live without, discussion of cognition in the brain is hereby limited to the least necessary structural and functional aspects of neurons and neuronal networks.

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Fig. 3.3 Neuron (left) and synaptic connections (right)

Any cognitive process involves billions of neuronal signals among millions of neurons located in different parts of the brain. A signal is always transmitted from the axon terminals of a given neuron to the dendrites of other neurons. Neurons always communicate with each other through unidirectional signals. A signal detected by the dendrites of a given neuron is processed in the cell body of that neuron and the outcome is transmitted to the axon of this neuron and through the axon terminals to the dendrites of other neurons at the level of synapses (Fig. 3.3). Synapses are junctions or electro-chemical connections that are created between axon terminals of a given neuron and the dendrites of other neurons following neural and, particularly for us, cognitive processes. The set of all synapses between a given number of neurons make up a synaptic network. There are trillions of synaptic connections among billions of neurons in the brain. Neurons in a particular network keep interacting and communicating with each other under particular biological, chemical, and physical influences, in order to form a distinct memory of a particular type of knowledge as discussed in the following sections. Brain plasticity is about the brain adaptation to new environmental and/or cognitive demands that can be met not with the current state of the brain but with structural change in synaptic networking among existing neurons (Fig. 3.3). This may involve rearranging neurons and rewiring synapses, adding or removing synapses while preserving dendrites and axon terminals, adding new spines to dendrites or axon terminals for additional synapses, and/or possibly neurogenesis, i.e., generation of new neurons. Throughout life, new networks and thus new memories are continuously formed and existing memories are continuously regulated to fulfill new demands imposed externally by our environment that cannot be met by existing knowledge, or intrinsically by our dissatisfaction with current knowledge. Brain flexibility is about optimizing the brain performance through functional not structural change, mainly by improving the efficiency, the excitability of existing synaptic networks without any change in the actual topology (neurons and synaptic connections) of any network. As such, plasticity is distinguished from flexibility. The two brain features complement each other. They are maintained from birth to death

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of any human being, with plasticity decreasing (but not vanishing) as we grow older, and flexibility increasing through late adulthood and decreasing and/or leveling off afterwards. Except for rare exceptions of brain anomalies or exceptionally high capacity of synaptic networking and functional flexibility (like in the case of “gifted” children who can perform rapidly complex arithmetic operations mentally), we are all predisposed, anatomically speaking, to naturally create or regulate any sort of neural network. We all have about the same innate level of brain plasticity and flexibility, and thus the same potential to develop (create and change) at any age (though to varying degrees) any type of knowledge we like to develop. However, environmental factors, and especially the type of education we are afforded, affect both plasticity and flexibility of the brain either positively or negatively. Brain plasticity is especially reduced when we are deprived of certain experiences, certain types of transaction with the real world that are critical at certain age. For instance, confining a person in a closed environment deprived of a rich perceptual input during childhood prevents that person from properly developing sensory areas in the brain. This may have a long-lasting detrimental impact on the person’s brain plasticity in those areas, and thus on the person’s engagement in experiential learning and school achievement at a later stage. Luckily, that impact is not necessarily irreversible. With proper provisions and training at opportune times, other brain regions may take over or compensate for the deficiency. The human brain is a complex system consisting of four major systems or subsystems: the cerebrum or telencephalon, the diencephalon, the brain stem (or brainstem), and the cerebellum (Fig. 3.4). Each subsystem is split between the right and left hemispheres, and divided in each hemisphere into numerous discrete small parts or areas of distinct functions. Each discrete part or area is characterized by the type and number of neurons that constitute it, but especially by the patterns of inter-neurons connections (synaptic networks) and the distinct function that it serves. For instance, the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the cerebrum that is the major memory repository, consists of four lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal), with each lobe split between the two hemispheres and divided into dozens of discrete areas. Each area is dedicated exclusively to one particular cognitive, perceptual, or motor function, yet any cognitive, perceptual, or motor process involves a mix of these cortical areas, subcortical parts of the cerebrum, and other brain parts. Discrete brain parts (cerebral cortical areas included) are not totally independent of each other. They are clustered into distinct functional systems. Each functional system consists of a number of interconnected discrete parts from different brain subsystems and is relatively autonomous in serving one distinct broad function. For example, vision is processed in a dedicated functional system (the visual system) consisting of about 35 distinct functional areas, and a similar distinct functional system is dedicated to perception with each of the other four senses, to the movement of the eyes (as distinct from the visual system), to language, and to the movement of each limb. Though relatively autonomous with discrete structures and distinct functions, different functional systems are not isolated islands, and do not exist, grow, and work independently of each other. They work in concert with each other

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Fig. 3.4 The four brain subsystems (in bold) and the four lobes of its cerebral cortex. The brainstem consists of the medulla oblongata, the pons, and the midbrain. It receives somatosensory signals from the skin, muscles, and other parts, and relays sensory and motor signals between the peripheral nervous system and the spinal cord, on the one hand, and the cerebellum and cerebrum on the other. It is also responsible for the coordination of vital and reflexive functions. The cerebellum makes up about 10% of the brain volume but takes in more than half of all its neurons. It modulates movement and is primarily involved in the development of motor skills. The diencephalon consists of: (a) the thalamus which relays various signals to and from the cerebral cortex, and (b) the hypothalamus which modulates autonomic, endocrine, and visceral functions. The cerebrum, or telencephalon, is the largest part of the brain (about two thirds of its volume). Its outer portion consists of a thin, heavily wrinkled layer of gray matter called the cerebral cortex. The cerebrum is divided into two hemispheres, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, connected by the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex in each hemisphere is divided into four specialized lobes, each exclusively dedicated to specific function and to sustaining related memory. These are: (a) the frontal lobe that controls thinking, short-term memory and movement; (b) the parietal lobe that interprets somatosensory signals such as taste, touch and temperature, and is concerned with the formation and the outer projection of a body image; (c) the occipital lobe that processes visual signals from the eyes; (d) the temporal lobe that processes auditory signals from the ears, along with sensations such as smell and taste. A number of cognitive and behavioral functions are managed by dedicated systems spread in more than one of the above four brain subsystems. For instance, the basal ganglia that serve memory, emotional, and motor functions, are spread in subcortical parts of the cerebrum, the midbrain in the brainstem, and the diencephalon. Other parts of the diencephalon and the telencephalon form the limbic system that has a prime role in the control of affects and memory. The hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the amygdala are three major constituents of the limbic system that are of prime interest to our discussion

to accomplish particular cognitive or behavioral tasks and benefit from each other to serve their individual functions. For example, and as discussed below, cortical areas dedicated to epistemic knowledge benefit from activities in other brain parts designed to help us develop procedural or axio-affective knowledge, and vice versa.

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3.4 Memory Learning is about the development (creation, expansion, partial or total change, and/or reinforcement) of all sorts of epistemic, procedural, and axio-affective knowledge. It is a process and an end or an output in the performance of a complex system (Sect. 1.2.1). The system is the brain when only cognitive knowledge (epistemic and axio-affective) is processed to bring about a new state of the mind (output) through insightful thinking without any transaction with the outside world. In the event of such transaction, perceptual and motor organs and limbs may also be involved and related behavioral knowledge processed as well. Learning then involves conscious and subconscious cognitive processes and behavioral acts that result in new mind and body states (output). Cognition is always involved in any thought or action, and memory is changed in certain respects as a consequence. Depending on the novelty, complexity, and personal relevance of the learning experience we go through and the efficiency of undertaken cognitive processes, the resulting knowledge may be transient with a temporary memory trace often called short-term memory (STM) or sustained with a permanent memory trace called longterm memory (LTM). Three types of memory are distinguished in the literature: short-term, working, and long-term. Short-term memory and working memory are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature, or one is used rather than the other (often, working memory instead of short-term memory). However, we hold the latter two memories to be distinct (Halloun, 2017, 2019). Short-term memory consists, for us, of transient knowledge (a temporary conceptual image in Fig. 3.1) the lifetime of which may extend from a few seconds to a few days or weeks, even months, like the store blueprint emerging from a first visit in our example of Sect. 2.2. In contrast, working memory consists of the short-lived outcome of a brief episode of cognitive processing of any new data and related knowledge invoked from STM and LTM from various parts of the brain. That outcome lasts for a very short time not exceeding 30 s, and, in a transaction with a physical reality, it provides a single snapshot of a given conceptual image that will be subsequently formed gradually in STM (Sect. 3.5.3). Eventually, and for reasons discussed below, STM will be either dissociated or consolidated strongly enough to be permanently sustained as LTM in the brain. Respective knowledge is annihilated and totally “forgotten” in the first case, while it is preserved for good in mind in the second case so that it may be eventually accessed and deployed for a variety of reasons. Back to the grocery store example of Sect. 2.2. Following a first visit to the store, you can hold temporarily in mind a conceptual image of the store, a partial and raw store blueprint. That image cannot contain everything you need to know about the store system after a first visit and cannot be permanently sustained in memory yet. Thus, you cannot subsequently “remember” yet where to find all items and how to proceed every step of the way with the entire shopping experience in this particular store. Knowledge you develop after your first visit can be “encoded” only in STM and can only be partially remembered in a subsequent visit because of two major reasons. First, it takes time and a few recurrent visits, i.e., some spaced shopping “rehearsal”

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in this store for knowledge about its system to be “consolidated” well enough and thus sustained in LTM. Second, you need to develop appropriate “mnemonics”, i.e., particular cues and procedures that help you remember, i.e., “retrieve” from memory, the location of every item in the store and every step you need to take to complete your shopping, which also takes time and practice. The three cognitive processes thus mentioned about memory formation and deployment, namely, encoding, consolidation (by rehearsal), and retrieval, are the main cognitive processes that we go through in learning anything about the physical world or about the conceptual realm of human abstract thought. Formal education needs to attend explicitly and diligently to the three memory processes so that students may develop course materials meaningfully and productively, but especially for them to become aware of what goes on in their minds and brains during any learning experience and be empowered to consciously take control of their cognitive processes and profit the best of the experience. These processes are discussed in the following three sections to the extent that we deem necessary for formal education and are extrapolated in the following chapter from a practical pedagogical perspective. However, let us first highlight how memory is formed in engrams and how it can be classified in accordance with knowledge types distinguished so far.

3.4.1 Engrams Memory processes are henceforth discussed from a mind and brain perspective. At the level of the mind, memory consists of epistemic, procedural, or axio-affective “knowledge” that we can consciously access, retrieve, process, deploy, and share with others through various means of engagement and communication. At the level of the brain, memory of any knowledge type and size is a complex neuro-anatomical entity the formation of which involves involuntary and subconscious complex biological, chemical, and physical changes in the structure of a network of neurons (and glial cells) spread throughout the brain and constituting so-called engrams. An engram is the basic unit of memory temporarily or permanently encoded in our brain. It consists of a large number of neurons in the brain that come to be wired or connected in particular ways (Fig. 3.3) following a given learning experience in order to constitute the physical substrate of a particular memory unit or memory bit. According to Josselyn and Tonegawa (2020), “a given memory is supported by an engram complex [an engram “system” for us], composed of functionally connected engram cell ensembles dispersed across multiple brain regions, with each ensemble supporting a component of the overall memory”. In the following, we reserve the word “knowledge” to refer to the conscious trace of memory in mind, and the word “engram” to refer to a corresponding subconscious, neuronal substrate unit in the brain. The word “knowledge” is hereby used in a broad sense to refer to anything held in mind and to include all sorts of beliefs, ideas, skills, and dispositions whether academically accepted or not, correct or mistaken, good or bad. A single engram makes up a unit of memory or memory bit and encodes a unique

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and distinctive small bit of a particular type of knowledge, be it epistemic, procedural, or axio-affective. There is still a lot to learn about the actual constitution and operation of engrams. However, there is already enough evidence2 in neuroscience and related disciplines to accept certain corroborated facts about engram development and underlying cognitive processes, and to take advantage of these facts in education the way we do in this work. Knowledge about any entity, idea, process, event, or any other concrete or abstract issue, no matter how small and simple it might be, is maintained by a complex engram system that consists of a large array of interconnected specialized engrams spread across a variety of functional systems in the brain. Each engram system can be defined in accordance with our systemic schema (Fig. 1.1 and Sect. 1.2.1) as follows from a cognitive perspective: Framework: Engrams and engram systems are defined and studied in the framework of neuroscience, and particularly better for us, in an adequate translational framework3 that translates reliable mind and brain research into viable pedagogical practices. Scope: Every engram system constitutes the neuronal substrate of a particular memory, a particular knowledge packet that is good to serve a particular cognitive and/or behavioral function. We are particularly interested in engram systems each of which upholds knowledge of particular function in a specific domain and pertaining to a specific type of knowledge as distinguished in our taxonomy (Sect. 3.4.2) or, more comprehensively, a specific systemic competency (Sect. 2.3). Constitution: An engram system consists of a large array of engrams spread across different brain regions and interconnected mostly through association areas in the cerebral cortex. These areas provide the interface among neurons or engrams located in different brain regions to ensure flow of information amongst them and contribute to memory formation. Each engram is unique in structure and function as described below. Individual engrams and an entire engram system are affected by other engrams and engram systems to which they are connected, and regulated and controlled by particular brain systems (environment) the most important of which are, for us here, modulatory systems (Sect. 3.8). Performance: Individual engrams and engram systems are wired, evolve, and perform their cognitive tasks in knowledge construction and deployment through physio-chemical processes in the cell bodies of individual neurons and especially through neural signals across synaptic connections (Fig. 3.3). Coordinated engram 2

See, for example, Cragg and Gilmore (2014), Davidson (2014), Domenech et al. (2020), Ekman et al. (2021), Freudenthal et al. (2020), Germine et al. (2011), Gregory and Kaufeldt (2015), Hartshorne and Germine (2015), Hassevoort et al. (2016), Josselyn and Tonegawa (2020), Kandel et al. (2013), Kim et al. (2016), Markant et al. (2016), Matos et al. (2019), Poo et al. (2016), Shing and Brod (2016), Sun et al. (2020), Wenger and Lövdén (2016) and Zak (2015). 3 See, for example, Carey et al. (2020), Churches et al. (2020), Kelleher and Whitman (2018), Knox (2016), Stafford-Brizard et al. (2017), Sousa (2010) and van Atteveldt et al. (2019).

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processes are memory processes typically classified in three main categories that make the object of this chapter, memory encoding, memory consolidation, and memory retrieval. Engram constitution and processes are addressed in this chapter at the microscopic level of the brain, only to the extent that serves our pedagogical purposes and prevents us from going astray in futile directions in our work. Engram matters are manifested at the macroscopic level in observable learning outcomes such as declarative statements, conceptual processes, and physical actions that make the object of the next chapter and that pertain to various types of cognitive and behavioral knowledge distinguished before and systematically classified below (Sect. 3.4.2). An engram is a unique dynamic system. It consists of numerous neurons of different structure and different functions distributed across different parts of the brain, especially in the cerebral cortex (Fig. 3.4), and forming a particular synaptic network in the manner illustrated in Fig. 3.3. Whether STM or LTM, each engram is unique in its structure and intrinsic modes of communication, and thus it subtends a distinctive and unique bit of memory. The engram is dynamic in two respects. Its neurons keep changing (increasing or decreasing) the number of synapses as well as the intrinsic excitability or strength of each synapse. Synapses increase in number by having more dendrites of a given neuron establish connection with the axon terminals of other neurons either while maintaining the structure of those dendrites and terminals or by developing new dendrite or terminal spines. The more synapses increase in number, especially through increased spines (brain plasticity), and in excitability (brain flexibility), the longer the engram lasts, and the better the newly formed memory (STM) stands a chance to turn into LTM. In contrast, when synapses decrease in number and/or excitability, the engram may eventually be dissociated, and thus the STM it forms erased or deleted (respective knowledge is thus lost and forgotten). Many parts in the four brain subsystems (Fig. 3.4), but especially in the cerebral cortex, contribute to the development (formation and subsequent elaboration) and sustainability of any engram, from its very inception, i.e., first time networking of its neurons to encode a given memory, and throughout its lifetime, whether as STM or LTM. Some brain parts play primarily a morphological or structural role and contribute constituent neurons, i.e., neurons that enter in the physical makeup of the engram. Other brain parts play primarily a phenomenological or functional role and do not necessarily provide constituent neurons (some may do). They induce, carry out, and/or control all neuronal processes of memory development (encoding and consolidation) and deployment (access, retrieval, and engagement in cognitive or behavioral acts). Engram structure and memory processes are discussed in this chapter with the least neuro-anatomical details possible and with reference only to those parts or areas of the brain that are most crucial for our pedagogical concerns. A crucial issue is worth mentioning at this point regarding the terms “working memory” (WM), “short-term memory” (STM), and “long-term memory” (LTM). The three types of memory indicate the status of an engram or engram system in the brain, mainly the strength and stability of their synaptic connections and their

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longevity, and/or, in the case of WM and STM, the cognitive processing episode that takes place to form such engrams. An engram (or engram system) remains labile as WM or STM, and the corresponding synaptic network may get eventually either dissociated (knowledge is then lost and forgotten) or reinforced strongly enough to be retained as LTM (knowledge is then sustained for good in mind). This is what we mean even when we sometimes take the liberty of expressing ourselves colloquially by saying something like “knowledge stored in” this or that type of memory. This should by no means give the wrong impression that WM, STM, and LTM are three different storage compartments in the brain, which they definitely are not.

3.4.2 Taxonomy Any engram system spans many discrete brain parts (especially cortical areas of the cerebrum) in different functional brain systems. Nevertheless, various engram systems, and thus memory, may be conveniently grouped and classified into a limited number of categories based on convenient criteria. Following the knowledge classification of Sect. 2.2, and after separation of cognitive and behavioral procedural knowledge, we may distinguish four types of memories, whether STM or LTM, that formal education is mostly concerned with: epistemic, rational, sensory-motor (or sensorimotor, i.e., sensory and/or motor), and axio-affective (axiological and/or affective). The four categories outlined in Box 3.1 are presented in more details in Sect. 4.3.1. This classification serves best our purposes in education and we hold to it throughout this and related works. Other categories that are beyond the scope of this work may further be distinguished (e.g., those related to instinctive or homeostasis functions), and various memory engram systems may be differently identified and organized under different criteria that lead to more or less inclusive categories. Box 3.1 Memory taxonomy that serves best our pedagogical needs from both theoretical and practical perspectives (details in Sect. 4.3.1 and Halloun, 2017/19) Epistemic memory includes all sorts of factual and conceptual knowledge we have about the physical world, in morphological and phenomenological respects, and all sorts of ideas in the realm of our abstract thoughts, especially all sorts of conceptions (concepts and relationships among concepts) about both world and realm. Rational memory includes all sorts of analytical, criterial, relational, critical, logical, and other reasoning skills in procedural knowledge. Sensory-motor (or sensorimotor) memory includes all sorts of sensory and motor skills in procedural knowledge involved in perception and physical actions respectively.

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Axio-affective memory includes all sorts of emotions and sentiments, dispositions and attitudes, ethics and values, and other affects and axiological merits or virtues. A more inclusive categorization in neuroscience distinguishes between explicit and implicit memories, particularly LTM, depending on: (a) the relative degree of awareness and consciousness involved in memory formation and deployment, and (b) whether prior knowledge invoked in these processes is predominantly cognitive or behavioral, and thus whether reasoning or sensorimotor skills prevail. Explicit memory (sometimes called declarative memory) involves conscious and reflective processes (e.g., evaluation and self-regulation, insightful dialectics), and relies heavily on prior conceptions and reasoning skills. This is the case of, say, language and mathematics. Implicit memory (non-declarative) involves reflexive rather than reflective processes, and relies heavily on motor or perceptual skills that can be unconsciously developed and deployed (e.g., daily care routines, handwriting, drawing of geometric figures). Explicit memory is more intricate than implicit memory especially at the level of conscious processing. A less inclusive categorization in neuroscience distinguishes, in explicit memory, between semantic and episodic memories related to factual knowledge in our epistemic category (Box 3.1). Semantic memory is primarily about factual patterns (especially morphological) that are largely context independent. It helps us remember things like the existence of aisles and shelves in different grocery stores or the common bodily features of all humans irrespective of race and nationality. Episodic memory is about phenomenological aspects of explicit memory, and pertains to events we go through in our lives. It helps us remember things like the trip we take to a grocery store or any other place and the people and other particular entities and occurrences we might encounter on the way. Classification criteria and ensuing memory categories may always be distinguished by convenience to serve specific purposes. The more inclusive a category, the bigger the number of dedicated brain parts, and the wider they are spread in the four brain subsystems, especially in cortical lobes. The least inclusive the category, the smaller the number and the more confined to specific lobes. However, no matter what memory taxonomy we may adopt, the distinction between a limited number of memory categories (less than a handful) remains somewhat artificial, but valid, or rather convenient, for the specified practical purposes. The categorization can be least inclusive when we look at the functional systems and the specialized discrete areas in the brain (Sect. 3.3), especially in the cerebral cortex that is most concerned with engram formation. For example, language speaking and understanding are two distinct functions handled by two different but connected areas in the posterior part of the cerebral cortex in the left hemisphere: Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area is located in the frontal lobe, whereas Wernicke’s area is located where the temporal lobe meets the parietal and occipital lobes (Fig. 3.4). Broca’s area is dedicated to speech, to uttering and writing words in meaningful ways, whereas

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Wernicke’s area is dedicated to the comprehension of language. People with lesions in the Broca’s area cannot speak and write but can understand language perfectly well. In contrast, people with lesions in the Wernicke’s area cannot understand what others say or write but can express themselves orally and in writing. Hence, one cortical area is dedicated to processing perceived language and making sense of it, while the other, to producing language. Such narrow specialization in brain parts have major implications on learning and memory that we need to pay attention to as discussed later in this and subsequent chapters no matter what memory and knowledge taxonomy we adopt.

3.5 Memory Encoding Engrams that formal education is mostly concerned about are not innate. We are all born with similar brains comprising similar number of neurons with similar structure. Neural networks that sustain life are mostly innate, like in the case of instincts, the operation of inner organs, homeostasis, and reflexive behavior. In contrast, engram systems concerned with memories like those pertaining to physical realities, abstract ideas, and reflective not reflexive behavior are not wired innately. Neurons that make up such engrams might already exist in the brain, but they are not innately fully active, developed, and connected to each other in appropriate synaptic networks. In the case of such engrams and engram systems that constitute the physical, neuronal substrate of all sorts of knowledge we are concerned about in education, connections among neurons begin to get established in various parts of the brain only as we transact with the world around us and “learn” things about this world (our own selves included), and how to think about it and interact with it. Memory encoding is the cognitive process concerned with such inception or initial formation of appropriate engrams and engram systems corresponding to real or abstract entities and processes at any stage of life, i.e., with the inception of all sorts of epistemic, rational, sensorimotor, and axio-affective knowledge (Box 3.1). A transaction with an entirely new physical reality is a typical cognitive and learning experience that involves encoding of new memory, the conceptual image in Fig. 3.1. Memory encoding induced by a transaction with the outside world is governed by all afferent data from this world on the one hand, and, especially, on the other, by a number of conditions and premises imposed by the natural structure and function of our brain, our peripheral nervous system that detects afferent data and sends them to the brain for processing, and various sensory organs, limbs and other bodily parts involved in the transaction. Similar brain conditions and premises govern encoding of abstract ideas and processes that do not necessarily involve transaction with the outside world. At its inception, a newly formed engram or engram system cannot be wired strongly enough to avoid dissociation and turn into LTM, i.e., to permanently sustain the respective new knowledge in mind. At this point, any engram system, like any individual engram in its makeup, can encode memory only as STM. Further actions need to take place in the subsequent two processes, consolidation and

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retrieval, so that an engram system be entirely sustainable as LTM and efficiently accessible for retrieval and deployment. For those actions to take place efficiently and meaningfully, memory encoding must satisfy and take place under a number of mind-brain conditions. Conditions and underlying corroborated premises that we deem mostly crucial and critical for education are briefly discussed in the following five subsections with some pedagogical implications.

3.5.1 Brain Readiness Development of some brain parts to a certain level of maturity is often a pre-requisite for learning and memory encoding. Some brain parts, especially in the cerebral cortex, are not mature enough at birth and take years to be ready for encoding. This is for instance the case of some cortical areas located in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the very frontal part of the cerebral cortex frontal lobe (Fig. 3.4), that are concerned with so-called executive functions dealing with certain forms of abstract thinking, problem solving, decision making, and other critical thought processes. Those PFC areas do not mature until the early or mid-twenties, and even at a later age for some people. Until then, memories involving or requiring PFC executive functions cannot be encoded, at least not meaningfully, no matter how hard we try in any form of learning. Such age dependency of certain cognitive processes (and thus learning) and encoding of certain memories, as already well established in neuroscience, supports in some respects Piaget’s theory of intellectual development and explains why students fail to “understand” some abstract knowledge and develop certain forms of abstract thinking typically required in middle and secondary school courses, especially in math and science, no matter how hard they and their teachers try. Concerned curricula and courses should thus be explicitly designed in terms of the actual brain potentials at any given age. No cognitive or behavioral knowledge should be included at any educational level unless learners are “ready” then to learn and encode and process required knowledge in corresponding brain parts. In contrast, certain other brain parts do not get “naturally” developed on their own. Their development must be induced at an early age through encoding memories they are supposed to accommodate. In other words, learning is sometimes a pre-requisite for brain development. In contrast to brain areas mentioned above, and in agreement in certain respects with Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of cognitive development, certain cortical areas must be explicitly engaged in encoding respective memories at an early age in order to get anatomically developed. Among these areas are the Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas concerned with language, especially when it comes to reading and writing and learning non-native languages. Other cerebral areas fall in this category like those concerned with arithmetic and music. Neuroscience has shown that the sooner children begin to learn such matters, the better concerned brain parts get developed and the easier for children to master required knowledge. More importantly, learning such matters at an early age helps

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develop brain parts other than those dedicated to accommodate corresponding memories. For example, learning music before the age of seven helps children develop their corpus callosum that connects the two brain hemispheres and other association areas in the cerebral cortex that are critical for cognition and learning knowledge of any type as discussed below. Curriculum developers must then reconsider certain matters like music and non-native languages that are traditionally considered as secondary or worthy of only extra-curricular activities, and incorporate them as integral parts of primary education onward.

3.5.2 Selective Adaptive Encoding Memory encoding involves selective and mutual adaptation of both the object of encoding (whether concrete or abstract, an entity or an event, a concept or a procedure, etc.) and the mind and brain engaged in encoding. Selective adaptation is especially important in the case of transaction with the outside world. In such an event, and as mentioned above (Sect. 3.2), only a portion of afferent data emitted by physical realities and detected by our senses is actually processed and adapted to our needs in terms of existing knowledge to form a partial conceptual image of any given reality (Fig. 3.1). The quality of that image is determined by the significance of the adaptation in question relative to the purpose behind the transaction. Empirical data emanating from a physical reality and detected by our senses are relayed to our brain where they undergo a two-stage analysis-synthesis or deconstruction-reconstruction process that involves continuous data filtering and refinement. At first, afferent data are unconsciously and involuntarily processed in dedicated parts of a relay brain system consisting the brainstem, cerebellum, and particularly the thalamus in the diencephalon (Fig. 3.4). As a consequence, only a small portion of the data (of the order of the thousandth or 10−3 ) is preserved to form during a small fraction of a second the perceptual image of the physical reality in question (Fig. 3.1). The image consists of what the relay system, and especially the thalamus, preserves of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and/or tactile input. Once formed, the perceptual image is ushered by the thalamus to the cerebral cortex where it undergoes analysis or deconstruction (Fig. 3.5). Each of the five types of sensory input is broken down separately, but in parallel with the others, into discrete unimodal packets by the concerned cortical region, also unconsciously and involuntarily at this stage. A unimodal packet of neuronal signals corresponds to a particular aspect or property of a given sensory input. For instance, visual input from a given object may be broken down, among others, into the object shape, color, size, and position, and the unimodal packet corresponding to each property is processed separately in a dedicated cortical area of the occipital lobe in parallel with other packets. Similar analysis into discrete unimodal packets takes place separately, but simultaneously, with auditory and other sensory signals (indicated by the long, dashed arrow emanating from the perceptual system in Fig. 3.5), and analyzed packets are then gradually combined together in a synthesis process.

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Fig. 3.5 Analysis and synthesis of filtered sensory input from a physical reality (perceptual image) for the cognitive reconstruction of the reality into a conceptual image. The entire process is reiterated until satisfied enough with how the latter image has been encoded to retain it in memory

As the perceptual image already deconstructed into discrete unimodal packets begins to get reconstructed (synthesis) in the cerebral cortex, a diversity of cortical areas and subcortical regions including those dedicated to rational and axio-affective functions are induced to contribute to the reconstruction process (synthesis of unimodal packets). A conceptual image is then gradually formed, now consciously and voluntarily, in a series of association areas (first unimodal and then multimodal) in the cerebral cortex to make sense of the perceptual input. Ample details about the analysis-synthesis process are provided elsewhere (Halloun, 2017, 2019). Let us only note here that formation of the conceptual image engages memory resources (prior cognitive and behavioral knowledge), and it involves: (a) evaluation of the perceptual image following its deconstruction and then reconstruction into a given conceptual image, (b) filtering out what is now consciously determined to be secondary or unnecessary information in the former image, (c) repeating the analysis-synthesis process to build a refined conceptual image following successive filtration, (d) redirecting our senses, following output evaluation, to bring in more sensory data from the outside world, if necessary, and form a new regulated perceptual image, (e) processing that image as before to form a new regulated and elaborated conceptual image, and (f) repeating all preceding steps as discussed in the following section until we get satisfied with the conceptual image, i.e., until that image is properly adapted to our needs, including the need to improve prior knowledge invoked in the transaction.

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Many axio-affective factors significantly contribute to the entire process, perhaps the most important of which in education are those concerned with attention and motivation (Sect. 3.8). The better our attention is focused on truly primary aspects of a given physical reality (or abstract entity or process) as determined by the purpose for which the transaction is carried out, the more meaningful and significant the outcome. Aside from that purpose, our selective attention is primarily governed by our emotions. The more we are driven by positive and constructive emotions, the more meaningfully our attention is focused on truly primary aspects and the better the synthesis of analyzed perceptual input is made to make sense of afferent empirical data. In contrast, the more we are driven at the time by negative and destructive emotions (like disinterest, distrust, fear, anger and the like), the more we get distracted from primary aspects, the less coherent and meaningful the synthesized image, and the more prone we are to come about with the wrong outcome. The outcome is two-fold. It is first about encoding the conceptual image that is reiteratively evaluated and regulated following repetitive filtering, analysis, and synthesis of afferent perceptual data (Fig. 3.5). Second, the transaction results in a change of memory resources (prior knowledge) invoked for processing the perceptual image and encoding the conceptual image. In other words, the outcome consists of mutually adapted conceptual image and prior knowledge, i.e., of an adaptation to each other of newly encoded memory and related pre-existing memory so as to bring about new emergent knowledge or memory state. When the transaction involves negotiations with other people, other physical realities, and/or resources providing information about various elements in the transaction, adaptation would then be also made to, and perhaps mutually with, these additional elements, which would bring additional features to the emergent memory state. Most importantly, the better a desired new memory is adapted to and integrated with existing memory, particularly pre-existing memory patterns, the better and the faster the encoding, and the better the chance for eventual consolidation (Sect. 3.6.3). In the shopping example of Sect. 2.2, the closer the distribution of various items in the new store matches the distribution pattern in other stores you are familiar with, the stronger and longer the new store blueprint will last in your memory and the better the chance it stands to be eventually sustained in LTM. This pattern-dependence has though its repercussions. When pre-existing memory patterns are deficient in any respect, they may prevent encoding new memory from taking place altogether, or they may lead to encoding flawed memory and thus erroneous knowledge. Such flawed memory may also result from wrong adaptation: (a) to what it corresponds to in the real world, e.g., from erroneous selective attention and filtering of afferent data and/or (b) to sound but inappropriate prior knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is valid for other situations but not the situation at hand. In any case, newly encoded memory with inherent or consequential flaws has detrimental consequences on future learning and subsequent memory encoding, as well as memory consolidation and retrieval. This is the case of so-called misconceptions. These are flawed conceptions that are incongruent or incommensurable with academically and professionally accepted alternatives. An example of misconceptions is the common belief that many people hold that the Sun turns around the Earth and not the other way

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around. In such an event, and if misconceptions and the like make their way to LTM, they subsequently bring forth further misconceptions in LTM, and they may even lead to the disintegration of any new STM that might be correctly formed at a later stage but that is in conflict with them. Educational research has long and widely established that misconceptions lead to further misconceptions and to preventing meaningful and sustainable learning from taking place in formal education. Selective adaptation of new knowledge to and with prior knowledge must then be explicitly attended to in designing and implementing learning activities. Learners’ attention needs to be directed to the proper information in the outside world and to the appropriate knowledge they already hold in memory. They also need to be guided to properly analyze afferent data and synthesize the outcome into coherent images, ideally of systemic nature, and to engage in purposeful insightful dialectics that help bringing about the appropriate emergent memory state. At all stages, learners need to learn how to master their constructive PFC modulatory functions, and especially motivation, so as to inhibit counterpart functions in their limbic systems from taking selective adaptation in memory encoding into futile paths (Sect. 3.8).

3.5.3 Reiterative Ontogenetic Encoding Deconstruction and reconstruction of physical realities (in fact, of their perceptual images) in a transaction with the outside world proceeds sequentially (serially and hierarchically) in certain respects, and in parallel in other respects. Yet any process may be reiterated numerous times and the outcome reversed at any time. For instance, analysis of unimodal packets in the deconstruction phase proceeds simultaneously in parallel for different sensory packets, and serially for each packet. Similar reiterative series and parallel processes take place for encoding any memory in the absence of transaction with the outside world. Memory development beginning with encoding is ontogenetic, i.e., multi-staged and generative in the sense that each step, mainly in the sequential part: (a) depends on prior steps, and (b) determines subsequent steps. Meanwhile, each step depends on the overall state of our pre-existing memory in all epistemic, procedural, and axio-affective respects. This has many important consequences. Take, for instance, planning for the future and anticipating future events, including possible outcomes of our own actions. The better our memories of past experiences are structured, the better our prospects for success in the future, and especially for anticipating and confronting possible challenges. This gives us a sense of readiness to confront related tasks, and it thus helps us build up our self-confidence to engage successfully in such tasks, including course assignments and exams. In contrast, and like in the case of misconceptions, the more we hold “bad” or “wrong” memories, the more we are prone to encode memories of the like. In this sense, ontogenetic encoding gives brain plasticity a purposeful, somewhat causal but not deterministic meaning since

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any encoding step or outcome may be reversed at any time, though this becomes hard if not impossible to accomplish once an encoded memory is consolidated in LTM (Sect. 3.6). Any memory encoding step may be eventually evaluated, reiterated, and regulated, even reversed altogether if necessary. Reiteration is necessary to bring encoding to a satisfactory state, whether or not in transaction with the outside world. In the event of such transaction, an entire encoding PI–CI cycle, beginning, as indicated in Figs. 3.1, 3.2 and 3.5, with the unconscious and involuntary formation of a perceptual image (PI) and ending with the conscious and voluntary formation of a conceptual image (CI), is reiterated numerous times in order to gradually: (a) tease out all unnecessary secondary information from either image (PI or CI), and (b) add all pertinent primary information pertaining to the physical reality that images correspond to (Fig. 3.6). Reiteration of PI–CI cycles may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, or even hours and days following the end of the actual transaction with the concerned physical reality. This brings us back to the issue of so-called working memory and short-term memory that is better addressed at this point. In each PI–CI cycle, and as indicated in Fig. 3.5, the perceptual image (PI) is broken down into discrete unimodal packets that are further analyzed and broken apart (unimodal analysis). Analyzed packets are then synthesized, first each packet

Fig. 3.6 Helicoidal and regulatory reiteration of perceptual image—conceptual image cycles. When the conceptual image (CI) is of a physical system that is an instance of a particular pattern (Fig. 3.2), the image CIj constructed by the end of a cycle j is developed and/or refined in the following cycle j + 1 so as to better meet the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1, especially in relation to the system function and structure, and better reflect the pattern in question. The partially dashed line between CI3 and CI4 indicates that a given cycle may be interrupted for any reason. PFC would ensure that the information constructed by then is retained in STM for as long as needed, and would bring the task back on track from where it got interrupted once the cycle resumed

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separately (unimodal synthesis), and then all packets combined together in a multimodal synthesis to form the conceptual image (CI). An entire PI–CI cycle, and some reiterations of it, can be partially represented by any of the “working memory” (WM) models proposed in the literature for the formation of epistemic knowledge (e.g., Baddeley, 2012; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Cowan, 2014; Pickering, 2006). This of course assumes that WM models were valid for any type of knowledge or memory distinguished in Box 3.1, and not just for epistemic, and more specifically factual knowledge. However, WM is thought to last for a maximum of 30 s. PI–CI cycles may need to be reiterated for longer than that, and often they do in education like in everyday life, in order to satisfactorily encode the CI of any physical reality and regulate invoked prior memories. For instance, in the case of our shopping example (Sect. 2.2), building a blueprint of the store layout (conceptual image) requires multiple cycles that take many minutes and perhaps hours to complete. The common WM model is thus not good enough for an entire memory encoding process that lasts more than 30 s. The WM outcome often needs to be temporarily retained for longer periods which cannot be done in LTM that is dedicated to sustained and not to transient knowledge. Newly formed engram systems need thus to be retained in an intermediate status between WM and LTM (Rose et al., 2016), a status that can only be provided by a short-term memory (STM) that may last for minutes, hours, days, and even weeks (Fig. 3.7). Memory encoded as WM at the end of each PI–CI cycle or of a limited number of cycles can be retained—and processed—in STM for as long as needed beyond the WM lifetime of about 30 s. It may subsequently be dropped out of memory altogether or it may make its way to LTM following proper consolidation (Sect. 3.6). In formal education, students have to retain for long hours a newly encoded memory (new knowledge of any sort), whether pertaining to the conceptual image of a physical reality or to an abstract entity or process. Newly encoded memory cannot make its way to LTM, even if retained for days or weeks without revisiting it, especially when students are disinterested, disenchanted, or for whatever reason when constructive

Fig. 3.7 Sequential processing of a perceptual image in memories of increasing lifetime. The conceptual image (CI) is constantly evaluated and regulated as indicated in Figs. 3.1 and 3.5 (not shown here for aesthetic simplicity), and processing in working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM) with the active participation of long-term memory (LTM) is repeatedly reiterated (Fig. 3.6) until we are satisfied enough with CI to start consolidating it in LTM as indicated with the rightmost dashed arrow

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affective and rational controls are not strong enough to eventually retain the new knowledge for good in LTM. Such knowledge can only be retained temporarily in STM then, but not in WM that has a very limited lifespan. For instance, when students lack interest in course materials, they retain required knowledge only long enough to pass certain quiz or exam. Once the purpose served and requirements met, retained knowledge is dropped out of memory altogether (or perhaps inhibited from being consciously remembered and retrieved). The corresponding engram systems get then dissociated, which is another aspect of encoding reversibility. That is why, students who are able to do well on a certain quiz or exam are unable to do as well on the same task a short while afterwards.

3.5.4 Long Active Encoding A newly encoded memory needs to be retained long enough as STM (days, even weeks) to have the chance to be eventually consolidated and sustained as LTM. During that time, the memory needs to be continuously and actively processed in ways to engage as many brain regions as possible in the formation and gradual expansion of the respective engram system. An engram and especially an engram system making up a particular memory have their neurons distributed across different and often distant brain regions, especially discrete specialized areas and association areas in the cerebral cortex. The encoding process, i.e., the synaptic networking of various neurons to form the memory engram system, is a highly coordinated collective endeavor that involves these and other brain parts that control various stages of the encoding process without necessarily supplying neurons to the memory engrams. For example, Broca’s and Wernicke’s cortical areas are the main neuron suppliers for language memories but not the only brain parts concerned with synaptic networking of the corresponding engrams. Synaptic networking of language engrams involves areas located in the prefrontal region of the cerebral cortex (PFC) and the hippocampus located in the limbic system, both of which being actively involved in encoding all sorts of memory, as well as the cerebellum located in the lower back (caudal) part of the brain and concerned primarily with motor functions in addition to certain cognitive functions (Fig. 3.4). PFC primarily governs the deconstruction and reconstruction of a perceptual image during any transaction with the outside world (Figs. 3.5 and 3.7), and it undertakes a similar job with WM and STM during non-experiential learning that does not involve such transaction. With its executive functions, this cortical region determines which prior knowledge needs to be invoked for the encoding process and how it gets engaged in the process, checks for congruence between newly encoded memory and existing memory patterns, and regulates new and old memories as necessary. The hippocampus is dedicated to engaging appropriate association areas, like in the case of the reconstruction of a perceptual image, and to binding neurons of any engram or engram system (synaptic networking) to form an STM memory that may be coherent and cohesive enough to be consolidated in LTM at a later stage. At an early age, the

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hippocampus begins its work by retrieving required knowledge designated by PFC, then later in life, PFC takes over that task for non-episodic memory as discussed in Sects. 3.6 and 3.7. The hippocampus then works on establishing and strengthening synaptic connections within new engrams and between these and concerned engrams already in memory. An exchange of neuronal signals constantly takes place between the hippocampus and concerned PFC areas, as well as between them and concerned discrete and association cortical areas that supply neurons needed for the formation of new engrams and/or that accommodate pre-existing memories invoked to this end. Encoding a new memory is a long and tedious process that does not stop by the end of a conscious learning experience, whether or not transaction with the outside world is involved. Even if not entertained consciously, encoding goes on subconsciously for several days after the conscious experience that triggered it comes to an end. The hippocampus takes at least 48 h to relatively stabilize newly encoded memory, and it does the most significant part of its work during slow-wave deep sleep. During that time and beyond, the hippocampus strengthens synaptic connections between neurons in every engram and an entire engram system—while other synapses may get dissociated—to the point of letting the entire synaptic network stable and sturdy enough for the corresponding memory to be eventually accessible, retrievable, and consolidated. Before stabilization, newly encoded memory remains extremely labile and difficult, if not impossible, to be successfully retrieved and deployed for any practical purpose. This explains why, for example, students cannot and should not be subject to any form of assessment within 48 h of their exposure to new course material. Efficiency of memory encoding, especially in terms of setting the stage for successful access, retrieval, and consolidation, depends on a number of factors. Among these factors are those pertaining to encoding modulators (Sect. 3.8), congruence between newly encoded memory and memory patterns in LTM (Sect. 3.6.3), and, in the case of learning about physical realities, how actively or interactively one engages in transaction with such realities. Markant et al. (2016) report on a series of studies that show that encoding episodic memory is significantly better when personally involved in a given event actively than when having other people tell you about that event or take you through the event as a mere observer. The authors hence reported that manipulating physical objects leads to “a richer representation in memory” of these objects and their locations and “faster recognition during a subsequent test than viewing videos of the same interactions” or watching somebody or a robot manipulating the same objects in front of you. In the same spirit, walking through a new grocery store or a new neighborhood helps you develop a blueprint or a map of the place in your mind better than, say, having somebody convey you “along the same path in a wheelchair” (ibid.) and people who find their way in a new neighborhood while driving through develop a better memory of the route they follow than companion passengers who sit in the car looking around. Active memory encoding through experiential learning and physical movement and manipulations provides the opportunity to engage a diversity of brain regions dedicated to different knowledge types (epistemic, procedural, axio-affective), which is very important for ending up with a relatively stable new memory. In particular,

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the bigger the number of brain regions engaged in encoding epistemic memories and the more diverse they are when it comes to procedural knowledge (perceptual, reasoning, and motor skills), the more stable and the more sustainable these memories are. Thus, students learn materials better (more meaningfully) when they actively participate in laboratory experiments or project-based learning than when they sit and observe a teacher’s demonstration of the same activities. In the former event, students engage brain regions dedicated to sensory and motor skills, and even reasoning skills (especially those of insightful dialectics), that they cannot engage in listening to lecture and watching demonstrations. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, students engage then more axio-affective brain regions and take better control of their learning experience, which is highly crucial for meaningful learning (Sect. 3.8). This brings us to a crucial issue regarding the role of perceptions and of concrete thinking in active memory encoding and learning in general. Epistemic memory development relies heavily at an early age on posterior brain regions dedicated to perceptual memory and to processing of perceptual information (context-dependent concrete thinking) under the control of the hippocampus. At adolescence, a gradual shift starts taking place toward anterior brain regions dedicated to conceptual memory and to processing of conceptual information (context-independent abstract thinking) under the control of PFC. Concrete thinking, i.e., thinking about and in relation to physical realities (objects and events) prevails in our thoughts until adolescence. Perception dedicated brain regions continue to be involved in abstract thinking afterwards, and throughout life, though often subconsciously and implicitly. This is for instance the case of certain abstract mathematical concepts and operations and of the interpretation of metaphors. Certain arithmetic operations, like addition and subtraction, but not multiplication and division that cannot be concretized in childhood, may at first, and should be carried out based on perceptual experiences with concrete realities like putting two pens next to three other pens and counting the entire number of pens to realize that “2 + 3 = 5”. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 115), “metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.)” which, of course, engages perception dedicated cortical areas.

3.5.5 Lifestyle Dependent Encoding “A sound mind in a sound body” is an old saying that applies particularly to learning and memory development. For instance, a good diet, low in fatty acids and rich in sugar, especially at a young age, is at least as crucial to various cognitive processes as it is for a good physical health. More importantly, regular physical movement and exercise while awake, and long and deep sleep at night are indispensable for memory encoding and consolidation, primarily because of their impact on the hippocampus

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structure and function. For a quick and clear overview of the impact of these and other major physical and emotional lifestyle factors on memory development and learning, one may refer to the “scoping review … of [related] peer-reviewed research published between 2000 and 2020” done by Ekman et al. (2021). The hippocampus interacts with other brain parts to play a prime role in memory encoding as mentioned above and memory consolidation as discussed below. It is significantly engaged in many critical cognitive processes and controls involved in any transaction, as well as in engram formation, elaboration, sustainability, and activation for processing and deployment. The hippocampus efficiency is determined by its anatomy, size, and function, all of which are in turn determined by many environmental factors and particularly one’s own well-being and lifestyle. The bigger the hippocampus, the better its efficiency, and thus the efficiency of memory encoding and related processes. A healthy, obesity preemptive diet at a young age helps developing the hippocampus volume, which subsequently improves the efficiency of various cognitive processes at any stage of life. Like obesity, stress has a detrimental effect on the hippocampus size and function, and thus on a person’s capacity to learn, especially at a young age, an effect that may last through adulthood. While learning takes place consciously, physical movement and exercise significantly enhance the hippocampus performance in various memory processes. Moreover, physical activity can make up, at any age, for any deficiency in hippocampal growth due to nutritional problems (or stress, to a certain extent). Therefore, the old traditional practice of having young students sit for two or more hours in a row on their school desks and limiting their movement during recess prevents the hippocampus from doing its job properly in memory development which has a detrimental impact on learning. After the first inception of a given memory, and as mentioned above, the hippocampus continues working subconsciously for long hours, even days, on processing that memory, enhancing it, and eventually sustaining it in LTM. At any age, but especially at a young age, the best part of the hippocampus’ work in these respects comes during the slow-wave phase of deep sleep. The longer that phase lasts, the better and especially the more stable the encoded memory, and the better chance it stands to be consolidated and, when needed, accessed and retrieved for efficient deployment in any thought or action.

3.6 Memory Consolidation A newly encoded memory cannot be immediately sustained as a long-term memory (LTM). At first inception, it can only be retained as short-term memory (STM) that may eventually be sustained following due consolidation, i.e., enrichment and reinforcement through recurrent rehearsal under opportune conditions. Without conscious consolidation, a new engram system, like any of its individual engrams, will be dissociated and the newly encoded memory lost, thus the newly developed knowledge “forgotten”.

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On a practical side, take for instance the shopping example of Sect. 2.2. A first visit to a grocery store is never sufficient to sustain the entire store floorplan in mind and to remember eventually where to find any item and how to proceed every step of the way with the entire shopping experience in this particular store. Recurrent visits are needed to: (a) focus your attention on more and more salient aspects of the store system, (b) relate those aspects efficiently to each other and to prior knowledge including patterns you know about in other grocery store systems, and (c) help you as a consequence to firmly retain in mind (consolidate) all you need to know and remember for speedy and enjoyable shopping at the new grocery store and other stores. Encoding any type of memory consists of establishing synaptic links between neurons from a variety of specialized brain regions and cortical association areas in order to constitute an engram system that consists of a multitude of engrams, with each engram having a unique structure and function. As mentioned above, initial memory encoding brings about a labile engram system that is subject to significant change and that may even be dissociated and lost altogether, with neuronal synaptic connections disconnected. Newly encoded memory needs consolidation in order to be sustained as LTM and efficiently accessed and retrieved for any cognitive or behavioral purpose. Memory consolidation consists of further diversifying neurons and synaptic connections and strengthening the connections enough to prevent the corresponding engram(s) from being eventually dissociated. It may also involve losing some synaptic connections in particular specialized discrete brain areas. Memory consolidation has to take place in favorable conditions, some pertaining to the nature of human mind and brain, others to the experiential context that is critical to accomplish the consolidation process in meaningful ways. Conditions that we deem most important in formal education, particularly systemic education, are outlined in the following five subsections along with underlying cognitive premises and some pedagogical implications.

3.6.1 Distributed Collective Consolidation Memory encoding involves many brain regions (Sect. 3.5.4). The more a newly encoded engram system spreads across a variety of regions, and the stronger its synaptic connections, the better it stands a chance to be retained as STM until it gets duly consolidated. Because of many constraints, some of which related to limited attention and processing capacity of various regions, newly encoded memory can never be rich and strong enough to be sustained for good in the brain as LTM. Time and proper effort are needed for memory consolidation, especially for engrams to be distributed widely and wisely enough in the brain, and synapses to be strengthened well enough under propitious conditions (or disconnected in some instances). In particular, memory consolidation is contingent on the following factors:

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1. The number and diversity of cortical areas, especially in memory types (Box 3.1), and of association areas contributing to engrams’ makeup. 2. The distance separating these areas in the cerebral cortex. 3. The richness of prior knowledge invoked in the encoding process. 4. The number of neurons contributed from each brain region, especially the cerebral cortex. 5. The number and strength of synaptic connections between neurons (Fig. 3.3). 6. The diversity in the functionality of areas involved in synaptic bonding (e.g., various emotional and somatic feeling controls among other modulatory factors discussed in Sect. 3.8). 7. The multiplicity of engram systems encoding the same memory from a mix of concrete and abstract perspectives. The more significant (bigger, higher, more abundant, etc.) a listed factor, the better the consolidation of any type of memory we are concerned about in education (Box 3.1). Take the shopping example of Sect. 2.2. In simple terms, the more you relate the location of a given item on a specific shelf to surrounding shelves, aisles, and other reference points in the same store, and the more you relate that location to corresponding ones in other stores you are familiar with, the better that location will be retained in your mind (as STM first) and remembered next time you visit this store. Distributed encoding and consolidation are even more important for abstract knowledge, especially with respect to factor 7 above. Newly encoded abstract knowledge stands a better chance to last as STM and to be subsequently consolidated as LTM if its engrams are spread across a diverse mix of sensory areas concerned with concrete, perceptual knowledge as well as across a variety of conceptual areas concerned with abstract, symbolic knowledge, and thus any abstract idea is better consolidated with a variety of abstract and concrete representations (e.g., verbal, textual, iconic, geometric, graphic, diagrammatic). For example, students stand a better chance to retain a new mathematical theorem or scientific law in mind if respective verbal statements come with a mix of geometric diagrams, graphic representations, and algebraic equations. Memory encoding, as already mentioned, involves connecting neurons from different brain regions and engaging particular association areas in the cerebral cortex. No one brain region is sufficient to consolidate, store and retrieve any memory. Consolidation has to engage the widest possible diversity of brain regions, especially cortical connection areas, and establish a rich mix of short-range and longrange synaptic connections. The more long-range areas are involved in learning and memory formation, and the more distant those areas are from each are, and thus the wider the variety of association areas, the more meaningful and productive learning becomes and the better are the chances of memory sustainability in LTM. This is particularly true for explicit, reflective and non-reflexive cognitive and behavioral memory.

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As mentioned in the previous section, some brain regions involved in memory encoding, like PFC, the hippocampus, and axio-affective memory modulators discussed later in Sect. 3.8, do not necessarily contribute neurons to the engram system making up the encoded memory. They intervene only to help establishing initial synaptic links during memory encoding, and continue their work afterwards to strengthen these links to the point that they can be sustained without their intervention, i.e., to the point of consolidating the encoded memory to a level that turns it into LTM. At that point, the brain regions in question, which we will hereafter refer to as engram regulators, may no longer be needed to sustain the synaptic connections in the memory engrams. For example, the hippocampus establishes the first synaptic links among various neurons of an engram system that makes up any kind of memory. Communication among different neurons in any engram goes then entirely through the hippocampus, though it may not necessarily contribute neurons to the engram. The hippocampus is known to contribute neurons only to engrams of episodic memory. Once an engram system is established, the hippocampus continues working to strengthen synaptic links within the newly encoded memory, and between it and existing LTM patterns, so that those links may gradually and eventually become strong enough to be sustained independently of the hippocampus (except for episodic memory). The encoded memory would then be consolidated and its status would evolve from STM to LTM. Memory consolidation is age-dependent in many respects. At early age and through adolescence, memory encoding and consolidation are significantly governed by the hippocampus (Sect. 3.5.4). During this period, predominantly short-range connections are established between neurons located in nearby brain regions to form memory engrams. Afterwards, concerned PFC areas start taking over the control of memory consolidation allowing for more and more long-range neural connections in engram structure. Among other things, this allows for taking advantage of increasingly more prior knowledge into increasingly more distributed memory networks. Immaturity of PFC at early stages of life may prevent access to, and/or meaningful activation of, prior knowledge when this involves long-range connectivity. In contrast, the shift in certain consolidation controls from hippocampus to PFC comes with a disadvantage. PFC takes more time than the hippocampus to establish needed connections, which is somewhat understandable when we remember that PFC is mostly concerned with long-range connections while the hippocampus, mostly with short-range connections. At any age, and in any cognitive situation, brain regions other than those involved in encoding memory are additionally involved in the consolidation process, and the memory is continuously modified, reconstructed, as a consequence. Memory consolidation is thus not a mere reinforcement of the original state of an encoded memory. Memory consolidation is dynamic in the sense that it always brings about a change (for better or worse) in the original memory state, hence a change in the knowledge it is about, no matter what that knowledge might be. This has many major pedagogical implications, among which we cite only three at this point. First, and as discussed next, consolidation cannot take place by simply revisiting a given piece of knowledge in the same context in which it was originally

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introduced. This may be only good for succeeding to deploy that knowledge in that same context (like going back shopping in the same grocery store), but not in different contexts. Second, different contexts and thus different brain regions activated require different cognitive processing approaches and thus different learning methods, and they bring about complementary but different outcomes that need to be insightfully coordinated (Sect. 3.6.4). Third, following each learning episode in a specific context, one needs to consciously revisit prior episodes and relate the outcomes in all episodes, i.e., establish a solid synaptic network among various engrams created in various episodes. Otherwise, and especially if appropriate association areas are not engaged, these engrams would be dissociated, and memory would not be actually consolidated. Whence the importance to systematically recap at the end of every lesson what has been learned in that lesson and systemically relate various parts of newly developed knowledge to each other and to prior knowledge.

3.6.2 Rehearsal Dependent Consolidation Memory consolidation is not a spontaneous or entirely automatic process. Engrams cannot spread on their own across diverse and distant regions of the brain, and especially across different specialized cortical areas and into a mix of short-range and long-range cortical association areas. The mind has to induce the brain to do so. As the old saying “practice makes perfect” goes, adequate and sufficient practice of any new knowledge is indispensable to sustain it as long-term memory, i.e., conscious and purposeful rehearsal of newly encoded memory is indispensable for its consolidation. Memory rehearsal should take place in propitious contexts for consolidation to succeed, and practice should not always consist of repeating the same drill over and over again. This may work in some instances of implicit sensorimotor memory, like, for example in the case of learning how to hammer a nail or ride a bicycle, or in a few instances of explicit epistemic memory like the memorization of the multiplication table at an early age before we grasp the meaning of multiplication in middle school. However, such drilling does not help consolidating other sorts of memory, namely explicit, reflective and non-reflexive cognitive and behavioral memory that we are mostly concerned about in formal education. Take for example the case of developing persuasive writing skills or of understanding a given mathematical theorem or scientific law. Rehearsal in similar literary contexts, one time after another, does not significantly help students develop their persuasive skills. Changing contexts, and especially bringing in cases from nonliterary disciplines, like social, economic, natural, or life sciences, is much more efficient in this respect, and perhaps the only way for meaningful, productive, and sustainable learning (LTM). The same goes in mathematics and science where learning becomes increasingly more meaningful and better sustainable when students practice a theorem or a law in more and more new contexts especially contexts that

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traditionally make the object of different branches in a given discipline or even better of traditionally distinct and remote disciplines and fields like arts, humanities, and social and economic sciences. Rehearsal that needs to take place in a variety of contexts should be carried in positive and constructive axio-affective conditions (Sect. 3.8) and adequately spaced in time. Consolidating newly formed memory is a slow process that lasts for weeks, even months, and that proceeds gradually in distinct specialized and association cortical areas. Rehearsal spacing in the last respect, i.e., in the case of not closely related contexts that, say, make traditionally the object of different disciplines, is particularly crucial in order not to overburden the hippocampus and brain parts concerned with attention, especially the thalamus and concerned PFC areas. Rehearsal done in different contexts and requiring the incorporation of neurons and/or synaptic connections across different and distant brain regions are better paced in ways to allow gradual engram ramification into these regions. Furthermore, and like for memory encoding, the best part of memory consolidation takes place during sleep following a given rehearsal exercise. To make a long story short, the consolidation process cannot be accelerated beyond certain limits imposed by the structural and functional nature of our human brain. Consolidation efficiency, and thus duration depend significantly on prior knowledge. It may proceed faster and more efficaciously when prior knowledge is well organized, and especially consciously organized around regularities and patterns, and when new knowledge (new memory engrams) is consciously encoded in congruence and/or consistency with such patterns as discussed next.

3.6.3 Pattern Embedded Consolidation Prior knowledge plays a major role in memory consolidation like it does in memory encoding. Consolidation involves capturing regularities between prior knowledge and newly encoded knowledge, and determining how well the latter fit with LTM patterns. Memory consolidation can be accomplished best if, and perhaps only if, newly encoded memory (STM) is congruent, not in conflict, with existing LTM patterns so that it gets embedded with these patterns, i.e., either (a) integrated in LTM patterns so as to complete these patterns or enhance them if it relates directly to them, or (b) incorporated along with these patterns if the new memory is totally new and unrelated to existing LTM patterns. Patterning, a natural spontaneous tendency of human mind and brain (Sect. 1.4.2), is crucial to memory consolidation in LTM, both at the neuronal level of the brain and the conceptual level of the mind. LTM engrams manifest structural patterns in the brain, and engram creation, activation, and consolidation involve patterns of neuronal signals flow and of processing across various brain regions. Furthermore, neuronal brain patterns favor conceptual mind patterns and vice versa. The more we focus

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consciously and purposely on conceptual patterns in developing new knowledge, structure-wise and process-wise, the better the chance for sustained learning, i.e., for the new knowledge to be sustained in LTM and, thus, for corresponding engrams to be physically consolidated as LTM. Beginning with memory encoding during a transaction with the outside world, and all the way through memory consolidation, patterning entails particularly a sort of nomic isomorphism between a conceptual image (CI) and the physical reality (PR) it represents (Fig. 3.1) or set of such realities (Fig. 3.2), on the one hand, and between that image and related LTM conceptual patterns on the other (and actually LTM engrams’ neural patterns). We are here borrowing Hempel’s idea (1965) of nomic isomorphism to refer to a syntactic and functional resemblance or correspondence between a given CI and the PR or set of PRs CI represents, as well as between CI and related LTM patterns. CI–PR correspondence entails also a morphological isomorphism, i.e., a resemblance or at least a one-to-one correspondence between individual primary PR constituents and properties and CI constituents and properties. Syntactic resemblance in nomic isomorphism is a resemblance between relationships among CI constituents and corresponding: (a) real relationships among primary PR constituents and properties of interest, and (b) conceptual relationships within related LTM. Functional resemblance is about the purposes CI, PR, and LTM patterns are meant to serve, each in its own world. From a systemic perspective, nomic isomorphism is about resemblance or one-to-one correspondence in the function facet in the scope dimension of the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1), the two structure facets in the constitution dimension, and the processes facet in the performance dimension (Sect. 1.2.1). CI–PR nomic isomorphism is important for CI to be a valid and reliable meaningful representation of PR (or set of PRs), and CI–LTM isomorphism in terms of neuronal and conceptual patterns is crucial for CI to be embedded in or along these patterns and thus consolidated and sustained in LTM. CI nomic isomorphism with both the outside world and the inner world of mind and brain patterns is necessary not only for consolidation, but also for the consolidated CI to be readily accessible and successfully retrievable and deployable in future situations dealing with the same and similar physical realities (Sect. 3.7). Encoding and consolidating any type of memory usually depends on a mix of perceptual and conceptual LTM patterns. In fact, memory processes and outcomes depend primarily and overwhelmingly on perceptual LTM patterns at early school age, i.e., patterns of unconscious processing of sensory perceptions like in the formation of a perceptual image of a physical reality, as well as patterns of conscious perceptions-based concrete thinking in mostly cortical areas dedicated to experiences relying entirely on our senses. As we advance in age and schooling years, and with proper training, we can gradually move to depend more on conceptual patterns of abstract thinking than on perceptual patterns of concrete thinking. The shift to predominantly conceptual, abstract patterns becomes possible in adulthood (Shing & Brod, 2016), and the level of expertise, and thus of productivity and creativity in any field, is then primarily determined by the extent to which such shift is made. Systemic thinking can most effectively and efficiently allow the realization of pattern-based

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nomic isomorphism between the real world and the mental realm (Fig. 3.2), as well as within this realm, but especially the transcendence above a perceptual perspective on the world in the direction of a conceptual pattern-based perspective, and thus the move toward creative and innovative meaningful and sustained learning. Should we consciously ignore structural or procedural patterns in memory consolidation, STM cannot turn into LTM and constituent engrams will eventually get dissociated and corresponding knowledge dropped out of memory altogether. More importantly, consolidation is far more likely, and far more meaningfully, to take place when a given pattern cuts across a diversity of contexts to the extent of becoming context independent, which requires that the corresponding engrams spread across different brain parts and engage a variety of association areas in the cerebral cortex. In academic sense, this translates into the pattern being shared by different parts or branches of a given discipline and, more significantly, by different disciplines and fields. Focus on structural and procedural patterns in memory consolidation should not be confused with redundancy, i.e., repetitive rehearsal with exactly the same objects of learning and/or in in the same contexts. Such redundancy may somewhat work for implicit sensorimotor memory but not quite for explicit epistemic and rational memory. In fact, redundancy has a detrimental effect on explicit memory consolidation because it works against the natural function of brain parts that control these processes like the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the thalamus. PFC tends to naturally prevent—and abhor—overlap of similar explicit memory traces, whether being entire engrams or parts of an engram or an engram system. Similarly, and through the control of attention, the thalamus of the diencephalon also prevents redundant information from being processed in explicit memory consolidation. In transaction with physical realities, the thalamus may even prevent redundant sensory information detected by our senses from making its way to sub-cortical areas as part of a perceptual image (Figs. 3.1 and 3.5) and from being transmitted to the brain for processing in the first place. That is why, for example, it often does not help students understand course material by repeating the same thing over and over again in class.

3.6.4 Insightful Challenging Consolidation Evaluation and regulation of memory and related processes are important at all stages of any memory development and deployment act, but especially during memory consolidation that needs to be carried out insightfully in order to free the memory of concern from any flaw that may prevent or disturb its consolidation, and to allow its access and retrieval efficiently for deployment whenever and wherever needed. Memory consolidation and especially access and retrieval can further benefit significantly when consolidation is carried out in sufficiently, but not exceedingly challenging conditions.

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Memory consolidation should take place actively in the manner briefly discussed in Sect. 3.5.4 for memory encoding and further elaborated in the discussion of experiential learning in the next chapter. It should also be carried out insightfully, i.e., with continuous and purposeful evaluation and regulation of the upheld knowledge, and dialectically through external negotiations with related knowledge sources and internal reconciliation with and within one’s own prior knowledge. Knowledge sources include: (a) physical realities represented by a given conceptual image encoded during transaction with the outside world if the memory being consolidated is about such realities, (b) learning agents, e.g., instructors,4 classmates, or any other people we might interact with during and for memory encoding and consolidation, and/or (c) resources we might rely upon like course textbooks or any other hard or soft references available in paper or electronic forms. Insightful dialectics with such sources involve looking at things from different perspectives available through the sources and/or approaching these sources from different perspectives and in a variety of ways. The more we do so, the more we allow memory engrams to be distributed as outlined in Sect. 3.6.1, and thus the better the consolidation. Throughout the consolidation process, and wherever appropriate, insightful dialectics take place in three realist-rationalist respects (Sect. 4.6). First, and when the memory being consolidated pertains to physical realities (Fig. 3.1), realist or empirical correspondence is ensured between any conceptual image and corresponding realities so that the image properly “represent” those realities in the desired primary respects, and be free from any noise or unnecessary superfluous or redundant information. The more the realities and the more diverse they are in nature and context in which situated, the better the consolidation, especially in terms of establishing the correspondence, the nomic isomorphism, with the pattern that all these realities exhibit (Fig. 3.2). Second, rational consistency is externally established with learning agents, especially professionals (e.g., teachers), and reliable resources so that the emergent knowledge (memory) can be validated and taken advantage of in accordance with duly established professional standards. Third, rational coherence is internally established in two respects: (a) within the new knowledge, the newly encoded memory, by tightening up loose ends and fragmented pieces, if any, and turning it into a cohesive memory, and (b) between the new knowledge and our own prior knowledge so that the new memory can be embedded with LTM patterns. Regulatory dialectics should be carried out with constant attention to intrinsic knowledge reconciliation, particularly in the event of any conflict or any other form of incongruence between a new memory and prior LTM patterns. As well established in Piaget’s theory of intellectual development, if a newly encoded memory is not congruent with LTM, and if the incongruence is not consciously and purposefully detected and resolved, the new memory might be retained only for a short while as STM, but it will never be consolidated enough to turn into LTM. It will eventually be dissociated and the corresponding knowledge lost and forgotten. This situation becomes particularly detrimental when prior knowledge is flawed, like in the case of misconceptions (Sect. 3.5.2), while the newly encoded memory is actually sound, 4

See Footnote 1 in Chap. 1.

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especially from an academic perspective. Research in cognitive neuroscience has lately revealed that in such an event, no “conceptual change” can take place whereby new sound knowledge “replaces” old flawed knowledge. At best, new and old knowledge can eventually “co-exist” in LTM, and unless we learn how to “inhibit” flawed prior knowledge and let the new sound knowledge “prevail”, every time a related situation arises, flawed LTM patterns automatically kick off to prevent the consolidated sound memory from being accessed and retrieved and to make their own way instead for deployment in that situation (Nenciovici et al., 2018; Potvin & Cyr, 2017; Potvin et al., 2015; Vaughn et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2019). Insightful dialectics are particularly beneficial, and thus memory consolidation particularly efficacious, when carried out in challenging not trivial situations. Any consolidation exercise should be challenging enough to benefit the most of brain plasticity and flexibility and induce metacognitive controls discussed in Sect. 3.8 to get constructively and efficiently engaged in the process. The level of challenge is primarily determined by the novelty of the situation in which consolidation takes place and the mismatch between current brain state and the cognitive demands imposed by the situation (Box 3.2). It is thus primarily determined by the level of structural and functional adaptation that encoded memory needs to go through, i.e., by the required level of brain plasticity and flexibility. Box 3.2 Cognitive demands (Halloun, 2017/19) Every thought and action entail particular cognitive demands, i.e., mental efforts to engage task related brain parts and process pertinent knowledge. Cognitive demands are primarily determined by: (a) the inherent complexity of the mental or physical task itself (including any possible communication about it), (b) the context in which the task is being carried out, (c) the degree of familiarity with both task and context, and (d) the nature and quality of resources relied upon (humans included), if any. In particular, cognitive demands of any task pertain to mental efforts required to: (a) detect and process related perceptual data, if any, (b) define what the task is about, (c) access and retrieve pertinent knowledge from memory, (d) set and carry out appropriate plans to accomplish the task, (e) carry out the task insightfully through continuous evaluation and regulation that might imply plan changes, (f) bring about, and evaluate and regulate, necessary outcomes that might include the construction of an appropriate conceptual image (Fig. 3.1), and (g) make necessary changes in memory. Such efforts depend primarily on: (a) the current state of memory, (b) the overall mind and brain state and particularly brain parts concerned with the selection and processing of external data and necessary prior knowledge or LTM, (c) the nature and extent of back-and-forth neural processes among these parts and the subsequent load on working memory, and (d) the state and efficiency of metacognitive controls engaged throughout various processes.

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In the absence of any challenge (totally familiar situation), or under little challenge, little structural or functional synaptic change in encoded memory would be required, if any, and the memory can at best be retained temporarily as STM but not sustained permanently as LTM. In the event of relatively high challenge (high cognitive demands) that requires structural or functional synaptic change that is beyond the brain potential, we are most likely to feel stressed, intimidated, and disenchanted, and thus to have a consolidation break down. Memory consolidation thus requires a level of challenge that is within an interval of affordable brain plasticity and flexibility. The interval low boundary should induce some structural adaptation in the encoded memory (increased number of synapses, neurogenesis) and/or functional enhancement (increased synaptic excitability). The interval high boundary should impose the maximum structural adaptation and/or functional enhancement that the encoded memory can afford given the person’s current state of mind and brain. The interval depends on the person age and prior experience that varies from one person to another, and is thus not the same for all people, especially not for students in different grade levels and not for all students in the same class.

3.6.5 Differential Dynamic Consolidation Memory consolidation involves spreading the corresponding engram system across different brain regions and especially across a diversity of cortical areas of different structures and functions. The system may be broken down into subsystems each located in a distinct area, characterized by a distinct structure and function, and thus consolidated differently from any other subsystem in the same engram system. The consolidation of various subsystems differs in the type of neurons that may be added to or removed from the makeup of each subsystem at any time, as well as in the synaptic connections between constituent neurons and the way these connections may evolve (strengthened, weakened, dissociated) during the consolidation process. As such, memory consolidation is differential and dynamic. Different engram subsystems are consolidated differently from a neuro-anatomic perspective, and each subsystem, and thus the entire memory, evolves following each consolidation exercise, thus bringing about changes in its structural and functional state. Differential memory consolidation implies that consolidating one particular engram subsystem does not automatically induce consolidation of all other subsystems in the same memory. Each subsystem needs to be attended to differently in order to be consolidated, whether in parallel or sequentially with other subsystems. This has major implications from the conscious mind perspective, and thus from a pedagogical perspective. Conscious rehearsal that needs to be carried out actively and insightfully in a variety of contexts as discussed above should thus be carefully

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planned to consolidate explicitly, and differently, each engram subsystem. In practical pedagogical terms, this means that teaching and learning a particular conception or procedure should cover explicitly and sufficiently all related knowledge or memory dimensions distinguished in Box 3.1. For instance, when conceptions (concepts, laws, theorems, and other relations among concepts) are specified individually or collectively in a conceptual system in accordance with the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1), every effort needs to be deployed to cover, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, all facets in all four dimensions of the schema in any necessary epistemic, rational, sensorimotor, and axioaffective respect. Missing any facet in any respect has a detrimental impact on “understanding” that conception and sustaining it in LTM. For example, curriculum developers, textbook authors, and thus instructors5 seldom pay sufficient attention to the scope of a given conception (Sect. 1.2.1), i.e., they seldom give students enough practical opportunities to figure out explicitly when and where, and under what conditions, a given conception can and cannot be used (domain facet in the scope dimension), and for what purpose (function facet). It is then assumed that when students manage to successfully “apply” the conception in a number of occasions, i.e., when they demonstrate the ability to properly reproduce the conception and deploy it as specified in the corresponding constitution and performance dimensions, this necessarily implies that students have managed to figure out on their own the scope of the conception. This is far from being the case, which is simply revealed by the fact that the same students often end up deploying the conception outside its own scope, i.e., using it where it is not appropriate to use. Failure to consolidate the scope explicitly and purposely through appropriate rehearsal exercises has a detrimental impact on other dimensions and thus on the conception of concern. Recurrent deployment failure (bad rehearsal) prevents the conception from being consolidated and sustained in LTM. As such, differential consolidation of different aspects of a given memory looks like a “package deal”. Each and every aspect needs to be consolidated enough to ensure consolidation of the entire memory. Failure to properly consolidate any particular aspect may have bad repercussions on other aspects, and may even prevent the memory from being consolidated altogether. Memory consolidation is not about reinforcing a given memory in a fixed state. It is not about state conservation. The structural and/or functional state of any memory always changes in certain respects following consolidation. Changes take place in the particular memory being consolidated as well as in all sorts of short-term and longterm memories invoked to contribute to the consolidation process. Those changes are most meaningful and most sustainable in a generative dynamic sense when consolidation is carried out actively and insightfully as mentioned above, and when we adhere to a favorable lifestyle in the manner outlined in Sect. 3.5.5. LTM sustainability, patterns included, is thus not a static state but an evolutionary, dynamic state. However, once sustained as LTM, a consolidated memory appropriates two key features. First, the memory retains for good the core engrams developed 5

See Footnote 1 in Chap. 1.

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when originally consolidated and embedded with LTM patterns, and particularly key structural and functional aspects it acquired then. In an almost epigenetic way, subsequent memory evolution builds upon those aspects by ramification, proliferation, and extrapolation that may improve engrams functionality without transcending the originally consolidated function. Second, and unlike STM, once sustained as LTM, a consolidated memory usually cannot be totally dissociated, i.e., knowledge sustained in LTM usually cannot be completely “wiped out” and totally “forgotten”. This may have a detrimental effect as mentioned before when the consolidated memory is flawed like in the case of misconceptions. In such an event, and with appropriate rehearsal, access to and/or retrieval of the consolidated flawed memory can be prevented through appropriate inhibition mechanisms (Sect. 3.8).

3.7 Memory Retrieval Memory retrieval is the cognitive process of consciously accessing and activating existing memory (STM or LTM) to serve specific purposes. Encoding and even consolidation a given memory do not guarantee proper access to that memory and its retrieval whenever needed. In contrast, memory retrieval is crucial for memory encoding and especially for memory consolidation as discussed below. Nonetheless, memory retrieval is different from the other two cognitive processes and need to be attended to differently in order to take advantage of encoded or consolidated memory. In other words, assimilating (and accommodating) a specific packet of epistemic or procedural knowledge and retaining it in STM or LTM does not ensure “remembering” it when needed or deploying it properly where appropriate. Knowledge assimilation is different from knowledge recall and deployment. The former does not imply the latter two, although the latter are crucial particularly for sustaining assimilated knowledge in LTM. This has major pedagogical implications, notably that the brain needs to be trained explicitly for memory retrieval in ways that differ from, but complement, approaches followed in memory encoding and consolidation. Back to the shopping example of Sect. 2.2. As mentioned before, it is normal not to know everything you need to know about the new store system after a first visit. It is also normal not to “remember” as a consequence where to find any item and how to proceed every step of the way with the entire shopping experience in this particular store. Knowledge you develop after your first visit cannot be entirely sustained in your mind (memory) and remembered in a subsequent visit because of two major reasons. First, it takes time and a few recurrent visits, i.e., some spaced shopping “rehearsal” in this store for knowledge about its system to be “consolidated” well enough and thus sustained in your mind. Second, you need to develop appropriate “mnemonics”, i.e., particular cues and procedures that help you remember, i.e., “retrieve” from memory, the location of every item in the store and every step you need to take to complete your shopping, which also takes time and practice.

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Remembering assimilated knowledge, i.e., memory access and, especially retrieval, is a cognitive process that involves activating corresponding engrams as well as neuronal pathways leading to and from these neuronal systems. Success and efficiency of memory retrieval depend on a number of mind and brain conditions the most important of which are discussed in the following three subsections.

3.7.1 Differential Memory Processes Memory encoding and consolidation result in the formation of engram systems the neurons of which are recruited from different brain parts, especially different discrete specialized areas and association areas in the cerebral cortex. Synaptic connections among constituent neurons and signal pathways and flow within engrams are externally controlled by other brain parts that we refer to as “engram regulators” (Sect. 3.6.1), e.g., the hippocampus and certain PFC areas, that may or may not contribute constituent neurons. Memory retrieval depends on memory encoding and consolidation, and vice versa, yet it is a different memory process governed by particular premises. A number of structural and operational aspects differentiate memory retrieval from the other two processes including the following: 1. Memory is encoded and consolidated primarily at the level of synaptic connections among different neurons making up a given engram and engram system. With dendrites of a given neuron always serving as receptors of input and the axon terminals always as transmitters of output, the flow of signals within any neuron and from one neuron to another at the level of a synaptic connection is always unidirectional (Fig. 3.3). This is always true for any memory process. Therefore, any two neurons that encode and consolidate a given bit of memory cannot serve to retrieve that same memory bit, for that would require a neuronal signal that flows backward from the dendrites of one neuron to the axon terminals of the other neuron, and from those terminals to the dendrites of the same neuron, which is impossible. Memory retrieval (output) thus always use different neural pathways than memory encoding and consolidation (input). 2. Input and output information pertaining to a given function are processed in different parts of the brain. For instance, and as mentioned in Sect. 3.4.2, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area in the cerebral cortex are dedicated to processing language along two opposite communication channels. Wernicke’s area is dedicated to processing what we hear and read (input) for language comprehension, and thus to encoding and consolidating language memory. Broca’s area is dedicated to processing what we speak and write (output) and thus to retrieving already encoded or consolidated language memory. 3. Different engram regulators are often engaged in input (encoding and consolidating) and output (retrieval) processes. For instance, the hippocampus remains at all ages the predominant engram regulator and supplier in encoding epistemic memory. It also ensures retrieval of such memory from birth through late

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adolescence. At this point, PFC takes over the retrieval task6 of all sorts of epistemic memory except what relates to episodic memory (though PFC is slower in retrieval than the hippocampus!). 4. Memory retrieval takes far less time than memory encoding and, of course, consolidation, and it often feels as if it were an instantaneous process. Memory encoding takes hours and days to be achieved, and memory consolidation may take weeks. Memory retrieval affects cognitive efficiency (CE). CE defines the best performance with the least possible effort in a given task and determines the time and cognitive effort needed to achieve any task. With fast retrieval of needed prior knowledge and high CE, cognitive resources are freed in the brain to efficiently process input information and achieve the task at hand. These facts and more that differentiate memory retrieval from memory encoding and consolidation have a major pedagogical implication: acquiring new knowledge and retaining it in mind is different from accessing and recalling that knowledge, and thus knowledge recall, whether for its own sake or for the sake of its deployment where necessary, needs to be taught and learned differently from knowledge acquisition. Effective retrieval learning strategies are those developed in a variety of contexts and that are age sensitive. Multiple contexts allow learners to develop multiple access routes to a given memory. When a memory is activated in a given context, exiting STM and LTM related to that context are accessed as well, and the neuronal pathway for retrieving the needed memory would then incorporate parts of the context-related memories. The more diversified the retrieval contexts, the more retrieval pathways are created for the memory in question. Furthermore, age dependency of various memory processes, and particularly of engram regulators,7 also imply that these processes should be taught and learned differently at different stages of life and school levels. However, and as discussed next, differential learning processes required for knowledge acquisition and recall, i.e., memory encoding/consolidation and retrieval, can be reconciled to work in tandem and in ways to enhance them all and improve their efficiency.

6

From birth to early adolescence, memory retrieval, like memory encoding and especially memory consolidation, is primarily governed by the hippocampus. By early adolescence (middle school years), PFC starts gradually taking over memory consolidation and retrieval until it becomes in full control of retrieval in adulthood (late college years). This shift in retrieval control from hippocampus to PFC is congruent with the gradual shift discussed in Sect. 3.6.3 from mostly concrete perceptualbased processing of information at early ages to mostly abstract conceptual-based processing at later stages of development. That is why, and because of PFC immaturity, children and young adolescents often fail, as Piaget indicated, to make the connection in abstract conceptual tasks between new information and corresponding prior knowledge already in their memory and, and thus to carry such tasks successfully. 7 See Footnote 6.

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3.7.2 Mutually Dependent Memory Processes Success and efficiency of memory retrieval depend significantly on how well memory is originally encoded and then consolidated, and particularly on how well a needed LTM is embedded with memory patterns and how well these patterns are, in turn, articulated individually and in relation to each other. The more memory encoding and consolidation are patterns based, the better the retrieval. Concerned PFC areas naturally compare different memory patterns in order to identify the appropriate engrams for a given situation, and the comparison is best achieved when those patterns are well consolidated in LTM. In the grocery store example of Sect. 2.2, the more we concentrate on function-based categorization of items and subsequent patterns of aisles distribution in different stores, the smoother our shopping experience would go in a newly visited store. Alternatively, memory retrieval helps consolidate encoded memory (STM) and sustain it as LTM. Every time a memory is retrieved, it is actually being re-encoded in the process. The more it is retrieved, the more it gets modified in an epigenetic sense as mentioned in Sect. 3.6.5. Most importantly, the more frequently the context in which memory retrieval takes place is varied and diversified, the more likely we are to consolidate memory into more diverse cortical areas, and especially association areas. In retrospect, PFC will then be more likely to develop a multitude of neural pathways for memory retrieval, which would enhance recall and cognitive efficiency. Three main points are worth noting in this respect. First, the lifetime of a memory depends on how frequently it is being retrieved and used. Engrams that are not sufficiently activated will eventually be dissociated, especially when still making up labile STM, and encoded memory will then be lost and knowledge forgotten. Lack of retrieval has a detrimental effect on LTM as well. If encoded memory is sustained as LTM but subsequently not retrieved sufficiently enough, its engrams may also get eventually dissociated, or, at best, it may turn into what has been referred to recently as “silent memory”. This is memory that is actually sustained in the brain but that cannot be accessed and that we used to wrongly believe to be lost memory (Picower Institute, 2019). Second, to preserve the integrity of a given memory, memory retrieval should involve all engrams constituting that memory as well as all neurons in the makeup of a given engram. Partial retrieval may lead to the dissociation of inactivated neurons or engrams. In practical terms, knowledge about a particular matter already in mind should be entirely activated in order to remain sustained in its integrity. Any inactivated part risks to be lost and forgotten. Third, memory retrieval is not only necessary to keep a memory accessible and to improve the chance of successful recall as noted above. It is also necessary to take advantage of and enhance brain plasticity. Once activated for any purpose, engrams are modified, and thus memory is re-encoded, and consolidated as modified. Retrieval thus contributes to learning. In fact, retrieval is learning in many respects. Any existing memory, whether WM, STM, or LTM, is modified while being retrieved. Memory retrieval is an active and dynamic not a passive process. When recalling

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knowledge of any sort and deployed in a given situation, this knowledge is not “conserved” in its pre-existing state. It is always transformed, thus developed, in the process, just like it does in the process of deployment and consolidation (Sects. 3.6.1 and 3.6.5). This is what happens when working on a course assignment and when taking a quiz or an exam. What a student produces in either case is not a simple regurgitation, not a reproduction or a mirror expression of what s/he had already stored in memory. The student product emerges, somewhat as discussed in Sects. 3.2 and 3.5.2, of pre-exiting memory and the situation that triggered memory retrieval. In this sense, assessment does not serve merely to ascertain knowledge students already have in mind, but most importantly as means of learning and memory development, whence the call for assessment “as” learning as discussed later in the next chapter (Sect. 4.8). Not all forms of retrieval are though good for memory consolidation, and some forms are more effective than others. For instance, it is not enough to memorize a given rule and recall it as offered in a given textbook to retain it for long and apply it successfully. The rule has to be applied in a variety of contexts in order not only to be “understood” but also to be sustained in LTM. Even a poem can be retained longer in mind and eventually sustained for good in LTM if “practiced” in one form or another, and not just memorized by rote and recited orally or in writing. Practice in question includes engaging in the discussion of various aspects of the poem while recalling some of its verses, and answering related questions in assignments and exams.

3.7.3 Mnemonics Dependent Retrieval Two prime factors determine the efficiency of memory retrieval: (a) diversity of specialized discrete cortical areas and of association areas in which corresponding engrams are spread (Sect. 3.6.1), and (b) availability of appropriate mnemonics. Mnemonics are cues and processes that dedicated PFC areas develop during memory encoding and consolidation and that PFC relies upon to subsequently activate in specific ways neural pathways pertaining to each engram in the memory makeup and to retrieve the memory as needed. PFC relies on mnemonics to compare any new information (new perceptual image in a transaction with the outside world) with existing short-term and long-term memories for an appropriate match or fit, in which event it proceeds to retrieving suitable memories. We all rely in everyday life on some mnemonics for remembering things. Common mnemonics include analogy with familiar objects or phenomena, matching patterns, and numerical rules. For example, mnemonics to find a specific item in a store visit (Sect. 2.2) include categorization criteria for putting items together in the same or adjacent aisles in typical grocery stores. Figure 3.8 shows how ascending and descending series of ± 1 increment may be used to recall multiples of 9 in a multiplication table. Pattern-based mnemonics are usually most efficient for memory retrieval especially when they are about functional aspects and operational principles that cut across a diversity of contexts.

3.7 Memory Retrieval Fig. 3.8 Multiples of 9. Mnemonics may include the + 1 increment from 0 to 9 in the tens’ place and the − 1 increment from 9 to 0 in the unit place as we go down the multiplication column

105

9x1 = 9x2 =

+1

09 18

9x3 =

27

9x4 =

36

9x5 =

45

9x6 =

54

9x7 =

63

9x8 =

72

9x9 =

81

–1

9 x 10 = 90

Mnemonics are often context dependent. They are most successfully deployed in the same contexts in which they have been developed or in similar contexts. They cannot be readily deployed in novel contexts without proper rehearsal and correspondence rules that facilitate transfer to those contexts. Systematic means, like the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1), need then to be explicitly developed for such transfer across a variety of contexts. Transfer success depends again on the diversity of specialized and association cortical areas in which a memory has been originally encoded and consolidated. The more diverse these areas, the more the mnemonics and the better the chance for successful retrieval, and the less the diversity and thus the less the mnemonics, the more likely we are to access and retrieve the wrong memories or even to get into a deadlock and not access any pre-existing memory at all. Like in the case of rehearsal for consolidation, the efficiency of mnemonics and thus of memory retrieval improves with context variation. The more contexts are varied in which memory retrieval takes place, the richer the mnemonics and the more successful and productive the retrieval in the future. Knowledge recall (memory retrieval) like knowledge construction (memory encoding and consolidation), is a conscious constructive process that induces, along with changes in stored knowledge that is being retrieved, the creation of new retrieval mnemonics. Mnemonics become increasingly more significant with the level of novelty in new contexts. As a consequence, knowledge deployment becomes increasingly more successful as we vary the context in which mnemonics development takes place. In contrast, mnemonics are limited in nature and efficiency when retrieval takes place repeatedly in familiar contexts. Memory retrieval is more efficient when it relies on a diversity of mnemonics because it relies then on a multitude of neural pathways leading to diverse cortical areas across which memory engrams spread. Mnemonics diversity has the advantage of accelerating memory retrieval and, especially, preventing failure to access needed memory. This is particularly important for students with test anxiety. The more

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diverse the mnemonics they rely upon, the more the pathways they can follow to access needed knowledge, and thus the better their chance to overcome any mind block they may get into. Retrieval mnemonics and deployment rules and procedures are most effective when consciously and purposefully constructed in systemic perspectives. They are particularly effective and efficient when: (a) they concentrate on cues emanating from the scope of a given system (or conception) to determine where and when the system or any of its constituents can be used and for what purpose (Sect. 1.2.1), and (b) rely on multiple encoding and retrieval pathways of information in LTM, i.e., when any system or organ is represented in a multitude of modes, while knowing the potentials and limitations of each mode and how various modes relate to, and complement each other. Representation modes should then vary from analogous pictorial representations that rely on perceptual cortical areas to concept maps and other graphical and analytic representations that rely on abstract conceptual cortical areas and that focus on nomic isomorphism (Sects. 3.6.3 and 3.6.4) between a given representation and what it represents. Multiple representations have the advantage of engaging a variety of cortical areas for memory consolidation and creating a similar variety of retrieval pathways that facilitate memory retrieval and enhance cognitive efficiency. The gradual shift from hippocampus-controlled to PFC-controlled retrieval8 discussed above in Sect. 3.7.1 has major consequences on knowledge deployment, and particularly on mnemonics needed for successful retrieval. Such mnemonics differ with age, even in relation to the same type of knowledge, especially when of abstract nature. At an early age (through middle school, and often through high school), and when retrieval is still governed by the hippocampus not PFC areas, students should be prescribed mnemonics and rules for abstract knowledge retrieval in the form of explicit, well-structured step-by-step procedures. They should also be helped then through similar prescriptive approaches to establish meaningful connections among different representations of the same knowledge and among different knowledge types that engage different association areas in the cerebral cortex. At a later stage, and when concerned PFC areas are mature enough to take over governance of memory retrieval from the hippocampus (in college!), students can be expected to organize abstract knowledge efficiently on their own and develop their own retrieval mnemonics for efficacious and efficient knowledge deployment.

8

See Footnote 6.

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3.8 Memory Modulation Aside from engram regulators mentioned above, memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval are governed or controlled by modulatory systems9 responsible of alertness, consciousness, emotions, and other factors called modulatory factors, the most important of which for our pedagogical interests are either part of the PFC executive functions or of axio-affective nature. Each modulatory system consists of a number of modulators located in different parts of the brain, primarily in PFC, the limbic system, the brainstem, and other subcortical parts, and is dedicated to managing one particular modulatory factor. A given modulator may be part of different modulatory systems, and may thus contribute to the management of more than one modulatory factor. Neurons of any modulator project their axons throughout the entire cerebral cortex, especially the neocortex responsible of higher-order cognitive and behavioral functions, communication included. Modulatory systems control from start to end all memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval processes, and any learning experience in its entirety. They set the direction in which learning takes place and determine the quality of outcomes of knowledge development and deployment task. In a nutshell, these systems are involved in any cognitive process, some consciously and voluntarily, others subconsciously and involuntarily. They may allow a learning experience to proceed as it should and bring about what it is meant to achieve, or they may divert the experience away from its original purposes and even prevent it from taking place altogether. A multitude of modulatory systems are involved in any learning experience, whether experiential or not, and whether involving concrete or abstract matters that make the object of learning. As discussed below, a modulator or modulatory system may work in concert with, or against other modulators or modulatory systems in managing a particular modulatory factor. Some modulators are predominantly constructive and conducive of meaningful learning (e.g., focusing our attention on a given physical reality in Figs. 3.1 and 3.5 and motivating us to construct the most meaningful conceptual image of that reality), while others are predominantly aversive or destructive and disrupt such learning or inhibit it altogether (e.g., looking at the reality in question but not seeing it or listening to it but not hearing it when distracted, disenchanted, or disinterested). In the following, we discuss a number of factors and related systems that modulate our learning experiences in major respects and that help us develop efficient metacognition for monitoring and regulating our learning experiences and our own memory processes in order to bring about meaningful outcomes.

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See, for example, Baddeley and Hitch (1974), Bradberry and Grieves (2009), Chun and TurkBrowne (2007), Cohen (2015), Damasio (1994), Ekman (1992), Goleman (1996), Gregory and Kaufeldt (2015), Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007), Kandel et al. (2013), Li et al. (2020), Murphy et al. (2003), Panksepp (1998, 2006), Panksepp and Biven (2012), Pink (2009), Sawada et al. (2015) and Shechtman et al. (2013).

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3.8.1 Attention Efficacity and efficiency of various memory processes (encoding, consolidation, retrieval) depend on how well we focus attention on primary aspects of any concrete or abstract matter we are dealing with. Two different modulatory systems govern attention depending on whether it is exogenous or endogenous. Exogenous attention is driven by perceptual signals from the external world, whereas endogenous attention is goal-driven and governed by motivation and other intrinsic drives. Experiential learning about a particular physical reality (Fig. 3.1) begins by focusing attention, being then exogenous attention, passively and involuntarily on certain aspects of the reality for the subconscious formation of a perceptual image. Subsequently, and following evaluation of that image, attention, now turned into endogenous attention, begins to be actively and voluntarily focused on primary aspects of the physical reality for the formation of a satisfactory conceptual image. Once a physical reality is detected by the senses, afferent data are carried by sensory neurons to the reticular formation in the brainstem that sends only a small portion of the data (other than olfactory) to the thalamus in the diencephalon that, in turn, determines which data are retained to form a perceptual image of the reality in the concerned sensory or perceptual areas of the cerebral cortex. The reticular formation and the thalamus are major components of the exogenous attention modulatory system that autonomously dictates which data are sent to the concerned parts of the sensory neocortex to form the perceptual image. That image is a partial, subconsciously and involuntarily formed representation of the corresponding reality. It consists of a very small fraction (less than one per thousand) of the afferent data. For instance, when we look around, light coming from all objects falling in the field of our vision enters our eyes. Once corresponding neural signals reach the brainstem, the exogenous attention modulatory system filters afferent visual data involuntarily to allow only a fraction of data to proceed for processing in the visual cortical areas in the occipital lobe. This is the fraction we actually “see” or “pay attention to” at a given instant, like the word or part of the word you “read” at any particular instant as you go through this text. The remaining signals (background information, including the part of the text that is not being read at a given instant) are blocked out. Sometimes, certain information, including background information, may bypass the exogenous system to be relayed directly to concerned brain parts where it gets processed subconsciously. This happens when the modulatory system in question is overloaded with information, or when we are completely distracted by our inner thoughts, so that we may “look but do not see” or “listen but do not hear”. A form of tacit memory is developed as a consequence that may be ultimately “remembered”, i.e., accessed and retrieved, and then activated. Once the perceptual image is formed, the endogenous attention modulatory system is triggered to invoke necessary prior knowledge and get that image actively and voluntarily processed and converted into a conscious conceptual image. The endogenous system recruits primarily certain PFC areas along with dedicated areas in the higher-order sensory cortex and related pons nuclei in the brainstem (Fig. 3.4).

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As discussed above in Sect. 3.2, the conceptual image is an emergent image that blends certain aspects of the perceptual image with appropriate prior knowledge. The conceptual image is evaluated, best through insightful dialectics, for its meaningfulness in terms of the purpose set for the learning experience, and attention is subsequently actively and voluntarily redirected by the endogenous modulatory system to specific aspects of the corresponding reality to regulate the conceptual image. The evaluation-regulation cycle is reiterated until a satisfactory conceptual image is formed as indicated in Figs. 3.5 and 3.6 and related discussion (Sects. 3.5.2 and 3.5.3). The efficiency of memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval closely depends on attentional control whether or not involved in a transaction with physical realities. The more the endogenous attention modulatory system is involved to focus on truly primary aspects of a given entity, whether an object or an event, concrete or abstract, and avoid redundancy and secondary aspects, the better the efficiency. However, for that modulatory system to function properly, a number of favorable conditions need to be in place. For instance, all sorts of distraction need to be avoided, positive and constructive emotions need to prevail, and personal preferences need to be controlled, all of which and more are governed by other modulatory systems, some discussed below. Attention and other modulatory factors are not triggered independently of each other. A variety of voluntary and involuntary modulatory systems are triggered simultaneously in any learning experience. These systems mutually affect each other, though not necessarily to the same level, and take any memory process and any learning experience in one direction or the other.

3.8.2 Motivation The endogenous attention modulatory system voluntarily focuses a given learning experience on specific aspects that serve the goals of that experience to the extent set by the personal drives and motives behind that experience. Motivation is the driving force behind pursuing and achieving a specific goal. It is primarily determined by how rewarding the experience is, especially in terms of fulfilling certain needs and interests and satisfying curiosity as a novelty-seeking drive. Unless a person sees in a given experience an opportunity to seek worthy novelties that meet personal needs and interests, whether conceptual, practical, or axio-affective, and whether exclusive to the person or shared with other people, the person would not be motivated enough to pursue the goals set for that experience. Moreover, once engaged in an experience of interest, the person’s motivation needs to be sustained by a strong volition to pursue that experience to the end. Without motivation and volition, one cannot pursue a learning experience meaningfully, and can hardly attain high levels of performance and achievement in education. Motivation is triggered and sustained by a dedicated modulatory system that includes, among others, the hypothalamus in the limbic system located next to the thalamus in the diencephalon, the nucleus accumbens located close to the limbic

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system at the interface of two basal ganglia in the telencephalon, and some PFC areas. The nucleus accumbens releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that regulates our mood and that determines the level of pleasure and the quality of reward brought about by a given experience. As such, it gets us motivated to engage in the experience in question. Serotonin, a complementary neurotransmitter produced in the brainstem and mostly stored in the guts not the brain, plays a critical role in sustaining or suppressing the positive mood generated by dopamine, and thus in sustaining or not our motivation, i.e., our volition to pursue a given experience to its fruitful ends with enough perseverance, grit, and tenacity. Major neural constituents of the motivation modulatory system belong to what some neuroscientists call the seeking/expectancy neural network (Panksepp, 2006; Panksepp & Biven, 2012; Pink, 2009) that is part of a number of modulatory systems and that “helps mediate our desires, our foraging, and our many positive expectancies about the world”, and makes us think and act “in goal-directed ways” (Panksepp, 2006). Curiosity, our novelty seeking drive, is extremely crucial for learning, especially for developing higher-order knowledge that involves PFC executive functions. Like hunger, curiosity is an innate motivational drive. The more novelty a given experience involves, the better the motivation to learn, and thus the more parts of the brain the concerned modulatory system recruits, especially in the limbic system and pre-limbic regions, and the more complex the memory processes it induces, all in order to sustain deeper and more meaningful learning. In simple terms, the more the novelty, the more productive the learning processes and the more meaningful the learning outcomes, provided, though, that the novelty does not impose high challenge and high cognitive demands that may then circumvent the experience or take it in the wrong direction. Motivation and volition drive best our learning experiences and our behavior in any situation when we value the involved processes and expected outcomes, and especially when they “make sense” to us. One of our daughters used to give us a hard time when studying school topics that “do not make sense” to her. One day while in middle school, she came home with a poem of thirty some verses to learn by heart. When she told us about her assignment, my wife and I braced ourselves for a long and hard evening. After studying the poem for about fifteen minutes, she came to me asking to recite the poem. I held her English book in hands expecting to return it to her in dismay in a matter of seconds. To my big surprise, she recited the entire poem joyfully without a single mistake. When I asked her if she had worked on it before coming home, she answered that she did not and that she was capable of memorizing the entire poem in such a short time because it simply made sense to her and that she could value every single verse of it! According to Lakoff (1987, p. 346), it “is easier to learn something that is motivated than something that is arbitrary. It is also easier to remember and use motivated knowledge than arbitrary knowledge”. Our own research has shown that the overwhelming majority of motivated students have high achievement in science courses of all levels (Halloun, 2001b; Halloun & Hestenes, 1998). Research also suggests that there is an interplay between students’ motivation, volition, achievement, and understanding. On the one hand, students with strong motivation and volition are inclined more toward meaningful learning than toward rote learning of

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course materials, and are capable of high achievement under propitious conditions as just mentioned. On the other hand, students who attain certain threshold of meaningful understanding (Décamp & Viennot, 2015), or who perform in a given situation better than they expected (Cohen, 2015), tend to be more motivated than their counterpeers and to better sustain their drive for, and be more willing to achieve, meaningful understanding, success, and progress. Moreover, the literature suggests that executive functions and positive dispositions, like grit, tenacity, and perseverance, significantly contribute to sustaining such drive, and that these functions and dispositions can be explicitly nurtured in the classroom with properly challenging activities (Shechtman et al., 2013).

3.8.3 Emotions Attention and motivation, like various cognitive processes and learning outcomes, are controlled by our emotions either constructively, in the case of positive emotions like pleasure, passion, and hope, or destructively, in the case of negative emotions like stress, apathy, and fear. Some emotions modulatory systems primarily located in cortical areas are triggered voluntarily and work consciously, while others, primarily located in subcortical regions, are triggered automatically and work subconsciously. Cortical emotions modulators include primarily certain areas in medial PFC, cingulate cortex, and insular cortex, and subcortical modulators include chiefly the amygdala located in the limbic system along with the nucleus accumbens and nearby basal ganglia. The amygdala ensures, along with PFC, the link among all modulatory systems concerned with attention, motivation, and emotions, and affects how PFC executive functions and the hippocampus regulate all memory processes. Emotions determine the immediate and subsequent course and outcomes of all memory processes. When a learner is taken more by positive emotions than by neutral and, of course, negative emotions, attention can be held longer and be more focused in whatever concrete or abstract matters that are the object of learning on primary aspects that are crucial to achieving the goals of a learning experience, and motivation can better sustain the experience in an opportune direction. Emotions, especially negative emotions like anxiety and stress, can have an enduring effect on cognitive processes that take place long after an uncomfortable learning experience comes to an end. For, emotions felt while encoding or consolidating any type of knowledge are held in memory and tagged to the developed knowledge in ways to affect subsequent retrieval. As a consequence, prior knowledge is better accessed, retrieved, and deployed when originally encoded or consolidated with positive emotions rather than with neutral or negative emotions. Negative emotions, whether felt during memory encoding or consolidation or during memory retrieval, are more likely to make us access and retrieve inappropriate knowledge or prevent us from access to any knowledge (memory block), just like these emotions are more likely to lead us to encoding misconceptions and other wrong content or process knowledge.

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The most critical emotions modulatory systems consist of a number of innate modulators that instinctually govern what Ekman (1992) and other psychologists call “basic emotions”, or what Panksepp (1998, 2006) and other neuroscientists call “core emotions” (Gregory & Kaufeldt, 2015; Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Panksepp seeking/expectancy system mentioned above (Sect. 3.8.2) is at the core of the most constructive of these systems. The most destructive emotions modulatory system is the one concerned with the negative instinctive emotions of survival and includes primarily the amygdala and the hypothalamus. Negative instinctive emotions include fear (e.g., of teacher or exam), rage (e.g., because of an incident with classmates or parents), panic (e.g., as a result of missing a question on an exam), and discontent (e.g., because of apathy toward teacher or disenchantment with the school environment). When we are besieged by such negative emotions, and when the corresponding modulatory system is not overridden (or inhibited from releasing its neurotransmitters) by positive emotions modulators like those in PFC, the survival modulatory system may instinctually and subconsciously take a learning experience in unsuitable directions, and it may even prevent learning from taking place altogether. This is also the case of all other negative emotions, all of which may have a long-lasting impact on cognitive and even somatic processes. For instance, when a person is excessively anxious or stressed, the adrenal glands located on top of our kidneys release the cortisol hormone that lasts in the body for a long time and hampers the immune system as well as various memory and thought processes. All modulators of negative emotions are triggered automatically and subconsciously with detrimental impact unless consciously overridden by positive emotions modulatory systems from the very onset of a given experience. While filtering of afferent sensory data is taking place in a transaction with a physical reality under the endogenous attention modulatory system, PFC is triggered at two levels to regulate the formation of the perceptual image of that reality (Fig. 3.1). First, ventromedial areas of PFC get engaged in parallel with the amygdala to circumvent negative emotions the latter might trigger. Those PFC areas modulate our social emotions, say, of accountability, reward, and punishment, and can rationally inhibit the amygdala from taking us into destructive courses or unnecessary instinctive actions. Second, other PFC areas concerned with the exogenous attention modulatory system intervene: (a) to sustain attention on specific perceptual information out of the already filtered information and determine the outcomes in memory, and/or (b) to redirect our senses to focus on specific aspects of the physical reality that are determined, with the help of prior knowledge, to be crucial for the conceptual image. Emotions modulators are particularly linked to, or part of, the so-called social brain, i.e., diverse brain areas concerned with social relations with others. The way we feel about others and expect them to behave, and the way they actually relate to us and treat us during an experiential learning experience affect the entire cognitive processes that take place in that experience, beginning with the rational consistency part of insightful dialectics (Sect. 3.6.4). Like with personal emotions, positive feelings and expectations about others (e.g., pleasant and respectful) are more conducive of meaningful learning than neutral or negative emotions and feelings that may even

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prevent any learning from taking place. Some subconscious feelings we might get implicitly about others and that the amygdala is particularly responsible of, like the first impression or inexplicable feelings we get about people when we meet them for the first time, may have a more significant and more lasting impact than conscious feelings and interpretation of other people’s look and behavior that takes place primarily in PFC. The interplay between emotions and social interaction is highlighted in SocialEmotional Learning (SEL) as advanced by Goleman (1996, 1998) and others. SEL somewhat builds on what Gardener (1993) calls intrapersonal (emotional) and interpersonal (social) intelligences, and it defines a set of dispositions and integrated cognitive and behavioral skills needed to control consciously and constructively one’s personal emotions and feelings toward others in order to function effectively in social environments, schools included. In a related aspect, SEL research shows that emotions are contagious. Angry or depressed people may spread anger or depression among people they interact with, and happy and serene people may spread happiness and serenity. Educational research has shown in many instances that teachers who keep a relaxed environment in class, often wearing a smile on their face or even coming up with a joke every now and then, can better focus and sustain their students’ attention on the object of class discussion, take them more efficaciously into a meaningful learning course, and lead them to better achievement than teachers who keep a strict atmosphere in class and maintain a grim, a serious look on their face, or even a flat face. Similar contrasting results are produced with emotional stimuli as simple as emojis. Classes that begin by showing a smiley emoji on a screen for a few seconds lead more favorable results than classes that kick off with a frowning face! Instructors’ relationship with individual students is highly critical at the emotional level. Eye contact with every student in class with a pleasant and empathetic look and tone induces positive emotions in individual students and enhances their attention in class. Teacher feedback on assignments and assessments is a critical factor as well. Positive feedback that students agree with or that makes them feel good induces positive emotions (e.g., praise and encouragement, empathy and understanding, expressing belief in students’ potentials and recognizing their efforts, showing a happy face and excitement about students’ achievement), and negative feedback that student disagree with induces negative emotions. Emotional contagion can also take place among students. Students can spread their personal mood, whether positive or negative, among peers they interact with in class and make them feel the same way.

3.8.4 Control Taking control of one’s own learning experience is crucial for meaningful learning. This goes from setting the experience goals and planning its course to pacing and carrying out various tasks and bringing them to desired ends. This also applies whether or not the learning experience involves transaction with the outside world,

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and thus whether or not sensorimotor skills are engaged. In the latter event, taking control involves having a say in the choice of physical realities and necessary resources. A learning experience may be controlled intrinsically by the learner her/himself and/or externally by other people, including instructors, parents, and, indirectly, curriculum and course materials developers who set the rules of the game. Intrinsic control and external control are handled by different modulatory systems spread primarily in subcortical regions including the insular cortex for intrinsic modulation and the cingulate cortex for external modulation. The insular cortex contributes to driving personal motives and rewards, self-satisfaction, and enjoyment. The cingulate cortex contributes to valuation in relation to other people satisfaction and to sanctions and rewards these people may come up with, as well as in relation to common values in a given community. In general, the intrinsic control modulatory system has more positive and more significant impact on all cognitive processes than its external counterpart. The more we are in control of memory encoding and consolidation, the better the chance to retain encoded knowledge as STM and eventually sustain it as LTM. More importantly, intrinsic control, or self-control, helps us better focus our attention on primary aspects in the encoding process, and gets us motivated enough to sustain a learning experience, sequence its tasks in accordance with personal cognitive priorities and demands, and bring about personally rewarding and satisfactory meaningful ends. Being in the control seat during encoding and consolidation has also beneficial consequences on memory retrieval. It allows us to develop rich and efficient mnemonics and subsequently activate and deploy appropriate knowledge successfully. Encoding efficiency closely depends on attentional control. According to Markant et al. (2016), research shows that efficiency declines “when attention is divided during encoding … However, retention improves when the amount of time spent encoding each item is self-paced [based on one’s attentional state and attentional resources] rather than set by an experimenter … [Furthermore], studies have shown that [student] active control of study leads to better memory performance than when study time is randomly allocated or dictated by another person”. Emotions play a major role in the manner and extent we take control of our learning experiences. Positive emotions tend to foster self-control with self-evaluation, planning, monitoring, and regulation of any cognitive process, while negative emotions tend to make us rely more on others in all these respects and in passive and submissive ways, thus building up self-confidence more in the former case than in the latter case.

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3.9 Metacognition Metacognition is about awareness and conscious control of how learning takes place, and particularly of various memory and modulatory processes discussed above and involved in the development and deployment of all sorts of knowledge distinguished in Box 3.1. It involves reasoning skills and dispositions (rational and axio-affective knowledge respectively in Box 3.1) that are necessary to decide, plan, monitor, and regulate “how” we learn, so that we come out of any experience with the most meaningful and productive outcomes and with the highest cognitive efficiency possible. In particular, metacognition is about mastering skills and dispositions necessary to purposely and consciously enable us and keep us in control of the following processes in any learning experience, whether the experience is carried out in formal educational settings or informally in any daily life settings, and whether concrete or abstract matters are the object of learning: 1. How to set cognitive and behavioral goals, namely expected learning outcomes that we advocate to be part of systemic competencies and habits of life (Sect. 2.3). 2. How to set appropriate plans to realize these outcomes and integrate them as efficiently as possible in our overall individual profiles that we call on being systemic 4P profiles (Sect. 2.5). 3. How to execute those plans systematically and successfully. 4. How to constantly evaluate and regulate the above processes and outcomes we come up with, and subsequently improve related competencies, habits, and entire profiles. 5. How to benefit the most in all the above of our memory resources (prior cognitive and behavioral knowledge) for efficacious and efficient cognitive processing, as well as of various human and material resources at our disposition. 6. How to consciously and purposefully engage constructive modulators, sustain their action, and curtail or inhibit destructive modulators in order to stay the course insightfully and productively. From the previous sections in this chapter, we can take away a number of lessons about metacognition in relation to whatever constitutes the object of learning, whether concrete or abstract matters, and whether an entity, an event, a process, or any other matter. Major lessons pertaining to the nature of human memory and memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval are outlined in the following seven items before we conclude with a quick note on modulatory systems. Each item begins with a recap of specific memory issues discussed in the previous sections of this chapter and ends with metacognitive implications that are particularly important for pedagogical purposes that make the object of the following chapters. 1. Innate predisposition for lifelong learning. Thanks to our everlasting brain plasticity and flexibility, we are all predisposed to learning anything at any age, yet with an age-related mind-brain interdependence. Learning is sometimes required, especially at an early age, in order to induce neuronal brain development in certain respects, whereas we need to wait at other times for natural brain development

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to take place in order for learning to be possible in other respects. Furthermore, different brain parts are naturally involved at different age levels in processing specific concrete and abstract types of knowledge, thus affecting how and how long it takes to learn such knowledge. Therefore, we need to know what learning outcomes (and competencies) can and should be reasonably achieved at specific times of our lives, what are corresponding mind and brain prerequisites, and how feasibly prerequisites can be ensured and outcomes achieved. We also need to know how to maintain specific and overall conducive learning conditions, including a healthy lifestyle at all ages, in order to sustain progressive minds (Sect. 2.5.1) and constantly develop meaningful and sustainable knowledge. 2. Insightful ontogenetic and dynamic cognition. The state and efficacy of memory and cognitive processes depend at any time on their past and determine our learning potentials for the future, and any cognitive exercise at any given time induces changes in memory state and in cognitive and behavioral potentials no matter how simple that exercise might be, even if it entails mere recall of prior knowledge. The quality of pre-existing knowledge thus determines how successful and how efficient a learning experience can be, and whether it brings about sound or flawed cognitive and behavioral changes. Therefore, we need to know how to systematically take advantage of prior knowledge for constructing new knowledge, and how to integrate new knowledge with prior knowledge so as to make it readily accessible for eventual need and efficiently deployable then. We also need to know how to constantly evaluate and regulate any knowledge in the process of constructing it and deploying it, and how to engage in insightful dialectics in any experience in order to reinforce sound knowledge and prevent flawed knowledge from taking us then and in the future in unwarranted or detrimental directions. 3. Distributed integrative cognition. Any memory is best encoded, consolidated, and retrieved when its engram system consists of a large array of engrams that spread across different discrete and specialized brain regions and that are interconnected through association cortical areas. The latter areas ensure that the entire engram system is coherently and cohesively held together, and that neural signals flow efficiently across neurons and synaptic connections in the entire system. The more diversified specialized areas are, and the more they include distant areas that entail long-range connections, the better consolidated the memory and the more efficiently accessible and retrievable. Therefore, we need to know how to develop any sort of knowledge from different perspectives and in a variety of contexts that are judiciously chosen to require the use of a variety of brain regions and association areas, and to come from different branches in a given discipline or community of practice (CoP) and, preferably, from different disciplines in different fields or CoPs. We also need to know how to coherently connect interrelated pieces of knowledge and how to systematically take advantage of them in all structural, procedural, and functional respects, and in the most efficient and innovative ways possible.

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4. Comprehensive differential cognition. Consolidation of any engram system is differential and needs to be comprehensive. Different engrams in the system have different neuronal structures and synaptic connections, different specializations, and different functions regarding the memory they uphold. Any experience strengthens only directly related engrams, and particularly their synaptic connections, and weakens or has no effect on other engrams in the same engram system (same memory), and thus consolidating one particular engram or set of engrams does not necessarily lead to the consolidation of the entire engram system. Moreover, and although memory retrieval is crucial for memory consolidation, the two processes go through different neuronal pathways, and memory consolidation does not ensure efficient memory access and retrieval. Therefore, we need to know how to attend differently, but comprehensively, to the formation and sustainability of different parts of any cognitive or behavioral knowledge, and to the recall and use of all these parts not only as differently as necessary from each other, but also differently from how they have been originally formed and sustained. We also need to know how to judiciously diversify the contexts in which knowledge construction and deployment take place, how to systematically proceed in such contexts, and, especially, how to deploy any knowledge coherently and consistently with the way it has been constructed (or regulate the original knowledge in line with the new experience) and with the ways other related parts have been constructed and deployed. 5. Reiterative selective and emergent cognition. Any encoded and then consolidated memory emerges from both the way we are, especially the way our memories and overall state of mind and brain are, and the way the object of learning and related information sources, if any, are. Memory consolidation is a long process that needs to be properly reiterated for gradual engram ramification and proliferation and gradual reinforcement of synaptic connections. Emergent knowledge about any object of learning is always partial knowledge, no matter how often its consolidation is reiterated, how long it lasts, and how diversified are the contexts in which it takes place. Therefore, we need to know how to put in place and execute long-term plans for gradual development and sustainability of any cognitive or behavioral knowledge, in any structural, procedural, or functional respect. We also need to know how to focus our attention in any encoding, consolidation, or retrieval exercise on primary aspects of an object of learning, how to make the best of our memory resources, and how not to overload our working and short-term memories, especially not with unnecessary and redundant secondary details, so that we may bring about profound knowledge about the object of learning (Sect. 2.5.3). 6. Experiential challenging cognition. Memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval are best achieved when carried out in reasonably challenging conditions and when involving brain regions concerned with both rational and sensorimotor processes, even when dealing with abstract objects of learning. Concerned sensorimotor brain regions pertain to the concrete contexts in which memory may have been originally or is currently being encoded, consolidated, or retrieved, as well as to any concurrent personal behavior that may or may not bear directly on the

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memory process in place. Such behavior includes hands-on, minds-on experience with the object of learning, as well as physical movement and exercise that boost memory processes at all ages and that are particularly crucial for such processes in childhood all the way through mid-adolescence. Therefore, we need to know how to plan and seek appropriate experiential learning activities for the development of all sorts of knowledge, particularly activities that present reasonable challenge and offer different perspectives on the same object of learning, and how to engage in such activities insightfully, hands-on, as much as possible, and always minds-on. We also need to know how to systematically engage in such activities not only for their own sake, but consciously and purposely for the sake of continuously developing our productive habits (Sect. 2.5.2). 7. Patterning. Patterns prevail in our cognitive processes and long-term memories at the mind and brain levels, just like they predominate in the real world around us. Any cognitive process involves pattern separation, completion, and/or creation in engrams’ structure and function. Any object of learning, whether a physical reality or an abstract entity or process, is an instance or a part of a pattern in the universe and/or in the shared conceptual realm of a particular group of people, especially professionals in an academic field or CoP, no matter how peculiar that object of learning may seem at a given instance. Therefore, we need to know how to consciously and purposely seek patterns around us and within us, within our mind and brain and within our individual and collective knowledge, thoughts, and behavior. For generic, meaningful, and sustainable knowledge, we particularly need to know how to systematically identify epistemic and procedural patterns within and across disciplines and CoPs, especially functional patterns based on nomic isomorphism, and how to take advantage of such patterns in the construction and deployment of all sorts of cognitive and behavioral knowledge. Managing modulatory systems, especially those concerned with attention, motivation, emotions, and control, is a highly crucial and critical function of metacognition for the following reasons: 1. These systems are involved in every thought and action, consciously or subconsciously. 2. They significantly affect setting our priorities and expectations in any experience, and particularly in learning experiences. 3. They shape the course and efficiency of any experience, and take us in either enjoyable and fulfilling directions or in stressful and futile directions. 4. They determine the nature and quality of realized outcomes, and thus dictate what to take away from any experience as far as memory encoding, consolidation, and/or retrieval are concerned. A tug of war takes place between constructive and destructive modulators leading to one modulator taking over its counterpart. Like any prior knowledge invoked and actively engaged in learning, modulators that prevail in any given experience

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are developed and reinforced as a consequence. Positive learning outcomes reinforce constructive modulators and make them ready to be spontaneously engaged in subsequent experiences and effectively enough to inhibit any negative interference from their destructive counterparts. Negative outcomes lead to opposite results with destructive modulators getting a better chance to prevail in subsequent learning experiences and to result in further negative outcomes. Neuronal substrates of modulators are innate. Some of them, especially destructive modulators like the amygdala, come into action spontaneously, instinctively, and almost reflexively and involuntarily. However, metacognitive dispositions and skills can, and should, be developed and consciously nurtured in order to make constructive modulators of reflective, not reflexive action, like those involving some parts of PFC, overcome destructive modulators. An important way to achieve this is to promote among learners a good value system that incites them for principled conduct (Sect. 2.5.4) in all aspects of life and to subsequently embed related axiological traits in their dispositions. We cannot easily and sufficiently develop and nurture constructive modulatory dispositions and skills on our own, and we often need assistance to do so. The same goes for all other metacognitive dispositions and skills. That is why, metacognition should be the explicit object of educational curricula at all levels including teachers’ pre-service education. Teachers (and all instructors10 ) should be prepared to attend to students’ metacognitive needs in everything they do and ask students to do in their courses. For students and teachers to succeed in this respect, education of all sorts and levels should proceed under appropriate pedagogical frameworks that mandate the development of metacognitive dispositions and skills in concert with the way our minds and brains are and work, and so as to serve student needs for success and excellence not only at school but in every aspect of life. Systemic frameworks can best achieve this end (Box 3.3) as described in the next chapter. Box 3.3 “Educating for the bigger picture” (Goleman & Senge, 2014) Daniel Goleman, an ardent proponent of social-emotional learning (SEL), acknowledged recently that “we feel SEL offers only part of what students need to be well prepared for life. In today’s world of work and global citizenship, young people also need to comprehend the complexity of the problems they will face. Parallel to the development of SEL, for the past 20 years, innovative teachers have been working to introduce systems thinking into PreK-12 schools to build a third intelligence—systems intelligence. Systems thinking, which has been a hot topic in the business world for years, has been shown to increase student motivation by engaging learners in issues of genuine concern to them, like the causes of conflict, whether among cliques in school or between warring nations … In math and science, for example, systems-based pedagogy and curriculum encourage the intuitive understanding that is often lost when

10

See Footnote 1 in Chap. 1.

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students learn only facts or technical manipulations without understanding the larger processes at work. We all know that memorizing the technical terms for the elements of a cell in biology is much less engaging than learning how a cell functions as it processes nutrients, expels waste, and maintains its integrity in the face of chemicals that threaten it. The same is true for manipulating equations in algebra or calculus without knowing how the real-life engineering or natural systems these equations describe actually operate … Without clear and thoughtful goals, our education system is adrift, and it becomes more difficult to motivate engaged learners and attract and retain talented teachers. We believe understanding oneself, others, and the larger systems within which we all live, offers a real step toward this much-needed consensus.”

Chapter 4

Systemic Pedagogy Experiential Ecology for Meaningful Learning

Contents 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Pedagogy for Meaningful Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Systemic Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Taxonomy of Learning Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Middle-Out Knowledge Structure and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Knowledge Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Experiential Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Experiential Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 Systemic Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Learning Cycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Insightful Dialectics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Learning Mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Assessment and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.1 Item Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.2 Assessment Rubrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.3 Maps and Rubrics for Authentic Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4.1 Introduction Formal education is concerned with empowering students of all levels for success in life in efficient ways that resonate well with how the human mind and brain are and work and that meet the realities of the time. To this end, students should be afforded conducive learning environments that help them learn explicitly, and sometimes prescriptively, how to systematically construct, organize, and deploy, minds-on, hands-on, cognitive and behavioral knowledge that they can readily take advantage of in their daily lives. In this chapter, we discuss major pedagogical issues that curriculum developers, teachers, and other educators and educationists need to

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attend to when designing and managing such environments under systemic pedagogical frameworks for the purpose of empowering students with systemic life-related competencies that culminate in systemic 4P profiles. It has long been argued in the educational community, and consistently demonstrated through research, that conventional instruction of lecture and demonstration that conveys passively one-size fits all course materials fails the true mission of formal education. With such common practice, traditional education drives students for transient assimilation by rote and not sustainable meaningful learning of these materials for the sole purpose of passing course and other exams. In order to turn things around, traditional pedagogical paradigms that revolve around authoritative delivery of academic episteme and routines following mostly rules of thumb should be abandoned in favor of mind-and-brain-based paradigms that focus on the evolution of student profiles. Alternative pedagogical paradigms would then make academic content a context of learning for the development of life-related competencies rather than the main, and often sole, objective of instruction, and professional paradigms, the ultimate paradigms that students need to insightfully adapt to, to the extent that their mental and physical potentials allow it at any given point of their schooling years. Alternative paradigms need then to revolve around student cognitive and behavioral needs in relation to their own interests and aspirations, the job market, community development, and various other aspects of everyday life, and to help meeting those needs in accordance with viable pedagogical premises (i.e., realistic, valid, reliable, useful, efficacious, affordable, feasible, reasonable, unambiguous, harmless, dynamically sustainable, etc., tenets, principles, and rules). This chapter draws on the previous three chapters and related research, and proposes pedagogical practices that alternative paradigms may sanction and that concerned actors, especially teachers and curriculum and learning materials developers, may adapt to their student needs as part of overall systemic curricula and education discussed in the next chapter. The chapter consists of eight sections. Section 4.2 outlines meaningful learning by contrast to assimilation by rote of any object of learning. Section 4.3 discusses how systemic knowledge can be efficiently put together in middle-out modalities centered on systems and competencies from which one can go down the cognitive hierarchy to four types of learning outcomes distinguished in a four-dimensional taxonomy and up the hierarchy to the big paradigmatic picture within and across disciplines and fields. The section also discusses how knowledge at any level of the cognitive hierarchy can be gradually developed through five stages of cognitive development. Experiential learning is discussed in Sect. 4.4 in the context of an appropriate learning ecology that fosters systemic learning processes of defined procedural stages. Section 4.5 then discusses how experiential learning can be carried out systematically in learning cycles that allow students to appreciate what they are proposed to learn, and gradually develop, individually and collectively, systemic content, processes, and competencies, coherently across various lessons. All along, students evaluate their knowledge and regulate it insightfully as discussed in Sect. 4.6, and develop it meaningfully under the mediation of teachers and other master learning agents as discussed in Sect. 4.7. The chapter concludes in Sect. 4.8 with a discussion of how assessment

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can be carried out systematically with the use of proper tools like item maps and assessment rubrics, not as an end by itself but as insightful means for meaningful learning of systemic knowledge.

4.2 Pedagogy for Meaningful Learning Virtually every educator and educationist around the globe call for “meaningful learning” and against “rote learning” of course materials at any level of education. The two attributes, meaningful and rote, are sometimes used implicitly as if everybody agrees on what they mean. At other times, they are defined and contrasted in somewhat different ways by different people. Rote learning, or learning by rote, is universally condemned as being about memorization of some educational materials by heart without understanding what they are about and good for. As such, materials may get assimilated without being accommodated in the Piagetian sense, and they may only be regurgitated, blindly reproduced, strictly in the context they were originally assimilated in, or, at best, in what appear to the learner to be similar contexts but that may not be necessarily so. We thus prefer to highlight such limitation of socalled rote learning and refer to it as “assimilation by rote” or “rote assimilation”, and thus to leave the word “learning” out for more worthy cognitive and behavioral endeavors as advocated by leading world organizations like the National Research Council (National Research Council [NRC], 1999, 2005) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2010, 2018). Learning is a coordinated mind-body endeavor. Mind-brain cognitive processes discussed in the previous chapter are most important and pivotal in any form of learning, and engage to different proportions a mix of prior cognitive and behavioral knowledge, whether consciously or subconsciously, implicitly or explicitly. These processes govern, and are coordinated with, physical, sensorimotor actions, particularly during transaction with physical realities, and, at all times, cognitive processes and physical actions are regulated and modulated by particular axioaffective factors and somatic feelings as already described in the previous chapter and further discussed in this chapter. Learning is addressed in this chapter at the macro-level, from a practical pedagogical perspective that builds upon the mind-brain cognitive perspective offered at the micro-level in the previous chapter. We are hereby particularly interested in pedagogical underpinnings and practices for meaningful learning of educational materials. Table 4.1 outlines what meaningful learning is for us by contrast to assimilation by rote in terms of a number aspects of learning going from the moment one decides to go after some type of knowledge, to the actual cognitive processes one undertakes to develop target knowledge and deploy it in one form or another, and all the way to how one’s own overall profile would get affected as a consequence. These aspects are further elaborated in the course of our discussion in this chapter and the following one. Students of all levels often cannot develop meaningful learning of educational materials on their own along the lines of Table 4.1. As indicated in the last row of the

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table and henceforth elaborated, students need to engage in a proper ecology with a proper learning environment to be set or scaffolded for them to learn meaningfully, under proper guidance, well-designed educational materials (as discussed in the next chapter) that they deem relevant to their personal and collective welfare. Pedagogy is for us about what and how people learn at specific stages of their lives, and specifically about how to specify and organize what students of a given educational level can learn and about how they can and should learn designated materials meaningfully in formal education. It is thus about how curricula should be designed and implemented in accordance with how the human mind and brain are and work and so as to meet the realities of the time. This chapter is devoted to pedagogical premises and practices for “how” students can develop meaningful learning of educational materials along the lines of Table 4.1 and in accordance with the mind-brain perspective of the previous chapter. How to design “what” these materials should consist of in appropriate curricula makes primarily the object of the next chapter. The following section tackles some content aspects (in partial answer to “what” to learn) that are necessary to carry out our discussion about procedural aspects (in answer to the “how” question) in subsequent sections, and that help paving the way for the next chapter.

4.3 Systemic Knowledge Engrams are the physical, neuronal substrates of memories. Knowledge about any physical or conceptual entity, event, or process is upheld by a complex engram system that spreads across different parts of the brain, no matter how simple or elementary that knowledge might be. Each engram in the system is distinguished with unique structure and function and upholds a unique bit of knowledge. That bit corresponds to a very narrow aspect of one of the four knowledge or memory categories distinguished in Box 3.1. It is not settled yet in neuroscience how narrow that aspect actually is. It is also not settled how to delimit a given engram system and pinpoint the knowledge category or mix of categories it corresponds to. However, for all practical pedagogical purposes, and for an orderly discussion and implementation of systemic, mind-and-brain-based pedagogy, we will hereby concentrate on two types of engram systems, and thus two types of memories or knowledge structures in the makeup of any person’s profile. The two systems are, in increasing order of complexity, the neuronal substrates of learning outcomes and competencies. A learning outcome (hereafter referred to as LO) is, for us, the smallest meaningful packet of a particular type of knowledge (Box 3.1) that we distinguish pedagogically and that a person actually achieves and sustains in memory about a particular aspect of a particular object of learning or set of objects of learning. An object of learning (hereafter referred to as O/L) is any concrete or abstract entity, event, or process that we intentionally learn about in formal or informal settings. A learning outcome may be specific or generic. It is specific when it pertains to a particular O/L or category of O/Ls and when it typically makes the object of a particular branch of a particular

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Table 4.1 Meaningful learning versus assimilation by rote of educational materials Aspect

Meaningful learning

Assimilation by rote

Quest

New knowledge sought intentionally under personal conviction of its value to serve worthy purposes, and under intrinsic drives for and beyond satisfying one’s own curiosity, needs, and aspirations as part of lifelong learning and continuous improvement of personal and collective life conditions

New knowledge received passively and blindly mostly to fulfill mandated requirements and/or to satisfy or please other people, be it superiors, parents, or instructors

Focus

New knowledge developed with external focus on primary aspects of objects of learning, and intrinsic focus on discovering and strengthening one’s own cognitive and behavioral potentials for the ultimate goal of empowering oneself for success/excellence in life

New knowledge developed with external focus on secondary aspects of objects of learning, and intrinsic focus on assimilating what it takes to fulfill job/course requirements and pass evaluation/exams

Sense making

Any object of learning (O/L) consciously analyzed and related semantically to prior knowledge, and interpreted in terms of that knowledge by correspondence to what it refers to in the real world and/or the conceptual realm of CoPs, in order to construe its meaning and understand what it is about and good for

An object of learning (O/L) construed at face value, interpreted vaguely by correspondence to what it refers to and loosely in terms of existing knowledge, and retained without fully understanding what it is about and good for

Engagement

New knowledge about any O/L constructed experientially, minds-on, hands-on, individually and collectively, involving, as autonomously as possible and to the extent that is possible, realist-rationalist dialectics and coordinated mind-body conceptual and physical actions, and invoking adequate memory resources (prior cognitive and behavioral knowledge, metacognition included)

New knowledge about an O/L accumulated passively, at best by mimicking or being conditioned by an authority, be it an instructor or a professional practitioner, and by invoking cognitive and behavioral resources that may not be necessarily adequate for the O/L at hand

Formation

New knowledge systematically encoded, revisited, and rehearsed with recourse to efficacious schemata and schemes, and constantly evaluated and regulated for enhanced structure, wider scope, and improved efficiency

New knowledge accumulated following rules of thumb and rehearsed through repetitive drills for reinforcement as originally acquired

(continued)

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Table 4.1 (continued) Aspect

Meaningful learning

Assimilation by rote

Integration

New knowledge consciously anchored into, and coherently integrated with, prior knowledge, especially with memory patterns, and all engaged memory resources evaluated and regulated insightfully in the process particularly to resonate well with professional/CoP paradigms

New knowledge accumulated so as to possibly co-exist with prior knowledge without being necessarily integrated insightfully with that knowledge, or to be loosely integrated with flawed or inappropriate prior knowledge invoked in the original accumulation process

Deployment

Constructed knowledge insightfully deployed in a variety of contexts following systematic schemes of clear and explicit rules, including efficient retrieval mnemonics, that can be adapted to any situation for the sake of bringing about high standard ends

New knowledge deployed, like accumulated, following rules of thumb, and/or by reproducing routine steps blindly or based on wrong criteria in an attempt to bring about passively mandated, unclear, or unworthy ends

Transfer

Constructed knowledge developed flexibly and generically enough to be readily transferable to new and unfamiliar situations in a variety of domains within the original and different disciplines and fields

New knowledge accumulated as context-dependent to be routinely deployable only in familiar situations or similar ones confined to a narrow domain in a particular branch of a given discipline

Efficiency

Constructed knowledge elaborated to address existing issues in creative ways, and extrapolated to formulate new questions and new problems and tackle them in productive and innovative ways

Accumulated knowledge rigidly restricted to its original scope (domain and function) with little possibility, if any, for creative extrapolation within or outside this scope

Sustainability

Knowledge consolidated through systematic construction and deployment in a dynamic long-term memory (LTM) state so as to be continuously elaborated and refined/transformed along with related memory resources and to be always accessible in any learning experience

New knowledge often retained temporarily in a transient state as short-term memory (STM), or sometimes implicitly sustained as LTM if its nature allows it, like riding a bicycle or memorizing the multiplication table, mostly to fulfill externally imposed requirements

Profile impact

One’s own profile transformed as a consequence of newly developed knowledge, particularly with regard to competencies and habits for lifelong learning and for meeting the realities and challenges of the time, and ultimately in the direction of a systemic 4P profile

Accumulated knowledge appended to prior knowledge with little transformation of the latter and thus of profile, if any, and minor favorable implications on learning and daily life habits

(continued)

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Table 4.1 (continued) Aspect

Meaningful learning

Assimilation by rote

Learning conditions

Learner-centered, instructor-scaffolded learning ecology, structured and managed under viable (ideally systemic) pedagogical frameworks to mediate along insightful and propitious paths individual and collective experiential learning of relevant and well-designed educational materials

Conventional authority-driven ecology predominated by one-size fits all instruction/training of lecture and demonstration about apparently irrelevant disciplinary knowledge and driving the majority of learners away from meaningful learning of such knowledge

discipline in academia or community of practice (CoP). It is generic when it pertains to many O/L categories and makes the object of many branches in a given discipline, or, more importantly, of many disciplines in different fields in academia or CoPs. As discussed in Sect. 2.3, a competency is a complex knowledge packet that consists of a mix of knowledge types and that is necessary to successfully achieve a given task or set of tasks pertaining to many O/Ls. When they get sufficiently consolidated in a person’s memory, competencies turn into habits of life in the profile of that person. Like learning outcomes, but with a broader scope, a competency can be specific or generic. A specific competency consists of a mix of cognitive and behavioral knowledge that is necessary to achieve similar tasks that are typically the object of a particular branch of a particular discipline. A generic competency consists of a mix of cognitive and behavioral knowledge that is necessary to achieve a variety of tasks that make the object of many branches in a particular discipline, or, more importantly, of many disciplines in different fields. A competency, and thus any task it is about, entails a variety of learning outcomes in terms of which the competency may actually be specified, and it offers an efficacious and efficient context for the development of such outcomes. Similarly, developing meaningful knowledge about any object of learning requires the development of a variety of learning outcomes about this and other similar and related O/Ls. A more elaborate picture of learning outcomes becomes thus important, particularly in relation to the taxonomy introduced in Box 3.1 and to systemic competencies and profiles as discussed in Chap. 2.

4.3.1 Taxonomy of Learning Outcomes A learning outcome (LO) is the smallest memory (engram system) that a person has already encoded (STM) and then consolidated (LTM) about a particular aspect of a given object of learning (O/L) or set of O/Ls, and that the person can demonstrate in observable and measurable ways. More specifically for us, and in line with the taxonomy of Box 3.1 and with other taxonomies proposed in cognition and education, a learning outcome pertains to O/Ls in a distinctive respect that may be of a particular

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epistemic, rational, sensory-motor, or axio-affective nature as distinguished in the Systemic Cognition and Education (SCE) taxonomy of learning outcomes presented in Table 4.2 (Halloun, 2017/19). Each dimension in our SCE taxonomy is divided into five facets, and each facet is divided into a number of subsets (Halloun, 2014/19). A learning outcome pertains then more precisely to a particular subset of a specific facet in a given dimension of the taxonomy. The epistemic dimension of the taxonomy covers various O/Ls with respect to corresponding conceptions that belong to the “episteme” or corpus of content or declarative knowledge (factual and theoretical) about such objects in a given academic or CoP field. A conception is here the output, the conceptual product in human mind, not the process, of conceiving whatever fact, notion, or idea about a physical or abstract O/L or set of O/Ls. Conceptions include object and property concepts, along with conceptual connections or relations among concepts. Connections may take the form of definitions, laws, principles, theorems, or other premises (theoretical statements). Epistemic learning outcomes (LOs) also pertain to appropriate conceptual means or tools to depict, connect, and operate with conceptions, and they all come with corresponding semantics and syntax. The rational dimension pertains to reasoning skills needed to carry out conceptual, not physical, processes with an O/L, or set of O/Ls, and with related conceptions (along with corresponding semantics and syntax). Rational LOs are particularly about reasoning skills required for inception of, and operation with, conceptions in working memory, meaningful understanding and sustainable integration in long-term memory (consolidation) of conceptions, and their efficient retrieval from memory and productive deployment in various situations. In contrast to other taxonomies in education, the rational dimension is distinguished from the epistemic dimension in our taxonomy. Such distinction is crucial for setting the line between “what” certain physical or conceptual objects of learning are about and what to learn about their very existence, on the one hand, and “how” to go about learning about them and taking advantage of them in practical, especially real-life situations, on the other. The sensory-motor (or sensorimotor) dimension embraces dexterities, or perceptual and physical, not conceptual, skills needed for their own sake or for the sake of developing and deploying conceptions and reasoning skills. We hereby use the term “dexterity” in a broad sense to include, in addition to manual or manipulative skills, all sorts of perceptual and behavioral operations and skills (e.g., looking and listening in perception and using a computer keyboard and physical exercise in behavior). Sensory-motor LOs are primarily about dexterities required for taking necessary perceptual and physical actions leading to meaningful understanding and productive deployment of O/Ls and reification in one concrete for or another of corresponding conceptions and reasoning skills.

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Table 4.2 SCE taxonomy of learning outcomes Dimension

Faceta

Description

Epistemicb

Entities in context (object concepts)c

Nature of an object of learning (O/L) and of all primary (relevant) entities (physical or conceptual objects) it consists of and is related to, or it interacts with, significantly, if any, as part of specific event(s) or processes—but not connections/relations among entities—and of the context (settings or environment) in which O/L and inner and outer entities are situated

Descriptors (property concepts)c Property concepts—but not connections/relations among concepts—needed to represent primary (relevant) properties of O/L and of primary entities, events, and/or processes, individually and in relation to each other Connectionsd

Relations among object and/or property concepts (in the form of definitions, axioms, laws, theorems, etc.), especially descriptive and explanatory relations among descriptors that express respectively “how” is an O/L (state structure and processes) and “why” this state changes or not in place and/or time. Explanation often comes with the identification of “causes”, if any, that might be behind the change or conservation of state, and of cause-effect relationships

Depictors

Symbolic and pictorial representations (alphabetic, iconic, and diagrammatic included) that may depict entities, events, processes, and related properties and connections among them all

Operators and operational statements

Operators (syntactic and logico-mathematical included) and rules for connecting and processing various concepts and conceptual connections, their depictors, or their physical referents (continued)

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Table 4.2 (continued) Dimension

Faceta

Description

Rational

Analytical reasoning

Exploration and analysis of the state (or change of state) of an O/L, and specification of which features (entities and their properties) are primary or pertinent and which are secondary or irrelevant for state description, explanation, and prediction

Criterial reasoning

Criteria-based thought processes about various aspects of an O/L in reference to the pattern it represents or it is part of, including comparison, measurement, classification, and analogical reasoning

Relational reasoning

Connecting appropriate concepts to establish viable morphological (constitution-related) and/or phenomenological (performance-related) relationships within and among various O/Ls and their properties, and linking up such relationships all the way to a big disciplinary picture and convergence among disciplines and fields

Critical reasoning

Determination and formulation of questions/problems about an O/L state; insightful inquiry and reflection about it and its merits, and about pertinent conceptions, underlying assumptions, and the entire learning ecology; anticipation of future prospects and challenges

Logical reasoning

Making conjectures and evidence-based arguments and inferences about an O/L and the pattern it represents or it is part of, and informed decisions and strategic choices about questions and problems at hand (continued)

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Table 4.2 (continued) Dimension

Faceta

Description

Sensory-motor

Expressive dexterities

Systematic and coordinated production of concise and precise oral, kinesthetic, written, graphic, artistic, or other expression forms (rationally chosen) to depict and communicate with others various aspects of an O/L (and other entities) in accordance with sound semantics and syntax

Digital dexterities

Efficient and constructive use of computers, peripherals, and all sorts of ICT media (hardware and software) that help understanding O/Ls and carrying out related processes (exploration, knowledge construction, deployment, etc.)

Manipulative dexterities

Efficient and constructive use of all sorts of physical tools and technical devices needed for various O/L processes, and that are typical of those used in school laboratories and shops

Artistic dexterities

Creative use of graphic arts and design, and other artistic tools, in the conception, design, and reification of necessary means for carrying out O/L processes efficiently and aesthetically

Ecological dexterities

Conscientious, constructive, and efficient interaction with others and the environment, and eco-conscious processes with O/L, inside and outside the classroom

Emotions (short lived)

Positive and constructive control of one’s own emotions while dealing with an O/L, with sustained motivation and focused attention on aspects that fulfill personal needs and satisfaction at the conceptual and practical levels

Axio-affective

(continued)

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Table 4.2 (continued) Dimension

Faceta

Description

Dispositions

Sustained constructive drive for successful and efficient completion of any task, an open-mind toward others’ ideas especially when different from one’s own ideas, and a resolve for systemism, productivity, and progressiveness

Sentiments (long lived) and attitudes

Sustained positive thoughts about and stance toward an O/L and concerned people, especially peers, teacher, and other learning agents, and resolve for constructive, synergetic, and respectful interaction with all learning agents

Ethics and values

Ethical conduct in learning tasks and beyond, by conformity to globally valued morals and codes of conduct, especially those valued by professionals in the concerned field of study

Civics and citizenship

Valuing any O/L, LO, and competency for personal and community merits, and in relation to one’s own and others’ culture and heritage, rights and duties, and sustained drive for personal and collective excellence in related tasks and beyond, in education and life

a The choice of and within any facet depends on any given object of learning (O/L) and what needs to be accomplished with it. This choice follows then the identification, in an appropriate framework, of: (a) the ontological nature of O/L, i.e., whether it is physical or conceptual, inert or living if physical, etc., and whether it is simple/elementary or compound/composite, (b) the pattern and/or the system that O/L is about or part of, (c) the state of O/L in the context of the situation that it is in (system and/or environment, conceptual settings, etc.) and that might affect this state in constitution or performance b All five epistemic facets include semantics and syntax of corresponding conceptions Semantics are about the interpretation of a given conception by correspondence to its referents (i.e., what it represents in the real world or what it is about in the abstract realm) in order to make sense of it, and understand what it means, and what it is good for, in isolation of and in relation to other elements of the same nature and corresponding to the same referent Syntax is about the rules that must be obeyed when connecting/relating one conception to another in one form or another, and carrying out operations (including measurement and coordination of multiple representations of the same conception) that such connections entail when establishing or deploying them c This facet pertains, among others, to the composition and environment, but not to the endo-structure and exo-structure in the constitution dimension of the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1) d This facet pertains, among others, to endo- and exo-structure in the constitution dimension of the systemic schema, and to processes in the performance dimension (Fig. 1.1)

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The axio-affective dimension covers emotions, sentiments, dispositions, ethics, values, and other inter- and intra-personal affective and axiological factors that control and contribute to the modulation of our thoughts and actions in any situation. Axio-affective LOs pertain to those modulatory, and primarily metacognitive factors that control our cognitive processes, perceptions, and physical actions in formal education, and that bring our learning experiences to fruitful and constructive ends at the individual and collective levels. Three issues are worth noting at this point regarding our SCE taxonomy. They pertain respectively to what we mean by learning outcome, the choice of dimensions and facets, and some distinguishing features of these dimensions, particularly the epistemic dimension (Halloun, 2017/19). A learning outcome (LO) is specified and stated or expressed as deemed beforehand necessary and suitable for certain objects of learning (O/Ls) and competencies, i.e., before learners are observed in action to determine what they have actually achieved, and the LO may be refined afterwards. This practice of stating a given LO as desired or expected is crucial in order to design and deploy learning experiences that are appropriate for students in formal education to reify (achieve) that LO, and to reliably assess the extent to which each student has actually reified the LO. The assessment in question results in an inference about the LO state in a student’s mind (or body) from the student performance on specific tasks, and never in an actual snapshot of the LO. The inference reliability is primarily function of the quality of indicators chosen and associated à priori with particular scales that are often task dependent. A task can be simple enough to target only that particular LO, or it can be involved to target a given competency in relation to a particular O/L (a system or part of a system) or set of O/Ls, and thus to entail simultaneously a number of distinct LOs in distinctive aspects of the task. Our SCE taxonomy is about explicit not implicit, or tacit, learning outcomes. Explicit learning outcomes, typically stored in explicit memory, are consciously developed (encoded and consolidated), retrieved, and deployed. They can be expressed in words and actions, and explicitly communicated and prescribed to others so that they can make sense of them, ascertain their merits, and develop them properly if needed. In contrast, implicit learning outcomes, typically stored in implicit memory, may or may not be originally consciously developed, retrieved, and deployed. However, with practice, they come to a point where we begin deploying them tacitly, i.e., automatically and spontaneously without conscious rational or sensory-motor effort. This is the case, for example, of mastering a given language, especially a native language, and speaking it without any conscious recall or even knowledge of its semantics and syntax. This is also the case of arithmetic operations and many physical actions, like walking or driving between familiar locations, or manipulating sculpture and painting tools, all of which we may carry routinely, perhaps after a period of explicit development and prescriptive practice, without consciously thinking of the corresponding rules. Implicit learning outcomes deserve due attention in education, yet they form a class of their own that is beyond the scope of our Table 4.2 and our discussion here.

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Our SCE taxonomy of learning outcomes is a generic taxonomy that applies to any field under any pedagogical framework. However, it gains full significance when deployed under systemic frameworks to define systemic competencies, and especially to spell out programs of study in the form of learning outcomes and competencies pertaining to well-chosen systems and systemic processes (Figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4). Table 4.3 illustrates how our taxonomy, and specifically its epistemic and rational dimensions, may serve to spell out systemic programs of study, i.e., programs of study consisting not of isolated conceptions but of limited sets of powerful and essential systems that are free of redundancies and superfluous information and that reflect patterns of interest in the physical world and/or the conceptual realm of academic and professional (CoP) knowledge. The table pertains to our planet Earth as a simple system as already introduced in Table 1.1 and delineated by convenience in terms of the function it is meant to serve. The function considered for illustration is of describing, explaining, and predicting three particular terrestrial phenomena: the day and night cycle, seasons, and sea and ocean tides. Details about the choice and statement of learning outcomes in this table are provided elsewhere (Halloun, 2017/19). As for the four dimensions and corresponding facets, we have distinguished them and named them, as just mentioned above, so as to make them as universal as possible and not restricted to a particular field or discipline and not to our own pedagogical framework. Table 4.2 provides for each dimension five facets that are most common to various fields, along with the description of each facet. The list is non-exhaustive and non-exclusive. Other facets that cut across a number of disciplines or that may be discipline-specific may still be added in any one of the four dimensions. Each facet can further be divided into a number of subsets. For example, in the rational facet of analytical reasoning skills, we may distinguish a number of subsets (distinctive analysis skills) including survey, differentiation, description, explanation, and prediction. Different subsets impose different cognitive demands (Box 3.2). A subset (e.g., descriptive analysis) is delimited in our taxonomy so that all corresponding learning outcomes impose cognitive demands of virtually the same level (Halloun, 2014/19). Some facets that are ontologically close to, but not quite part of, one dimension or the other, or that are at the interface of two dimensions may also be added in Table 4.2 outside any of the four distinguished dimensions. For instance, in the first respect, a “facts” facet (or perhaps a “factual” dimension) may be added above the epistemic dimension. That facet belongs to declarative knowledge and covers entities (events/processes as well) and their properties in particular states that are taken for granted following the acknowledgment of their existence by all people who come across them. The very existence of Earth and our Sun and Moon and the phenomena discussed in Tables 1.1 and 4.3, as well as your own existence and that of the document you are reading right now are such facts. In another respect, one procedural facet may be added, say, at the interface of the epistemic dimension, and more precisely the “Operators” facet of that dimension, and the rational dimension to include routine abstract operations. Such operations include arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as various other abstract processes that are carried out using operators and following

Scope

Framework

Schema

Domain

• The classical framework is universal; it applies to any similar planetary system in the universe • The framework includes premises shared with other frameworks that govern the microscopic world as well as the macroscopic and astronomical worlds (Tables 1.1 and 1.4) • E/SM is the object of scientific and non-scientific fields, including arts and literature

E2T

E3T

E4T

• Is a prototype of all planet/star and satellite(s) systems in the universe • Represents all celestial objects that are centrally bound by the gravitational interaction with other celestial objects

E6E

E7E

R7C

R6L

• Is part of our Solar system that includes more planets and their R5L satellites

R4K

R3K

R2L

E5E

The student realizes that the E/SM system

• The Earth system taken with the Sun and Moon as its sole agents (hereafter denoted by E/SM system) can be studied in a classical framework for the purposes set in the scope (E8)

E1T

R1L

Labelb

The student realizes that

Rational

Labela Sample learning outcomes

Epistemic

Taxonomy

Table 4.3 Systemic learning outcomes for Earth in the Sun-Moon environment (E/SM system)

(continued)

• Specify the criteria according to which the E/SM system can serve as a model or prototype for other planetary systems

• Acknowledge convincingly that billions of systems similar to E/SM exist in the universe, all governed by the same laws as the E/SM system

• Figure out that the defined system and framework are suitable for studying phenomena not only on Earth, but also on the Sun and the Moon as affected by Earth and each other

The student is able to

• Ascertain certain foundations and claims in science fiction and outside science regarding the E/SM system

• Refute with proper arguments the foundations of astrology

• Figure out that there are universal premises that could be part of a variety of frameworks

• Figure out that the chosen classical framework stemming from Newton’s theory of classical mechanics and Kepler’s planetary theory suits the set purposes

The student is able to

Sample learning outcomes

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Function

Composition

Scope

Constitution

Schema

Table 4.3 (continued)

• For the development, in certain respects, of scientific theory and paradigm • To inspire various artistic and literary works, real or fictional, and even some mythical and anti-scientific beliefs

E9T

E10T

(continued)

• Figure out which properties depend on the choice of the reference system and which do not

R14R

• Figure out that considered primary features are specified with a certain level of approximation that is suitable for the distinguished purposes (e.g., assuming that the three celestial objects are spherical) • Recognize the need for an appropriate reference system in which to situate the E/SM system

• The primary Earth properties that need to be considered for the R12K study of the three phenomena in question include its mass (only if gravitational forces need to be evaluated), its spherical shape, its axis of rotation, and its position at specific times relative to the Moon and Sun

E12D

• List the features (entities and their properties) of the E/SM system and distinguish between primary and secondary features for any particular function of the system

The student is able to

• Acknowledge convincingly that, should planets similar to Earth exist in the universe, the three phenomena and their impact on possible life would occur similarly on those planets

• Determine which questions the E/SM system/model can answer and which it does not

• Figure out that, though related, the three functions, and especially description and explanation are distinct functions that need to be addressed distinctively

The student is able to

Sample learning outcomes

R13R

• For the purpose of studying the three phenomena of interest (E8), Earth can be considered, to a very good approximation, as a “simple” spherical object with no particular composition to take into consideration (the same goes for the other two celestial bodies, Moon and Sun, in the environment)

R11A

R10L

R9K

R8K

E11D

The student realizes that

• To describe, explain, and predict many phenomena on Earth including the occurrence of: – Day and night; – Seasons; – Tides

E8C (PD and PE)

The student realizes that the E/SM system serves

Rational Labelb

Labela Sample learning outcomes

Epistemic

Taxonomy

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Constitution

Schema

Exo-structure

Environment

Endo-structure

Table 4.3 (continued)

• The tilt angle of the Earth’s axis of rotation constantly changes, though slightly throughout the years (about 47'' or 0.013° per century)

E15C (PD)

• Aside from their position relative to Earth, and only if gravitational forces need to be evaluated, the mass of each agent is the only intrinsic primary property to take into consideration

E17D

• For the functions considered in E8, we only need to consider the actions on Earth of its agents, the Sun and the Moon, and not the reciprocal action of Earth on its agents • Kepler’s laws and Newton’s laws of mechanics govern the motion of all three celestial objects • The change of position, from day to night and from one day to another, of a given spot on Earth relative to the Sun and the Moon causes a change in the net gravitational interaction at this spot with the two agents

E18C (PE)

E19C (PE)

E20C (ME)

The student realizes that

• The primary agents of Earth that need to be considered are: Sun for the first two E8 phenomena (day and night, seasons), and the Moon for the tides

E16E

The student realizes that

• In 2022, the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted at an angle of about 23° 26' with respect to the normal to the plane of its elliptical orbit around the Sun

E14D and C (MD)

R22L

R20C

R21L

R19A

R18A

R17C and L

R16K

• The inner structure of Earth (like that of the other two celestial R15A bodies) can be ignored for the purpose of studying the three E8 phenomena

E13C (MD)

The student realizes that

Rational Labelb

Labela Sample learning outcomes

Epistemic

Taxonomy

(continued)

• Deduce the universality of interaction laws in content (e.g., dependence on mass/charge and distance in gravitational/electrostatic laws) and form (e.g., the inverse square)

• Infer similarities and differences between the E/SM system and the Bohr model of the atom

• Figure out that neighboring planets interact with Earth but have no significant effect on the E8 phenomena

The student is able to

• Determine why the Earth position relative to the two agents and the relative masses of the latter celestial bodies are primary determining factors in the three phenomena

• Determine why external agents (Sun and Moon) and not the Earth itself are behind the three phenomena of interest (E8)

The student is able to

• Figure out that eventually, and after thousands of years, Earth’s axis of rotation will get reversed (thus reversing seasons in the two hemispheres)

• Figure out that human activities on Earth may have a significant detrimental impact on the three phenomena of interest, though to different degrees, and should thus be constructively controlled

• Figure out that natural interactions in the Earth biosphere have no significant impact on the three phenomena within our scope of interest (particularly seasons) and can thus be ignored here

The student is able to

Sample learning outcomes

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Performance Processes

Schema

Table 4.3 (continued)

• Earth rotates around itself (around its virtual axis of rotation) once every almost 24 h, and its rotational motion is governed by Euler’s laws • Earth moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun once every almost 365 days, and its translational motion is governed by Newton’s laws of the centrally bound particle model • The Moon orbits around Earth in an ellipse, with the Earth at one of the foci, just like the Earth does around the Sun

E22C (PD and PE)

E23C (PD and PE)

E24C (PD)

• Relate the change of apparent positions of sunrise and sunset to the orbit of Earth around the Sun

R27A

• Explain why sea and ocean water moves inland and outland during tides • Explain why tides are more pronounced in oceans than in seas

R30A R31C

(continued)

• Figure out why the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation and not its relative position to the Sun is the determining factor for the occurrence of seasons

R29L

R28A and L • Acknowledge that there are different seasons at the same time in different countries around the globe, and particularly opposite seasons in the two hemispheres

• Relate the occurrence of equinoxes to the position of the Earth relative to the Sun

• Describe how the relative duration of day and night varies with seasons

• Get convinced that Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around

• Describe how the angle of incidence of sunlight varies from one spot to another on Earth at a given time, and from day to day at the same spot

The student is able to

Sample learning outcomes

R26R

R25A

R24L

• The primary processes that need to be considered for the study R23A of the three phenomena of interest (E8) pertain respectively to the Earth’s rotation around its axis (day and night), its elliptical orbit around the Sun, with attention to its inclined axis of rotation (seasons), and the Moon’s elliptical orbit around the Earth (tides)

E21C (PD)

The student realizes that

Rational Labelb

Labela Sample learning outcomes

Epistemic

Taxonomy

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Output

E28C (PE)

(continued)

• Compare the effect of the Sun and the Moon on tides in terms of the magnitude of the gravitational forces they exchange with the Earth

• Figure out why the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation and not its relative position to the Sun is the determining factor for the occurrence of seasons (Fig. 1.5)

• The change of seasons in a given country results from the change, from day to day, of the angle of incidence of sunlight and not of the position of Earth relative to the Sun (Fig. 1.5) • The differential gravitational attraction by the Moon on R35C different points on Earth (which is more significant than that of the Sun) results in sea and ocean tides

The student is able to

The student realizes that R34A

• The quasi-spherical shape of the Earth and the tilt of its axis of R33A and L • Explain each phenomenon in terms of the appropriate causal rotation cause: (a) sunlight to hit different regions of Earth at law different angles of incidence in a given time, and (b) change, from day to day, of that angle of incidence at a particular spot on Earth as it orbits around the Sun

E26C (PE)

• Set longitudes and latitudes, and specify how longitudes determine time zones and latitudes, climate and seasons

The student is able to

• The day-night cycle results from Earth rotation around its axis in front of the Sun

R32R

Sample learning outcomes

E25C (PE)

The student realizes that

Rational Labelb

Labela Sample learning outcomes

Epistemic

Taxonomy

Performance Output (extrapolated E27C (PE) beyond the original scope)

Schema

Table 4.3 (continued)

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• The Moon’s revolution around Earth brings about, in addition to the tides, numerous effects like the apparent phases of the Moon

E31C (PE)

E32C (ME and PE) • The three phenomena herein considered have particular impacts on life on Earth

R37R

• Earth rotation around its inclined axis of rotation brings about, in addition to the day-night cycle, numerous effects including its precession (wobbling like a top) with a period of around 26,000 years (for a complete turn)

E30C (PD and PE)

• Specify how the Moon phases can be determined in a particular time of the lunar cycle (how to tell from the shape of the lit part of the Moon) • Relate the occurrence of eclipses to the relative position of the Sun, Earth and Moon • Formulate proper questions about the origin and evolution of the E/SM system • Formulate hypotheses about the relative impact of the three phenomena herein covered on life on Earth, and their socio-economic impact • Generalize the three phenomena and their impact on life to other planets in the universe, should there be planets similar to Earth out there

R40A R41K R42K

R43L

• Explain and predict the phases of the Moon in a lunar cycle

• Compare the impact on heat, and thus on climate and seasons, due to the change of the distance between the Earth and the Sun at different times of the year

• Compare the impact on heat, and thus on climate and seasons, due to the variation, in space and time, of the angle of incidence of sunlight on Earth

Sample learning outcomes

R39C

R38A

R36R

E29C (ME and PE) • Earth elliptical revolution around the Sun (just like Moon around Earth) brings about many effects in addition to seasons and weather and climate changes. These include a variation of the gravitational interaction between the two celestial bodies that goes from a minimum when Earth is farthest away from the Sun to a maximum when it is closest to it, which in turn results in the Earth moving slowest on its orbit in the former case and fastest in the latter

Rational Labelb

Labela Sample learning outcomes

Epistemic

Taxonomy

The letter following the number of an epistemic learning outcome (E label) relates to Table 4.2 as follows: “T” for a theory or set of theories in a given paradigm, “E” for entities’ object concepts, “D” for descriptors or property concepts, and “C” for conceptual connections. For further distinction and relation to other facets, “C” is followed in parentheses with: “MD” for descriptive morphology, “ME” for explanatory morphology, “PD” for descriptive phenomenology, and/or “PE” for explanatory phenomenology. MD and ME are respectively about the description and explanation of constitution in the system schema (Fig. 1.1), and PD and PE, about the description and explanation of performance. The depictors facet is partially illustrated in Fig. 1.5. The operators facet omitted in this table is primarily about all laws that have been listed and not formerly stated or expressed in the table for simplicity b The letter following the number of a rational learning outcome (R label) corresponds to the appropriate facet in Table 4.2 as follows: “A” for analytical reasoning, “C” for criterial reasoning, “R” for relational reasoning, “K” for critical reasoning, and “L” for logical reasoning

a

Schema

Table 4.3 (continued)

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141

rules specified in the epistemic facet in question. Likewise, two behavioral facets may be added, one at the interface of the same epistemic facet and the sensory-motor dimension to include routine physical processes like swimming and other physical exercises and actions, and the other at the interface of the sensory-motor dimension and the axio-affective dimension to cover particular social interactions. One should though be very careful in delimiting an additional facet or dimension in our taxonomy or any other taxonomy of learning outcomes. For instance, one might be carried away in elaborating the latter social interactions facet to interface with the epistemic and rational dimensions as well in order to cover, say, teamwork in educational or occupational settings. The facet may then turn into a competency to accomplish tasks in an exclusive domain and under particular terms (specific competency) or collaborative or cooperative tasks carried in a variety of domains (generic competency). Some facet details and corresponding subsets are discipline specific in certain respects. The epistemic dimension is the most affected by discipline peculiarities in traditional discipline-specific curricula. As indicated in Table 4.2, conceptions serve to set the characteristics of O/Ls within specific settings, and to describe and explain their morphology (constitution in the system schema of Fig. 1.1) and phenomenology (performance, events or behavior). Individual conceptions about an O/L or a set or category of O/Ls, and especially individual object and property concepts and connections among concepts, and related semantics and syntax, are traditionally discipline specific. Some conceptions may be exclusively the object of a particular discipline but not others, and the same conceptions may be the object of different disciplines but approached from different perspectives and thus defined differently in these disciplines. Epistemic facets of Table 4.2, like all facets in the other three dimensions, have though been chosen so as to transcend the peculiarities of individual disciplines and facilitate convergence among traditionally different disciplines. In the context of systemic pedagogical frameworks, and with the focus on systemic objects of learning, curricula would concentrate on learning outcomes that are most critical for bringing up epistemic patterns within and across various disciplines, and thus for bringing about systemic convergence in education (Sect. 5.4). To this end, LOs are particularly targeted that are at the crossroads of various disciplines on the one hand, or that help bridging traditionally distinct disciplines and fields, on the other, so as to bring coherence within and across educational curricula, and help students realize the big picture within and across disciplines and fields.

4.3.2 Middle-Out Knowledge Structure and Development A systemic worldview allows us to systematize how we go about exploring and interacting with the world around us, understanding this world meaningfully, from the big picture in any situation we are interested in, down to the minute details, and shuttling between big picture and details efficiently and productively. It especially

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Fig. 4.1 Systems in the middle-out hierarchy between the big picture and individual details in a given situation, and between universal patterns and local or specific entities and/or connections among entities

allows us to readily recognize morphological or phenomenological patterns that predominate in both the physical world around us and the conceptual realm within our human minds and all sorts of knowledge we conceive and produce. As indicated in Fig. 4.1, systems occupy the middle of the cognitive hierarchy between a big picture (that may be a universal pattern) and specific details in a given situation. According to Lakoff (1987), humans organize their knowledge in middle-out structures whereby basic and most fundamental structures occupy the middle of the rational hierarchy between individual entities and the entire corpus of knowledge pertaining to those and similar entities. Systems, as we see it, are such basic structures. For example, a typical and crucial corpus of knowledge consists in science of a given theory or set of theories, and, in languages, of the various types and genres of discourse (or written text). A conceptual system in science, and more specifically a scientific model like Bohr’s model of the atom (Table 1.4), is to theory (the big picture) and concept (detail) what an atom is to matter and elementary particles. Each elementary particle at the bottom of the structural hierarchy is essential in the structure of matter at the top of the hierarchy. However, the importance of an individual particle cannot be realized independently of that particle’s interaction with other particles inside an atom. It is the atom, the system, in the middle of the hierarchy and not elementary particles that gives us a coherent and meaningful picture of matter, and it is the atom that displays at best the role of e ach elementary particle in matter structure. The same goes for language. A sentence is a conceptual system that stands in the middle between discourse (or text like narrative texts in Table 1.3) at the top of the hierarchy and phoneme (or even word) at the bottom. The sentence gives us a coherent and meaningful picture of any type of discourse, while, through corresponding semantics and syntax, it displays at best the meaning and role of each word in discourse structure (Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6, 2007, 2011). Any concrete or abstract system can be spelled out in formal education in the form of learning outcomes along the four dimensions of the systemic schema as illustrated in Table 4.3. LOs are the smallest meaningful details one can specify pedagogically about any system or any other object of learning. LOs can similarly serve to spell

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out any specific or generic competency required to achieve a given set of similar tasks or a variety of tasks of different nature respectively. A competency consists of a mix of cognitive and behavioral knowledge (Sect. 2.3), and thus of a mix of all four types of learning outcomes (Table 2.1 by correspondence to Table 4.2). In a cognitive middle-out hierarchy, a system occupies the middle of the hierarchy between learning outcomes and the broader corpus of knowledge the system is part of (e.g., a scientific or literary theory), and a competency sits similarly between learning outcomes and a person overall profile (Fig. 4.2) or, at least, the part of the profile that pertains to a particular academic or professional field or discipline. Take for example the productive habit of exploring and investigating any situation from a systemic perspective. Such a habit emerges from mastering generic and specific competencies in a variety of disciplines (e.g., Table 2.1), whether literary, scientific, artistic, social, economic, industrial, agricultural, or any other sort of discipline. More specifically, it emerges following successful, repetitive deployment of thoughts and actions (learning outcomes) entailed by any competency in a series of learning experiences that involve increasingly novel O/Ls, along with or instead of familiar O/Ls, in increasingly novel contexts. This and other habits would then emerge in a person’s profile through a middle-out approach from repeatedly deploying certain LOs as required by specific and/or generic competencies (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2 Middle-out, competency-based, development of learning outcomes and profile. Couples of up and down arrows between competencies and learning outcomes indicate that, although learning outcomes enter in the make-up of a competency (arrows pointing up from learning outcomes to competencies), it is the mastery of a competency that allows for meaningful and sustainable achievement of learning outcomes (arrows pointing down)

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As such, competencies are critical to the development of both learning outcomes and overall profile traits (habits included), as they stand in the middle between the two in their complexity and the cognitive demands they impose. Under SCE, specific and generic competencies are mostly envisaged as systemic (Table 2.1), and always pursued for the purpose of developing and sustaining particular 4P profile traits. A systemic competency requires that any task be approached as dealing with systemic objects of learning (O/Ls), i.e., systems, subsystems, or components of them specified in accordance with the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1). LOs about any O/L or variety of O/Ls are then meaningfully achieved and sustained in long-term memory, not through isolated learning experiences involving exclusively those O/Ls, but through competency-based learning experiences that would gradually involve other O/Ls and entail additional LOs along any given dimension of the taxonomy (Table 4.2) and of the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1).

4.3.3 Knowledge Evolution In SCE, we hold that any learning outcome evolves gradually in one’s mind and brain as rehearsed in the context of different objects of learning (O/Ls) until it is satisfactorily “achieved” or consolidated in memory (sustained in LTM) to a desired and affordable level of maturity. The more O/Ls consist of concrete or conceptual systems, and of specific and generic systemic competencies, or parts of such systems and competencies, the more systematic and efficient the evolution and the consolidation. We also hold that systems and competencies evolve gradually in one’s mind and brain as they are being deployed in different situations, thus leading to gradual development of habits and profiles. The evolution of any learning outcome, as well as of any system, competency, and thus habit and profile, proceeds in a helicoidal not linear progression in line with Fig. 3.6. Yet, this evolution can be conceived in five stages outlined in Table 4.4 and discussed elsewhere in ample detail (Halloun, 2017/19). The five stages are sequentially ordered, though achieved helicoidally, in terms of six provisions pertaining to memory formation as discussed in the previous chapter (Columns 1, 2, 6) and to practical aspects of learning discussed later in this chapter (Columns 3, 4, 5). These provisions are spelled out in Table 4.4 relative to the evolution of learning outcomes (LOs) in a learner’s mind and brain. They hold and can be readily extrapolated along the same lines for any complex cognitive and behavioral knowledge that may be defined in terms of LOs, systems and competencies included. Provisions are as follows, in the order of their appearance in the table: 1. The formation in memory (encoding and consolidation) of any type of LO, along with the corresponding scope, namely the array of O/Ls and other entities, and/or events or processes which a given LO pertains to, and which we call LO “referents”, and the function the LO serves regarding these referents.

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2. The connections of a given LO with other LOs, especially for ultimate consolidation in long-term memory, and the implicated cortical association areas (in the context of a given pattern and/or system and competency). Table 4.4 SCE developmental stages Stage

Provision LO formation and scope

Connection with other LOs

Learning mediation

1. Initiation or weak achievement

Inarticulate encoding in short-term memory (STM), with partial deployment success in the context of the original object of learning (O/L) or “referent” and of few similar referents in familiar situations

Connection with some closely related LOs, mostly of the same nature and requiring mostly short-range cortical association areas

Total dependence on teacher or mentor mediation to begin developing (encode and deploy) the LO partially in certain respects

2. Inception or limited achievement

Articulate encoding in STM, but not yet in LTM, with deployment success limited to the context of the original referent and similar referents in familiar situations

Connection with closely related LOs, of the same and different nature, and requiring a mix of short-range and long-range cortical association areas, with loose integration in memory pattern(s)

Mediation still needed to develop the LO insightfully, but still partially and to the extent that is cognitively possible

3. Emulation or contextualized achievement

Consolidation in LTM and successful deployment as required by correspondence to a number of referents in the same domain within a given discipline, including appropriate system(s) in accordance with the system schema, and in familiar situations and new but similar situations

Connection with a considerable array of closely and distantly related LOs of the same and different nature, with somewhat firm integration in memory pattern(s)

Little mediation, if any, for meaningful understanding of what the LO is about and for in the specified scope, for consolidating it insightfully in memory, and for successfully deploying it in embraced contexts

4. Production or extrapolative achievement

Extrapolation to new referents in novel situations that may be totally different from familiar ones, further elaboration and consolidation in LTM, and transfer to new domains within the same and different disciplines

Further connection with especially remotely related LOs of the same and significantly different nature with firm integration in memory pattern(s) under a specific paradigm

Total autonomy in consolidating the LO and deploying it within the specified scope, and occasional guidance sought for LO transfer to new domains

(continued)

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Table 4.4 (continued) Stage

Provision LO formation and scope

Connection with other LOs

Learning mediation

5. Innovation or mastery achievement

Extrapolation to new functions, widening domain to new referents and dealing creatively with entirely novel situations within the same and different disciplines, and possibly changing some referent features, designing and developing new referents (invention)

Focus on connection with remotely related LOs of significantly different nature with firm integration in memory pattern(s) and the creation of new patterns with paradigmatic changes and the possible extrapolation to a new paradigm

Autonomous LO elaboration for widening its scope to novel domains and pushing its function in creative and inventive directions

Stage

Provision Engagement with peers

Resources

Modulatory drive

1. Initiation or weak achievement

Discourse with peers under significant mediation limited to what the LO could possibly be about

Total dependence on textbook and other paper and digital sources for coming to realize what the LO is about and how it can be achieved

Resignation to mediator and curriculum authority that mandates the LO and promotes it to satisfy certain academic needs (mostly passing exams in traditional settings)

2. Inception or limited achievement

Working with peers under close mediator supervision and insightful push in the right direction to undertake limited tasks

Frequent recourse to textbook and other sources to develop the LO to the extent that is possible at this stage

Motive induced mostly by the desire to satisfy others and curriculum requirements, and by some primitive appreciation of the inherent LO merits

3. Emulation or contextualized achievement

Working with peers, with little mediation, if any, and possibly assisting those in need to achieve the LO in specific contexts

Occasional recourse to various resources to identify appropriate pathways for achieving the LO as required

Motivation driven by the appreciation of the inherent merits of the LO, and a determination to satisfy personal needs and ambitions to a certain level of gratification

4. Production or extrapolative achievement

Taking the lead in certain aspects of collective work with peers to help them achieve the LO as required and beyond

Occasional recourse to various resources, mostly for LO transfer to new domains

Motivation driven by the determination to take the LO to novel domains and a passion to master and expand one’s own competencies beyond any level of gratification (continued)

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Table 4.4 (continued) Stage

5. Innovation or mastery achievement

Provision Engagement with peers

Resources

Modulatory drive

Taking the initiative to engage qualified others in coming up with and carrying out innovative ideas

Recourse to appropriate resources for coming up with and carrying out innovative ideas

Motivation driven by the lack of gratification (the sky is the limit) and a passionate drive to transcend current knowledge and habits of life and widen profile horizons

3. The level of “learning mediation” (Sect. 4.7) or dependence on master learning agents, e.g., teacher or mentor (i.e., any in-school or out of school professional who assists/supervises a learner in long-term projects), to develop LO to a certain level of maturity. 4. The degree to which the learner can collaborate with and assist peers in developing the LO in question. 5. The level of dependence on educational resources, namely textbooks and related paper and digital sources. 6. Memory modulators, namely motivation and locus of control (satisfying self or others), that govern or drive the development of LOs (and any more complex knowledge). At the early stage of development, the stage of “initiation”, a learner is introduced to a given LO and begins to develop it in the context of one specific O/L or a restricted set of similar O/Ls or referents. Gradually in the following two stages, the learner achieves the LO, first somewhat satisfactorily in limited contexts (“inception” stage), and then to the desired maturity level (“emulation”), but still exclusively in the original theoretical and practical contexts in which the LO was developed under guidance, and with external locus of control. Subsequently, the learner begins gradual transcendence of the original contexts to extrapolate the LO with increasing autonomy to new referents and in novel contexts (“production” stage), and ultimately master the LO enough to make it serve new functions outside its original scope, namely for creation and invention (Sect. 1.3) purposes (“innovation” stage). The same five stages apply to any facet or dimension of our taxonomy, to any system, to any competency, and to entire profiles that students are expected to develop. As a learner evolves from the primitive stage of initiation to the ultimate stage of innovation, any LO (or set of LOs) is gradually developed as follows in terms of the six provisions considered above:

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1. The array of referents (physical and conceptual entities, systems and competencies included) that are successfully inducted in the LO domain gradually expands from one particular referent or one particular and restricted set of similar referents relative to which the LO was originally introduced in a particular discipline (Stage 1), to a wide array of similar referents in the same discipline (Stage 3), and then to completely different referents in this and different disciplines (Stages 4 and 5). Various referents are maintained in their original state through Stage 4 beyond which the learner extrapolates the LO to conceive and implement possible changes in those referents or to invent entirely new ones. 2. The number and complexity of connections established with other LOs gradually increase from a limited and loose number of LOs, mostly of the same nature and in short-term memory (STM) in the first stage of initiation, to a progressively wider and integrated mix of LOs of different nature (in order to consolidate it in LTM), thus implicating an increasingly wider mix of short-range and long-range cortical association areas in the formation of the respective engram system until that system is appropriately integrated with existing memory pattern(s). 3. The level of dependence on master learning agents gradually decreases across stages so that the learner becomes fully autonomous by the time s/he reaches Stage 4 and an innovative initiative taker in Stage 5. 4. The learner might look up for peers in the first three stages mostly for soliciting their assistance or cooperation, and evolves in subsequent stages to provide guidance and assistance to struggling peers, or to cooperate with competent peers on equal footing for extrapolation and innovation purposes. 5. The level of dependence on learning resources (textbook and other paper and digital sources) gradually decreases through Stage 3, beyond which resources are no longer sought for mere LO development and deployment in its originally delimited scope, but to broaden this scope in domain and function. 6. LO gradual achievement is at first authority driven with the sole motive of satisfying such authority, be it parent, teacher, or curriculum requirements, but by the time Stage 3 is reached and LO merits are appreciated, intrinsic motivation and locus of control with relative self-satisfaction but no absolute gratification begin driving the learner in novel and innovative paths. The five developmental stages of Table 4.4 are based on the way memory engrams actually evolve in human brain (Sects. 3.5.4 and 3.6.1). In particular, encoding of any engram about any O/L begins mostly in the perceptual areas of the cerebral cortex that are heavily context dependent, with: (a) short range connections established among various cortical areas, and (b) LTM formation (knowledge encoding and consolidation) and accessibility for knowledge retrieval entirely controlled by the hippocampus. All this constrains learners’ achievement and deployment of any LO to familiar contexts that involve the same O/L or similar ones, and that impose relatively low cognitive demands. Such is the case with our first three stages, initiation, inception, and emulation. Subsequently, engram encoding and consolidation evolve to

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engage conceptual areas of the cerebral cortex that are relatively context independent, with long range connections weaved among engaged areas, and LTM accessibility primarily controlled by the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) instead of the hippocampus. All this allows learners’ extrapolation of any LO to novel contexts with relatively high cognitive demands as is the case with our last two stages of production and innovation. As noted above, a learner achievement and consolidation of a given LO (or set of LOs) proceeds gradually in a helicoidal not linear progression (Fig. 3.6), and s/he may or may not evolve to the same stage in Table 4.4 with respect to all six provisions at any point of LO development. Furthermore, learners in the same cohort of students do not necessarily all evolve to the same stage with respect to any of the distinguished provisions at a given point of instruction. At a given point of the evolution process, a learner may reach a particular stage with respect to any one of the provisions, and lag behind or be ahead, usually by one stage, with respect to one or more of the other provisions. The status of the LO in the learner’s profile may then be defined by an appropriate 6-point matrix showing the distinctive stage reached with respect to each provision, or approximated by a median stage around which hover all six provisions. The same goes for system and competency development.

4.4 Experiential Learning Various memory processes are best achieved when they involve a variety of brain regions, particularly a good mix of specialized epistemic, rational, and sensorimotor regions that engage numerous association areas in the cerebral cortex, especially those concerned with long-range synaptic networking. Learning is thus most meaningful, productive, and sustainable when experiential, i.e., when it involves insightful transaction with objects of learning (Sect. 3.2) in real life settings and entails and fosters the development of competencies consisting of all sorts of cognitive and behavioral knowledge along the four dimensions of our taxonomy (Table 4.2). Transaction with objects of learning (O/Ls) is a dominant characteristic of experiential learning. It should take place directly with O/Ls, whenever reasonably feasible, and engage as many senses (especially when an O/L is a physical reality), dexterities, and reasoning skills as possible, in addition to related declarative (epistemic) knowledge. When transaction cannot take place directly with a given O/L, it may be carried out with representative substitutes that reflect most if not all primary aspects of the object in question. For instance, transaction with astronomical and microscopic O/Ls through appropriate telescopes and microscopes respectively is often beyond the reach of individual learners and most educational institutions. Viable alternatives can then be sought through documentary films, simulations, and even still photos and other pictorial representations. The same is true when it comes to studying, say, paintings or sculptures normally located in museums or belonging to private collections which learners cannot have access to.

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Experiential learning goes beyond the exploration of O/Ls to involve a mix of investigative and innovative tasks (Fig. 1.4 and Sect. 1.3). Investigative tasks are about describing and explaining a given situation, and/or making some sort of inference or judgment about it, without making significant changes to that situation. Innovative tasks are about making such changes and bringing about creative or totally new products and/or processes the scope of which extends beyond the situation at hand. Experiential learning is more meaningful and efficacious in all three forms, exploration, investigation, and especially innovation, when it takes place in real life situations, and when it is not restricted to traditional, theory focused school settings and not confined to campus boundaries. Breaking up with such academic tradition begins with virtual or real field trips for exploratory and investigative purposes, like museum, industrial plants, and aid agencies visits, where students get the chance to enquire first-hand about the operations of such places and experience on site how professionals go about solving particular problems and producing particular goods or services. Experiential learning becomes even more significant when it is praxis immersive for innovative purposes. Praxis, as commonly known and simply put, is about bringing theory and practice together in a given professional field. In formal education, and up to tertiary education, praxis can, and should be carried in a variety of modalities, on-campus and off-campus (Sect. 5.6). On-campus praxis may take place in science laboratories and makerspaces. Makerspaces, like technical and artistic shops or ateliers, are facilities that foster the development of generic competencies with student innovative potentials along all four dimensions of our taxonomy (Table 4.2). They require students to rely heavily on individual and collective initiatives and autonomy, work together minds-on, hands-on, with O/Ls using real and virtual tools (e.g., computer simulators), and design and realize certain artifacts and processes under particular professional frameworks and the supervision/mentorship of concerned professionals. More advanced and productive modalities of praxis take the form of off-campus fieldwork, clinical practice, internship, apprenticeship, community service, or the like. They require students while still at school to practice in the field, i.e., in the labor market and within concerned CoPs, what they learn behind their school walls, and subsequently to bring back to school what they learn in the field. At an even more advanced level, and especially in tertiary education, praxis takes some form of short-term or long-term entrepreneurship in a given community. All this requires, of course, transcendence of many traditional educational policies and practices, and especially of demarcation lines that traditionally separate general education from technical and vocational education (Sects. 5.4, 5.6 and 5.8). Experiential learning needs to be carried out systematically within and across different courses at various educational levels, and thus following well-defined but flexible rules that account for learners’ cognitive needs and potentials at any given age and educational level and that allow instructors of different courses to work efficiently together. For such systematization, and for systemic 4P profiles development, we hereby call for experiential learning to take place in systemic learning ecologies,

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concentrate on generic systemic processes, and, in formal education, proceed through systemic learning cycles under teacher mediation.

4.4.1 Experiential Ecology Experiential learning is not merely about transaction with objects of learning (O/Ls), but about a more complex ecology engaging the learner in different levels of interaction with a number of other elements that are part of the experiential learning environment. From a systemic perspective (Sect. 1.2.1 and Fig. 1.2), the ecology is about a learner’s interaction with O/Ls, available resources, and all surrounding people and physical entities involved in or affecting the learner’s transaction with O/Ls (local environment). The learner may then be conceived as a simple, open, adaptive system (Sect. 1.2.2 and Fig. 1.3) consisting of an individual person, a student in formal education, who is engaged in a given learning experience to fulfill specific purposes (system function) in a given domain. In formal education, these purposes are typically set in a given curriculum in some form of cognitive and/or behavioral knowledge about particular O/Ls (e.g., learning outcomes and/or competencies that we call on being constituents of systemic profiles) that the student is expected to develop meaningfully. The experiential learning ecology would then be about the learner’s interaction with the following elements that make up the learner’s environment (Fig. 4.3): • Objects of learning, i.e., various physical and/or conceptual entities, events, or processes (along with their properties) about which and in the context of which the learner is expected to develop the expected knowledge meaningfully through Fig. 4.3 Experiential learning ecology. A learner interacts to different levels with elements in the learning environment. A dashed arrow indicates that the learner’s effect on a given element, if any, may not be as important as this element’s effect on the learner

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conscious and purposeful insightful transaction or series of transactions with these entities or representative substitutes as mentioned above. • Learning agents, i.e., peers, instructors,1 and other people with whom the learner may significantly interact and exchange ideas about O/Ls and transaction, before, during, and after transaction. • Resources, i.e., various physical tools, facilities (e.g., school laboratories and shops, and in/out of school praxis sites), and/or information sources (textbooks included) that are at the learner’s disposal at any point of the learning experience. • Ambiance, i.e., material and non-material (cultural included) settings and surroundings, other than all the above, that set the overall perceptual and emotional atmosphere of the learning experience, and that might have direct or indirect effect on the course and outcome of the experience (e.g., light, temperature, relative comfort of sitting or standing in place or moving around, emotional state of learner and learning agents). In an experiential learning ecology, a learner interacts regularly and directly with all elements in the local environment (Fig. 4.3), and occasionally and/or indirectly and remotely with other elements that make up the learner’s global environment (Figs. 1.2 and 1.6; Table 1.2). The latter environment, not shown in Fig. 4.3, includes, for example, people other than learning agents in the local environment with whom the learner interacts directly or virtually through the internet during transaction with O/Ls, as well as tutorials and various information sites available through digital media. In the transaction process, the learner is continuously affected by all local and global elements. In return, s/he may be affecting some elements, like in the case of learning agents and perhaps O/Ls, but not others, as it is often the case with ambiance, resources, and various elements in the global environment. The more the learner is engaged with any given element in true interaction, i.e., in two-way actions with mutual effect, the better the learning processes and output (system performance). This is especially true when it comes to learning agents including school teachers and mentors in out of school praxis sites who are expected to benefit from the interaction with individual and groups of learners to continuously reflect back on their own knowledge and practices, and subsequently regulate and enhance their own competencies and profiles. Learner and learning agents are thus in this respect open adaptive systems who continuously change to adapt to the learning experience and each other’s needs or requirements, just like in any ecological system in nature. When experiential learning is governed by a systemic pedagogical framework like SCE, O/Ls are treated as systems or parts of systems when these objects consist of concrete or abstract entities, and as systemic processes when consisting of physical events or phenomena (set of related events) or conceptual processes or operations. In all cases, morphological and/or phenomenological patterns are at the core of such systemic transaction with O/Ls (Fig. 3.2). Furthermore, under SCE, an experiential ecology in a suitable learning environment is designed to promote systemic learning 1

See Footnote 1 in Chap. 1.

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through flexibly structured learning cycles that allow insightful profile development under teacher mediation as discussed in the following sections.

4.4.2 Systemic Learning Under SCE, experiential learning is carried out systemically. All cognitive and behavioral endeavors are carried out as systemic endeavors, the most important of which for pedagogical purposes are those distinguished in Sect. 1.3 as exploratory, investigative, and innovative. Once O/Ls are presented in a given physical or conceptual situation, systemic learning takes place following well-defined rules of systemic engagement, beginning with an exploration of that situation, and leading to a thorough investigation of the situation and/or to some innovative products and/or processes viable for that and other situations (Fig. 1.4 and Table 2.1). All endeavors are carried out insightfully (Fig. 1.3) and explicitly for system development (construction, refinement, and/or elaboration of a system in accordance with the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1) and/or system deployment (which, in fact, leads to further system development) in order to fulfill specific needs and help learners develop their systemic competencies and profiles. Exploration of a given situation usually takes place in two stages: survey and analysis (Fig. 4.4). At first (Situation Survey in Fig. 4.4), the situation is quickly examined to figure out which systemic framework is most appropriate to deal with that situation and carry out all subsequent stages and processes with O/Ls that the situation is about. Then, the situation is analyzed under the chosen framework, and O/Ls are broken down (deconstructed) into primary and secondary entities and events or processes (properties of both included) of physical and/or conceptual nature. Following such situation analysis, primary elements (pertinent entities, processes, and respective properties) are retained for further processing (first in mind, and on paper or, say, computer screen), while secondary elements are ignored being deemed irrelevant for what the transaction with O/Ls is all about. Once primary elements are teased out, they are brought together to reconstruct the situation in the form of a system or set of interrelated systems (or parts of systems or patterns) in accordance with the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1) in order to accomplish what the transaction with O/Ls is about. That reconstruction or systemic formulation of the situation (Fig. 4.4) is first done conceptually rather than physically to form a conceptual image of the situation in the learner’s mind as discussed in Chap. 3, and virtually on paper or computer screen rather than in reality, even when O/Ls are of physical nature. Depending on the situation and the goals set for the learning experience, the conceptual systems may then be reified, or not, into physical systems (physical models or prototypes). If the transaction, and hence the learning experience, is purely investigative, the systemic formulation stage ends there with conceptual and, perhaps, physical systems that partially but viably represent the situation and O/Ls

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Fig. 4.4 Systemic learning

in terms of chosen primary elements (Table 2.1). If the experience is innovative, or if it turns out that the pure investigative arrangements and goals originally set for the experience cannot resolve the tackled issue and bring about the desired outcomes, new conceptual and/or physical elements would need to be brought in (adduced) from outside the situation at hand and end up with modified O/Ls along with some innovative products and/or processes. Situation analysis and formulation always involve adduction of familiar conceptual and, perhaps, physical systems, i.e., bringing in systems or parts of systems and related systemic processes from outside the situation. Familiar conceptual systems are brought in from the learner’s prior knowledge (short- or long-term memory), and they may resemble O/Ls or not in any or all of their constituents. Moreover, adduced systems may or may not belong to the same discipline or field in the context of which transaction with O/Ls takes place and from which the systemic framework is originally borrowed or derived. In line with memory consolidation requirements (Sect. 3.6.1), and as further elaborated in Sect. 5.4, the more we adduce systems or systemic elements and processes from different disciplines and fields, the richer the transaction and the conceptual image, and the more meaningful and sustainable the cognitive and behavioral outcomes. The system in Table 4.3 and those illustrated in Tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 are examples of systems that one may adduce to a given situation during any stage of experiential learning, but especially during the analysis and formulation stage (Fig. 4.4). The adduction process always involves an evaluation of the viability of a considered familiar system, primarily in terms of the scope of that system and the

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function it may serve in the situation at hand under the chosen systemic framework. Once the system is found viable, particular elements from its constitution and performance may then be borrowed and deployed, or somehow referred to or adapted, to deal with that situation. Upon completion of the systemic formulation, or while it is taken place as is often the case, systemic processing of the conceptual image begins for investigative and/or innovative purposes. As discussed in Sect. 1.3, investigation may be factual, inferential, or judgmental, and innovation may be creative, transcendental, or inventive (Fig. 1.4). Investigation of any sort results in some report about the situation at hand and involved O/Ls, and any action taken throughout the process is supposed not to modify any element in that situation and concerned O/Ls and representative systems (notwithstanding quantum measurement effects). In contrast, innovation always induces some changes in the situation in question and/or a transcendence of O/Ls and framework, or even an invention of entirely new entities and/or processes under the same or different framework. In that sense, investigative actions are conservative while innovative actions are not. From a cognitive perspective, cognitive demands increase progressively as we go from investigation to innovation, and as we go within investigation from factum, to inference, and then judgment, and within innovation, from creation, to transcendence, and then invention. Praxis also becomes increasingly more demanding and effective as we go in the same directions. Hence, pedagogical efforts required on both student and teacher sides to bring experiential learning to its fruitful ends also increase in those same directions. Experiential learning is about individual learners being actively involved in developing to their own satisfaction their own knowledge, competencies, and profiles. However, students always need some form of guidance in order to head in the right direction and stay the course efficiently and successfully (Sect. 4.7). Systemic processing continues until all designated issues are properly resolved, and the expected learning outcomes about O/Ls are realized within the context of the situation at hand. The output is then framed in accordance with the systemic schema and interpreted within the context of appropriate systems under the chosen systemic framework. It may subsequently be extrapolated in order to formulate theoretical and practical implications for optimizing all invoked and developed cognitive and behavioral knowledge, within and beyond the scope originally set for the transactions with O/Ls, and setting the stage for future learning experiences. Meanwhile, any learning outcome modified or newly achieved during the current experience is properly integrated with prior knowledge, particularly with competencies and patterns in LTM, in order to consolidate it if already in memory, like in the case of adduced systems, or to make future consolidation of newly encoded knowledge efficiently possible. All processes discussed above and indicated in various stages (boxes) of Fig. 4.4 are carried out insightfully as discussed in Sect. 4.6. Every single action taken and

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every single output brought about throughout the learning experience are continuously evaluated, and, if necessary, these and prior actions and output may be reconsidered and regulated to the extent of substitution if necessary. As such, no learning experience is linear. As indicated by the two dashed circular arrows in Fig. 4.4, any process in any stage may be revisited at any point to be evaluated and regulated if necessary, along with all related processes already undertaken and output already brought about. This includes adduced conceptual systems that would be regulated as indicated in Fig. 1.3, as well as any other cognitive or behavioral knowledge invoked from short- or long-term memory for any purpose. The evaluation process may also take us back all the way to the initial stage of situation survey, as indicated by the arrow emanating to the corresponding box from the output box in Fig. 4.4, thus possibly leading to a change in or of the systemic framework under which experiential learning has taken place so far. The latter arrow also indicates that, if the entire experience depicted in Fig. 4.4. has been satisfactorily achieved all the way through systemic consolidation, a new learning experience may begin in a new situation to further consolidate the outcomes of the already achieved experience, and/or to begin encoding totally new learning outcomes, systems, or competencies. As such, experiential learning goes through cycles like those commonly referred to in the literature as “learning cycles”.

4.5 Learning Cycles Experiential learning is about engaging individual and group of students actively in developing meaningfully (Table 4.1) and to their own satisfaction their own cognitive and behavioral knowledge through insightful transaction with O/Ls in, or related to, real life situations. Prior knowledge of individual students is critical in such endeavor (Fig. 3.5). Because of individual differences along every facet in every dimension of our taxonomy (Table 4.2), experiential learning needs to be flexible enough to account for such differences. So-called individualized instruction may be a way to do it. However, such form of instruction cannot be afforded at all times by any school, and most schools cannot afford it at all. That is why it is crucial to come up with instructional approaches that are structured enough to be deployable across the board with all students at all levels, but flexible enough to allow individual teachers to adapt such approaches to their own school environment and their individual student needs. As a systemic pedagogy that calls for systemic structuring that rhymes well with the way the human mind and brain are and work, and that has proven to be effective in various educational settings (e.g., Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6), SCE relies on systemic learning cycles to infuse flexible structure and systematization within and across courses of different nature and at different educational levels. Many variants of the learning cycle originally developed by Karplus and colleagues at U. C. Berkeley (Karplus, 1977) have been proven relatively effective

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in this direction, including our own modeling cycles in science education (Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6, 2007). A learning cycle is a pedagogical approach whereby teachers infuse some structure in experiential learning in order not to let students wander on their own in futile paths. A cycle always begins with the exploration of a given situation for the purpose of achieving specific objectives, and ends with an extrapolation of the final outcomes in ways to come up with new questions that open the door for a new cycle. As such, learning becomes a continuum that helps students coherently and consistently link new lessons to old ones and a systematic endeavor, a pattern, that students can adapt to. Students embark on such endeavor with clear expectations as to how every lesson progresses in well-defined stages, what type of questions they need to answer in every stage, and how they need to go about answering those questions, hands-on, minds-on, following well-defined rules of engagement. Experiential learning continuum and pattern can be optimized when learning cycles are systemic and foster systemic learning as described in the previous section. A systemic learning cycle is an experiential cycle devoted primarily to the construction of a particular conceptual system (and/or systemic competency) that may be reified into a physical system whenever possible and necessary, with both conceptual and physical systems eventually recognized and explicitly conceived as instances of particular conceptual and physical patterns respectively (Fig. 3.2). As indicated in Fig. 4.5, the cycle can be carried out under a systemic framework in four phases that are consistent with the stages of Fig. 4.4, and each of which goes in two or more stages. Phases are consecutively those of exploration, formulation, deployment, and synthesis (Fig. 4.5). While Fig. 4.4 is about learning exercises that involve the deployment of particular systems or parts of systems (3rd phase in Fig. 4.5), Fig. 4.5 is about the construction of a new system (or competency) that would make the object of a particular lesson in a given course under systemic curricula (Sect. 5.3), and that may take sometimes more than one cycle to be achieved. As will become evident during the discussion, the learning cycle comes in line with memory processes discussed in the previous chapter. The first two phases of exploration and formulation pertain to memory encoding (Sect. 3.5), and the last two phases of deployment and synthesis, to memory consolidation and what it entails as retrieval and rehearsal (Sects. 3.6 and 3.7). In the following is an outline of systemic learning cycles, ample details about which can be found elsewhere (ibid.). Exploration begins with exposing students to a simple real life, problematic situation that brings them to some sort of Piagetian cognitive disequilibrium whereby they realize that a question or two, or a simple problem they are confronted with in that situation, fall outside the scope of their prior knowledge, and more specifically outside the scope of all conceptual systems (or competencies) they have already developed. As a consequence, students would be unable to answer those questions or solve this problem. This “attention grabber and interest driver” exercise is meant to allow students discover the limitations of prior knowledge (old systems and/or competencies), and realize the need to construct a new system, or at least new conceptions and processes that would be part of, or relate to, a system or a family of systems, in order to be able to deal with the situation at hand. Realizing such a need is very critical

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Fig. 4.5 Systemic learning cycles

from a metacognitive perspective to motivate students to engage in the new learning cycle. Students are then guided to propose in the form of hypotheses, individually or in groups, candidate systems or system elements (conceptions, processes) that may tentatively serve to resolve the problematic situation. They subsequently evaluate their propositions (hypotheses) through class discussion in order to tease out improper candidates and retain only one coherent set of elements that could possibly serve for the construction of a single plausible system. Next in that phase, students propose an investigative design that would help them ascertain the validity of their propositions. The design commonly agreed upon is implemented in the Formulation phase, and proper measures are taken to ensure the resolution of the situation at hand and subsequently complete the construction of the target system in accordance with the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1. In some instances, two alternative hypotheses (or sets of hypotheses) may be proposed, tested, and then compared to keep only the valid one for the formulation phase. Throughout the previous two phases (Exploration and Formulation), students are engaged, individually or in groups, in elementary investigative tasks, and perhaps simple innovative tasks as well, that would gradually encode and reinforce in their minds individual elements of the system that belong to one or the other of the four schematic dimensions (framework, scope, constitution, performance) along with required systemic exploratory, investigative, or innovative processes. Once these

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two phases are satisfactorily completed, students move on to the Deployment phase where they get engaged in complex investigative and innovative tasks that would require the use of many system elements from a multitude of perspectives so that they would consolidate a coherent comprehensive picture of the target system in accordance with the systemic schema and following the systemic scheme of Fig. 4.4. That phase is particularly important to foster the development of specific and generic systemic competencies, along with the system, and should involve some forms of on-campus and off-campus praxis. All tasks are chosen to be challenging enough to motivate students to proceed through various phases and consciously detect and insightfully regulate any possible flaw in their thoughts and actions (Sect. 4.6). Furthermore, students are constantly guided to compare the new system to old systems along the four dimensions of the systemic schema, and to gradually integrate it with the rest of their systemic knowledge repertoire, particularly as an instance of a particular pattern (or patterns) in their conceptual realm and in relation to the real world. Whatever the nature of a given task, formal assessments included (Sect. 4.8), it always contributes to students’ development of the target system (inception, reinforcement, refinement, or elaboration), systemic processes included, since, as discussed in Sect. 3.7.2, any memory retrieval induces memory changes in the process of recall and deployment. The new system is firmly integrated with prior knowledge in relation to specific patterns in the last phase of Synthesis whereby an insightful recap of the entire cycle (or of successive cycles leading to the construction of one given system) is carried out systematically in the chosen systemic framework to bring coherently and explicitly together and consolidate all dimensions of the systemic schema (Fig. 1.1) and all necessary aspects of the systemic scheme of Fig. 4.4. Once that phase is satisfactorily achieved, students are confronted with a new problematic situation to induce the cognitive disequilibrium that kicks off a new Exploration phase and to set the stage for the next cycle that may be about elaboration and consolidation of the current system or the construction of a new system. In this respect, it is always advised to induce the disequilibrium in question at the end of a given lesson (once the lesson objectives are satisfactorily accomplished), i.e., at the end of a given learning cycle, so that students can have out of school time to prepare themselves for the next lesson/cycle. Cycle phases are consecutively but not linearly achieved. One cannot proceed to a given phase before going through preceding ones. However, one can go back at any time to a prior phase for reconsidering problematic issues that may arise following due evaluation of what has been accomplished so far. Formal assessment (Sect. 4.8) is carried out throughout all four phases to contribute to system development and continuously ascertain student progress and evaluate the efficiency of the cycle, and subsequently determine whether one can proceed to new stages in system development or go back to previous stages within the same or previous phases for regulation purposes. All four phases of a systemic experiential cycle are carried out through a mix of individual and collective tasks, formal assessment included. For instance, the first stage of cognitive disequilibrium in the Exploration phase may be carried out at

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first separately by individual students at home, and then completed in class through teamwork. A class may be divided then into a finite number of cooperative or collaborative groups distributed, and reshuffled periodically, based on student background and interests and operated in accordance with well-defined rules of engagement.

4.6 Insightful Dialectics Evaluation and regulation are constantly carried out insightfully under systemic pedagogy, and thus throughout any systemic endeavor or learning cycle (Figs. 4.4 and 4.5), so that learners may detect and correct any flaw in their thoughts, actions, and outcomes, and creatively widen the horizons of their cognitive and behavioral knowledge. To these ends, and in order to make sense of transactions with O/Ls and bring a learning experience to meaningful and productive ends, a learner may go at any stage of experiential learning through three types of insightful dialectics already introduced in Sect. 3.6.4, intrinsically within the learner’s own knowledge and externally with concerned elements in the learning environment (Fig. 4.3). Intrinsic dialectics are carried out to bring coherence to one’s own knowledge. External dialectics with O/Ls, learning agents, and resources are meant to establish realist or empirical correspondence with O/Ls, on the one hand, and rational consistency with professional paradigms concerned with systems and processes of interest on the other (Fig. 4.6). All sorts of dialectics involve negotiations between some knowledge already developed, or being developed, by the learner and other knowledge either already held in this learner short- or long-term memory or emanating from concerned elements in the learning environment. Negotiations are held particularly between incongruent or discrepant bits of knowledge held by the learner under the same framework or paradigm, and/or between knowledge held on different sides (learner vs. environment) under different perspectives or paradigms. Negotiations end with proper— insightful—reconciliation of emerging differences within one’s own knowledge and of incongruence with proper framework or paradigm, particularly, for us, in relation to systems and systemic processes and competencies. As a consequence, the

Fig. 4.6 Insightful dialectics within one’s own knowledge and with the outside real world and conceptual realm of CoPs

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learner’s knowledge evolution may involve transformation, even change or inhibition, of existing knowledge, transition from an existing knowledge state to a different state, or complete transcendence of existing knowledge and construction of entirely new knowledge under perhaps new framework or paradigm. Coherence dialectics are intrinsic, rational dialectics that involve the comparison of a particular piece of cognitive or behavioral knowledge to one’s own related knowledge, and the resolution of any possible incongruence or discrepancy that might subsequently emerge between the two knowledge packets. In particular for us, such dialectics are about the evaluation of specific learning outcomes relative to conceptual systems and systemic competencies they are supposed to be part of under an appropriate systemic framework, and the subsequent regulation of outcomes, systems, and competencies. Coherence dialectics are reflective cognitive processes that take place within one’s own mind, and about one’s own knowledge, in relation or not to input from any element involved in the experiential learning ecology. This input becomes crucial, along with respective correspondence and/or consistency dialectics, when intrinsic dialectics come to a dead end. Coherence dialectics may sometimes be misleading and/or unknowingly detrimental, like in the case of misconceptions. If someone is already encumbered with erroneous beliefs and flawed knowledge and paradigm, and encodes a new misconception that rhymes well with old ones, coherence dialectics would result in validating the new misconception and thus integrating it in memory. Correspondence and especially consistency dialectics are then indispensable to resolve the situation in favor of more viable, professional knowledge. Those dialectics would be equally necessary to figure out the viability limits of one’s own knowledge and delimit the scope of such knowledge, i.e., to determine precisely when, where, what for, and under what conditions this knowledge may be viable, and subsequently acknowledge the necessity to consider and develop alternative knowledge for dealing with situations that fall outside this scope. Correspondence dialectics are external, realist dialectics held between empirical data gathered through real transaction with O/Ls (perceptual image converted into a conceptual image in Figs. 3.1 and 3.5) or from a reliable source, on the one hand, and one’s own related knowledge on the other. Correspondence dialectics are particularly important to corroborate a conceptual image with reliable empirical data, i.e., to establish the image viability with strong real-world evidence to represent whatever it is supposed to represent in this world. More importantly, those dialectics are necessary to corroborate conceptual systems by correspondence to physical systems and patterns they are supposed to represent (Fig. 3.2), along with related systemic processes and competencies, and establish their viability to fulfill their supposed functions in their designed domains as stipulated in the respective scopes. Correspondence dialectics entail morphological and/or nomic isomorphism as discussed in Sect. 3.6.3. Morphological isomorphism between primary constituents of physical realities (O/Ls) and their properties, on the one hand, and constituents and properties of a corresponding conceptual image, particularly a conceptual system,

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on the other is crucial for establishing the viability of image and system. Nomic isomorphism is even more important. It pertains to the syntactic relationships among constituents and properties (syntactic isomorphism) and thus to the function a conceptual system is supposed to serve in its domain (functional isomorphism). Functional isomorphism becomes particularly crucial in inferential investigation whereby the viability of a conceptual system can be determined not directly, but through inferences that we can make with the system and that we can validate rationally and/or empirically through certain observations in the real world. For example, the viability of a mathematical model or a computer simulation (conceptual systems) to forecast the weather can only be established when the actual weather actually and repeatedly turns out to be as predicted by the model and simulation to an acceptable level of approximation. Commensurability dialectics are also external–but rational–dialectics between one’s own knowledge and professional knowledge of concerned CoPs, particularly their professional paradigms (Box 1.1). Those dialectics are carried to establish that one’s own knowledge is (or to ultimately make it) “commensurable” with professional counterparts, i.e. to assert that personal knowledge is compatible with the latter in measurable ways. The more we come close to quantitative measurement in this respect, the better. In some fields, like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), all measurements are de facto quantitative, which provides for ultimate and most objective ways to establish commensurability. Other fields that are predominantly qualitative, like arts and literature, can still enjoy and benefit from some quantitative norms for comparison purposes, even when such norms come with something like interval rather than ratio type of measurement. Ratio measurements, like length and mass, allow the comparison of two quantities of the same nature by dividing one by the other and saying subsequently that one is a multiple or a fraction of the other. For example, we can say that the length of a 30 cm stick is three times the length of a 10 cm stick, or that the latter is one third the former. Interval measurements do not allow such comparison; they allow instead finding the difference between two interval-type quantities, and concluding then that one quantity is bigger or smaller than the other by an amount equal to that difference. For example, if the temperature of the two sticks is 30° and 10° respectively, we cannot say that the former stick is three times as hot as the latter or that the latter is one third as hot as the former. All we can say is that the former is 20° hotter than the latter, or that the latter is 20° cooler than the former. The same is true about the color of the two sticks or the different shades of the same color, if the latter happens to be the case. We cannot say that one stick is three times or one third as colorful as the other. If the two sticks are of the same color, we can only say that one is a certain amount of Hertz (frequency) or nanometers (wavelength) darker or brighter than the other. Outside STEM, we can always find, or at least come as close as possible to, interval type criteria, if not ratio type, for comparison purposes, and subsequently for establishing or refuting commensurability between two pieces of knowledge.

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Like with correspondence dialectics, commensurability can be established through morphological and nomic isomorphism, but now entirely at the conceptual, rational level. Morphological isomorphism is now established between, say, the composition of a conceptual system that one holds in mind and the composition of a corresponding conceptual system commonly held by all members of a given CoP under a given professional paradigm. Nomic isomorphism is established in relation to the endo- and exo-structure of the two systems (syntactic isomorphism), and to their scope and performance (functional isomorphism). Commensurability dialectics are particularly important to regulate knowledge like misconceptions (Sect. 3.5.2) that is at odds with a respective professional paradigm, and that cannot be straightened out with coherence and correspondence dialectics. Commensurability dialectics can also serve to further reinforce or consolidate viable ideas that resonate well with those of concerned CoPs. When everything else fails to treat misconceptions and the like, a teacher or any other learning agent would be left with the only choice of proposing a professional alternative to student ideas. The agent would propose the latter alternative as an option to ponder in light of some empirical and/or rational evidence, but not as a fact that students have to take for granted. Students would be asked to compare the proposed alternative to their own ideas, especially in making predictions about specific realities, so that they would realize the advantage of considering the professional alternative. Students may also be brought to a state of cognitive dissonance (Piagetian cognitive conflict or disequilibrium) that they may resolve in ways to make the professional alternative prevail in their mind over their own flawed knowledge (Sect. 3.6.4). Insightful dialectics should be carried out in all three modes (Fig. 4.6) by individual learners on their own or through active negotiations with learning agents. These agents, be it teachers or peers, cannot carry out the dialectics for a given learner, especially not through show and tell or traditional lecture and demonstration. They may facilitate any dialectics mode with different levels of intervention as discussed in the next section in order to ensure that a given transaction brings about the proper outcomes. In any form of intervention, it is crucial that learners: (a) be continuously engaged in critical thinking, and (b) express themselves in words and other forms of communication. In the former respect, individual learners have to: (a) recognize some sort of a problem in their own thoughts or actions, and (b) be subsequently willing to come up with a proper solution to this problem, on their own or with the help of learning agents and/or available resources. Problem identification and resolution can be meaningfully and efficiently achieved through expression of one’s own thoughts and exchange of ideas with others. As eloquently noted by an anonymous author in a poem entitled “Words” published in 1949 in the Oxford Magazine (Eccles, 1985, p. 244): I lag behind, my words go on before And tell me what I did not know I knew, And yet I knew it, but I know it more

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When I have said it too. Dark mystery of words that can reveal Even to the speaker what were else obscure, Can on the soul’s dim searching set a seal And mark them clear and sure.

Insightful dialectics are especially important to prevent prior knowledge, when flawed, from taking experiential learning in the wrong direction toward biased, inadequate, or impractical cognitive or behavioral knowledge. This is for example the case of misconceptions, particularly when they are about physical realities and at odds with scientific theories and paradigms. These misconceptions, also called naive, lay, or folk conceptions in the literature, stem from overall intuitive, common sense (CS) paradigms that ordinary people hold about the real world. According to such naturally predominant paradigms, and among other things, the reality of physical systems and phenomena is exposed directly to our senses, and thus most ordinary people believe that the Sun turns around the Earth because this is how it appears to us moving in the sky. About four centuries ago, Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, taught us that this is far from being true and that direct human perception is often deceiving. In order to understand the universe, we thus have to transcend our perceptions and imagine how the world could actually exist in a way that is not exposed directly to our senses. As such, we can then realize that the Earth turns around the Sun and not the other way around. It takes insightful dialectics carried out systematically in all three modes (coherence, correspondence, consistency) to realize the shortcomings of CS paradigms and the necessity to adopt scientific paradigms instead. Falling short of critical transcendence of CS paradigms in prior knowledge prevents people from coming to correct description and explanation of real-world systems and phenomena. Transaction with physical realities (O/Ls) involving insightful dialectics may take place virtually, i.e., as indicated above, with physical or abstract representations of such realities. These include photos and related graphics and narratives in textbooks, as well as computer simulations. Most importantly, learning does not stop by the end of a transaction, whether real or virtual. Once a transaction completed, posttransaction conscious learning may continue to take place with insightful dialectics in the absence of O/Ls and their representations (Fig. 4.7). Our perceptions may be deceiving as just noted above. Yet, our past perceptual experiences may be beneficial, even indispensable, in certain instances of post-transaction learning, whether implicating concrete or abstract thinking. Posttransaction concrete thinking involves explicit dialectics with analog conceptual images of physical realities (objects or events) that we are familiar with without having any such realities in sight, and with no related real or virtual transaction. Such dialectics implicate consciously and explicitly past perceptual experiences with concerned realities and engage related areas in the cerebral cortex dedicated to processing signals detected by various senses. In contrast, abstract thinking involves rational processes with abstract ideas and/or symbols that may or may not pertain to some physical realities. Even when pertaining to such realities, abstract thinking may

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Fig. 4.7 Post-transaction insighful learning continued in isolation from physical realities and their concrete representations

not involve consciously and explicitly analog conceptual images of such realities. Nonetheless, neuroscience research has shown that abstract thinking involves unconsciously and implicitly cerebral areas dedicated to processing and storing empirical, concrete information that we perceive through our senses during actual transactions with physical realities. For instance, and as noted in Sect. 3.5.4, sensory cerebral areas dedicated to perception are activated during recall of and operation with abstract mathematical concepts or interpretation of metaphors. Whence, certain form of correspondence dialectics may take place unconsciously in our mind with O/Ls and/or their representative substitutes whether O/Ls are concrete or abstract. Those dialectics may become more productive when brought to a conscious level that learning agents, especially teachers, may mediate in the right direction, like they do with any other action during experiential learning.

4.7 Learning Mediation It is widely and rightfully recognized, though not necessarily acted upon resolutely, that meaningful learning cannot take place under traditional instruction of lecture and demonstration whereby students submit themselves passively to the authority of teacher and textbook. Under such circumstances, students commonly assimilate course materials by rote. They memorize these materials by heart without necessarily

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understanding them, and retain them temporarily as transient knowledge in STM only long enough to pass course exams instead of consolidating them in LTM as sustainable knowledge worthy of integration in their profiles. To turn things around, students need to be actively engaged in the learning process, from planning to executing and accomplishing what they can actually deem as self-fulfilling learning tasks with worthy means and ends. Student-centered learning is a slogan that has been flying around for decades to this end and interpreted differently by different teachers and other educators. Some have taken it to the extreme of letting individual and group of students wander on their own in constructing new knowledge, with little teacher intervention, if any. Others have been more realistic by recognizing the need—even the duty—to prevent students from wandering in futile paths through timely and reasonable intervention, even if that meant recourse to some short lectures and demonstrations. Sustainability of knowledge in LTM requires that newly encoded memories be rehearsed in a variety of contexts in order to be consolidated (Sect. 3.6). Students cannot figure out on their own which contexts are appropriate for efficient consolidation, and what rehearsal opportunities these contexts should offer to this end. Moreover, they often need help to transfer what they learn in a specific context to other contexts, especially when these contexts differ significantly from each other. Systemic learning, like other viable learning modes, sometimes requires counterintuitive thinking and transcendence of one’s own paradigms, like when it comes to Galilean transaction with O/Ls that typically make the object of STEM and whereby primary properties and events are not exposed directly to our senses. Such transcendence is also necessary when it comes to inferential and innovative processes in these and various other fields, arts and literature included, and to systematizing our concrete and abstract thinking in various contexts. Commensurability dialectics become critical in such instances, and students cannot then bring professional paradigms to the table on their own. Furthermore, in formal education, teachers and students do not have the luxury of time when they have a certain curriculum to be achieved in fixed terms. All in all, students often cannot learn on their own, and should not be left to do so—that is why they go to school in the first place!—and teacher guidance or mediation of learning is then a necessity. Learning mediation is about a master learning agent, teacher or mentor, watching carefully over learners in action and intervening in timely and efficacious manner whenever and however appropriate in order to keep learners on productive tracks and safeguard them against any mental or physical harm or disadvantage in the immediate term and long run. Mediation may then take different forms depending on the cognitive and physical demands of a given task (Box 3.2), the actual knowledge state of learners, and their subsequent conceptual and procedural needs. It comes more in the form of guidelines when students have some valid background knowledge in relation to the task at hand, and when the task demands and subsequent student needs are not relatively high, and more in the form of direct intervention, lecture and

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demonstration included, when students lack such knowledge altogether. For mediation to be then properly and efficiently carried out, mediators need to be equipped with a battery of diagnostic instruments that would help them identify and categorize student pre-instructional knowledge state, and subsequently chose the appropriate mediation strategy (Halloun, 2004/6). Under all conditions, a teacher, like any other mediator, begins any task or any stage of a systemic endeavor (Figs. 1.4 and 4.4) or cycle (Fig. 4.5) by soliciting student ideas about what it takes to bring that task (or stage) to its desired ends. Then, based on what s/he knows about students’ initial knowledge state and on ideas they propose in relation to task demands, the teacher decides how to proceed forward. When student proposed ideas turn out to be entirely or partially viable, and/or when students have what it takes to regulate flawed propositions through appropriate dialectics and achieve the task satisfactorily, the teacher guides students to compare ideas and resolve possible incompatibilities to the extent that they can do it on their own. S/he does not intervene directly in the process to resolve the matter in favor of one idea or another. Instead, s/he can passively supply some rational or historical details, empirical data, and/or counterexamples that may help students brainstorm, clarify to one another specific ideas of their own, or bypass a stalemate that they may get into. The teacher gets directly more involved in the mediation process when students have conceptions or follow procedures that are incommensurable with professional paradigms. The teacher would then bring concerned students first to a conscious state of cognitive disequilibrium, and direct them next to negotiate discrepant ideas among each other so as to get them resolved in favor of a particular position that is viable from a professional or an academic perspective. S/he does so at first by invoking among students a sort of Socratic dialogues (Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6). When this fails to bring things to a satisfactory closure in due time, or when students fail to make propositions that may serve as stepping stones toward desired ends, especially when the task at hand is entirely outside the scope of students’ prior knowledge, the mediator may offer the professional position as an alternative that students are invited to contemplate. At this point, the teacher gets most involved in taking the learning experience in the desired direction. S/he would then confront students with empirical situations or data from which they are guided to infer the appropriate conceptual and/or procedural knowledge, and/or would help them rationally infer new knowledge from prior knowledge. The teacher may provide students with appropriate tools in the process. When students fail after all mediation attempts to construct the target knowledge, the teacher may resort to a more direct approach. The target knowledge is though not imposed in an authoritative way. It is offered instead only as an alternative that students are asked to ponder on their own in order to be convinced of its viability (commensurability dialectics). Following any task that brings about new learning outcomes, whether independently or as parts of a coherent body of knowledge (e.g., system or systemic competency), and for consolidation purposes, students need to rehearse those outcomes in a series of activities (deployment phase in Fig. 4.5). The mediator may at first

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have to prescribe explicitly how to achieve a given task and then retreat gradually from direct intervention as students become more and more autonomous, somewhat in the manner followed during craft or sport apprenticeship. Insightful dialectics (Fig. 4.6) with mediator timely and regulatory feedback are crucial under any mediation form. Learners’ autonomy gradually increases in the process until they can become virtually capable of moving forward and the mediator can step aside and monitor learning from a distance with the least guidance possible. Ample details about various mediation modes and necessary feedback may be found elsewhere (Halloun, 2004/6). Learning mediation under any circumstance must bring about quality learning that students would be interested enough to pursue meaningfully in order to sustain its outcomes in their profiles and take advantage of them in the most productive and constructive ways possible. Mediators would then deliberately assume the task of convincing students to disavow memorization of course materials by heart for the sake of fulfilling obligations mandated by others, and pursue instead meaningful learning of such materials for the sake of developing systemic profiles fit for success, even excellence, in personal life (Table 4.1). One of the most detrimental myths that have long prevailed in education is about what constitutes “learning” and subsequently “meaningful” learning. The myth stems primarily from the mix up between learning and memorization, and the assumption that what students say or do actually reflect what they have already learned, understood, and sustained in LTM. Research has though long shown that: (a) students often assimilate by rote, and retain long enough in STM, information and conceptual and physical routines they come across in a given course, and that (b) they are capable of replicating successfully such transient information and routines, whenever they are tested about, and do so blindly and without necessarily understanding what their transient knowledge is about, what it is good for, and when and how it can and cannot be taken advantage of. This, as discussed later, is primarily the consequence of teaching and studying to the test and not for one’s own benefit in life. A prime objective of learning mediation is then to convince students (and all concerned stakeholders), and make sure they actually think and act accordingly, that assimilating course materials by rote and encoding them loosely in STM does not constitute “learning”, and that holding them in a transient state there and succeeding to retrieve them for routine deployment in the same context in which they were originally encoded or in similar contexts do not necessarily indicate “understanding” of such materials. Understanding can best be reflected when students are feasibly capable to: (a) consciously and purposefully relate newly encoded materials to other materials in memory, especially conceptual and sensorimotor patterns in LTM, and to (b) insightfully know when, and when not, and how, and how not, to deploy them, and be actually capable of such deployment. We may then speak of reproductive learning when students succeed repeatedly to reproduce accumulated materials strictly in the same context within which they originally acquired those materials and in similar

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contexts (Stage 3 in Table 4.4), and of meaningful learning when they can deploy materials in novel contexts for productive and eventually innovative purposes (Stages 4 and 5 in Table 4.4). Learning mediation is crucial for swaying students away from assimilation of educational materials by rote and moving instead toward meaningful learning of such materials (Table 4.1), and from submitting themselves blindly to any authority, teacher included, to assume control of their own profiles’ development. To this end, learning mediation should move away from didactic instruction and engage students instead insightfully and experientially (minds-on, hands-on) in the learning process. Mediators (teachers, mentors, etc.) need then to take necessary actions in the following respects: 1. Make the primary objective of instruction not the delivery of particular course content and the fulfillment of a pre-established rigid syllabus, but the meaningful development of students’ profiles along all four dimensions of our SCE taxonomy. 2. Never assume that students know how to learn on their own. Learning mediation is not about delivering course content, but mostly about helping students learn how to encode, consolidate, and retrieve any type of memory (Sects. 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7), how to master their modulatory systems (Sect. 3.8) and develop efficacious metacognitive skills (Sect. 3.9), and thus how to work and “study” individually and collectively, all to the extent of sometimes providing students with prescriptive instructions on what to do and what not to do in every step of the way. The following mediation actions are particularly crucial to these ends. 3. Convince students of the value of what they are about to learn and motivate them to engage actively and insightfully in the learning process through selffulfilling experiential tasks requiring specific and/or generic competencies that meet people practical needs in everyday life and foster the development of their learning and everyday life habits and thus of their profiles. 4. Choose tasks that are insightfully challenging but cognitively affordable (Sect. 3.6.4), and that require all three sorts of insightful dialectics distinguished above (Fig. 4.4) with a good mix of reasoning skills (Table 4.2). 5. Choose tasks that help students figure out what falls outside the scope (domain and function) of any conception, system, competency, or any other type of cognitive and behavioral knowledge so that they would not deploy their knowledge in the wrong situations, and other tasks that help them gradually widen that scope (Sect. 3.5.3) and the contexts of which preferably make the object of different academic disciplines and fields (Sect. 5.5) and require gradually increasing connections across different parts of the brain (Sects. 3.6.1 and 3.6.5). 6. Attend explicitly to various modulatory systems in the brain particularly to help students learn how to focus their attention on pertinent (primary) aspects in any situation, sustain their drives (especially motivation and volition) to pursue any learning experience meaningfully to optimal ends, manage their emotions constructively, and assume full control of their formal education for the sake of their profiles development (Sect. 3.8).

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7. In all above respects, and particularly for reinforcing constructive modulation, turn student failures from learning obstacles to learning opportunities through insightful regulation of cognitive and behavioral issues that may cause further issues and prevent meaningful learning at any time. In order to achieve all the above efficiently under SCE, mediators need to: 1. Plan and execute lesson plans systematically following learning cycles, with coherent and smooth transition from one cycle to the next cycle allowing gradual development of a coherent big picture about any subject matter, and especially about professional paradigms. 2. Organize course content around powerful conceptual and physical systems (Sects. 5.3 and 5.5) and systemic events and processes in line with Table 4.3 and Figs. 1.3, 1.4 and 4.4, so as to help students develop systemic competencies (Table 2.1) that gradually cover all sorts of investigative and innovative processes (Sect. 1.3), appreciate physical and conceptual patterns, and consciously sustain cognitive and behavioral patterns in their memories. 3. Carry out assessment as part of continuous evaluation and insightful regulation of learning and instruction and for the purpose of inducing and sustaining meaningful learning of course materials.

4.8 Assessment and Learning Efficacy of learning mediation depends significantly on how learners’ prior knowledge is being accounted for and taken advantage of, which in turn depends on how viably such knowledge can be ascertained, and how learner and mediator interpret and profit of such ascertainment. Meaningful learning involves continuous evaluation and insightful regulation of every piece of knowledge we invoke, every process we go through, and every outcome we bring about (Figs. 1.3, 4.4 and 4.5). In formal education, evaluation relies on a variety of informal and formal means and methods. Informal evaluation relies on things like student face and body language, oral questions a teacher asks in class, monitoring of student discussions and of individual and collective work. Formal evaluation relies particularly on prescriptive means that provide systematic logs of student performance and achievement on certain tasks that student and teacher alike can analyze and interpret following specific rules in order to come up with informed and relatively objective judgment about the quality of learning and instruction. For instance, monitoring student work can be formalized by using structured protocols that provide consistently specific indicators of student performance and achievement across a variety of tasks. Aside from student logs, assessment portfolios included, formal evaluation may rely on similar logs of teacher practice using specific classroom observation protocols, as well as on structured and related surveys of parents, school administrators, and various other stakeholders. Assessments, or assessment means, that include a variety of assignments (traditional homework problems and exercises, case study, projects, etc.) and examinations

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(traditional tests, quizzes, high-stake exams, etc.) continue to be the most systematic means of evaluating student performance and achievement on structured tasks. Assessment though is not for us an end by itself. It is an evaluation process, more than a product, that serves a more worthy end: mediating student learning properly, including insightful regulation of student knowledge, and sustaining student profiles evolution in meaningful and productive directions. As such, assessment is not about formal examination or any other task assigned along with or instead of tests and quizzes to come up with certain grades for the sake of ranking students on certain scales and sanctioning them to pass or fail a given course or high-stake exam. Before we elaborate our position on assessment and learning, and in order to set the stage for this elaboration, let us point out some critical issues regarding knowledge we invoke and deploy in any thought or action we undertake for any purpose, assessment included. No matter how assessment is defined and carried out, it always requires that students invoke and deploy some of their knowledge in certain instances, and thus “perform” certain conceptual and/or physical acts, and “achieve” or bring about certain abstract or concrete outcomes, based on which we come up with appropriate conclusions, make proper judgment, regarding that knowledge. A number of cognitive issues that underline knowledge deployment and processes that it entails in any instance need to be taken into consideration in mediating learning, particularly to avoid constricting or even undermining assessment in any respect. These issues include primarily the following: 1. Knowledge access and engagement (deployment) in thought or action for any purpose always induces knowledge change. Memory retrieval always involves changes in the corresponding engram system (Sect. 3.7.2) and thus changes in the cognitive or behavioral knowledge it sustains. Therefore, how a person performs and what s/he achieves in a certain task, even in answering the simplest question possible, does not provide an authentic account of the actual state in which invoked knowledge existed in the person mind just before the instant that task was undertaken. Instead, the person’s performance and achievement reflect how that person has transformed that knowledge into a new state different from the one in which it used to exist in memory up until the instant in question. The extent of knowledge transformation, of its change of state, depends on the neuronal demands of memory retrieval and, especially, on how the undertaken task requires invoked knowledge to be adapted to the situation at hand. What a quantum dilemma about knowledge change resulting from measurement (assessment) of knowledge! 2. Prior knowledge and respective change of state can never be exactly the same regarding the same instance for two different people, or regarding similar instances for the same person. Because of natural neuronal and engram differences in different people brains, and because of differences in their prior experience, no two people can have exactly the same knowledge regarding anything, and they can never transform any knowledge exactly the same way. A paradox thus seems to emerge when the same judgment is made regarding two people who apparently achieve exactly the same thing in any given instance. A similar paradox

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seems also to emerge when the same person ends up with apparently the same achievement in two similar instances. For, the person’s concerned knowledge changes when invoked in the first instance and that change should be reflected in the second instance during which further knowledge change takes place. What a paradoxical dilemma imposed by weighing evenly people performance and achievement! 3. Performance and achievement do not necessarily come as a consequence of the knowledge we are interested in assessing. What knowledge people invoke (adduce in Fig. 4.4) in a given instance depends on how they interpret what the instance is about and what they think is expected of them to achieve in that instance. Such interpretation and expectations may vary from one person to another, and, especially for us, those of a student may not match those of a teacher or any examiner. Furthermore, how people perform in a given instance, especially when of conceptual nature and when reasoning is expressed in words and various symbolic depictions, depends primarily on people’s potential to express themselves properly. Therefore, poor performance and achievement may be due not necessarily to flaws in the knowledge being assessed but to a misinterpretation of what an assessment task is all about in the first case, and to communication weaknesses in the second case. What a predicament inflicted on assessment in accordance with Galileo’s axiom that the reality of things may not be exposed directly to our senses! Educators have long called for “authentic” assessment, assessment that provides valid and reliable indicators of student knowledge, and particularly of student meaningful learning. The three issues above imply that people knowledge cannot be assessed directly under any circumstance, and that we cannot speak of assessment “of” knowledge or “of” learning in the strict sense since no achievement provides a mirror image of knowledge behind it. In assessment, like in any other cognitive or behavioral exercise, we can only make inferences about the implicated knowledge following Newton’s motto: “From the effect (performance and achievement), infer the cause” (underlying knowledge), the cause that cannot be directly measurement or ascertained. Authenticity cannot then be about assessing student knowledge directly, but about ascertaining what students can do with that knowledge in demonstrable ways. Only in that sense, one can speak of assessment “of” learning. Another authenticity issue pertains to how traditional assessment drives students away from meaningful learning. Traditional tests used under the labels of “formative” and “summative” assessment, including high-stakes exams, are often assumed to measure what students have actually “learned” meaningfully about a given topic or subject-matter and sustained in LTM. Notwithstanding the three cognitive issues mentioned above and inherent validity and reliability flaws of traditional tests, research has constantly shown that students are capable of memorizing by heart material they know they will be tested about, without necessarily understanding it, holding it in memory (in STM not LTM) long enough to recall it and reproduce it as required when being tested, and dropping it out of memory a short while afterwards. Students are being encouraged, and even compelled to take this futile path

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when formal education is being reduced to “teaching to the test”, especially when high-stakes exit exams are at stake, and learning subsequently reduced to studying to the test. In order to turn things around and assume a realistic, productive, and constructive stance on assessment, we better carry out assessment “of” learning not for its own sake, but for the sake of mediating meaningful learning. We would then speak more of assessment “for” learning and assessment “as” learning. When carried out “for” learning, assessment is not reduced to testing in the traditional sense. It is instead carried out for the evaluation and regulation of both student and teacher knowledge and practice, and thus for mediating meaningful learning and sustaining student profiles evolution along realistic and efficient tracks. Student and teacher alike look then insightfully into the outcome of any assessment in order to detect strengths and weaknesses in student (and teacher) knowledge, reinforce and build on the former and regulate or remedy the latter. Assessment “as” learning builds constructively on the first cognitive issue mentioned above, namely on the fact that any thought or action always implicates changes in invoked prior knowledge, i.e., learning of some sort. Therefore, even when students are subject to traditional testing, they transform knowledge they retrieve to adapt to, and deploy in, those tests, and thus end up learning while taking any test. Test performance and achievement reflect then, in addition to their knowledge potentials, what students might have learned while taking the test, i.e., what they can produce, and how they can do so, with invoked and adapted knowledge. Assessment items would then be treated as deployment tasks that help students further elaborate and enhance their knowledge and eventually consolidate it in memory, ultimately in productive and innovative ways (thus reaching Stages 4 and 5 in Table 4.4). Authentic assessment then becomes a constant process of ascertaining student work of any sort, a process that is carried out as an integral part of learning mediation in order to: (a) make proper inferences about student knowledge (or rather potentials) from their work performance and achievement, (b) track and chart the evolution of designated elements of student profiles (e.g., learning outcomes, systems, or competencies), instead of documenting discrete snapshots of what students can achieve on specific tests at specific times, (c) provide students with timely feedback for insightful profile regulation, and (d) mediate learning insightfully in all respects. Such authenticity can be relatively ensured when all assignments and exams are systematically designed, deployed, and interpreted with reliable tools and in accordance with welldefined rules. Among the most important of these tools are item maps and assessment rubrics that complement each other in major design and deployment respects.

4.8.1 Item Maps An item map is a generic tool that can be used to design systematically all sorts of structured learning tasks or items, textbooks exercises and assessment items included. The tool may be used in the form of a template, a matrix or a table, that provides

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the specifications which a given item needs to assume in order to be as viable as possible in contributing to the development of specific profile components, and as authentic and as reliable as possible in serving the four objectives just mentioned for authentic assessment. For optimal efficiency regarding insightful regulation and mediation of learning, particularly with the same cohort of students, specifications should be designated as consistently as possible across different items on the same and different instances, especially when it comes to assessment, by the same teacher or examiner, and by different teachers or examiners concerned with different courses. For instance, item maps may include the following specifications: 1. Item objective, which specifies explicitly before the item is prepared what the item is supposed to ascertain in an assessment (or to help students learn otherwise), namely, a particular learning outcome (LO) or set of LOs, independently or as part of a given system or competency, or of any other profile component of interest. LO specifications include, for us, the dimension, facet, and subset it belongs to in the SCE taxonomy (Table 4.2). System specifications include, preferably in the form of LOs, the covered schematic dimensions and facets of the system(s) of interest in the manner illustrated in Table 4.3, and competency specifications may similarly cover aspects like those in Table 2.1 in relation to the type of tasks that the competency is about. 2. Development stage, namely the level at which students should have achieved (or achieve after learning) the objective above at the time of assessment in accordance with Table 4.4, particularly Stage 3 for contextualized achievement (Emulation stage) when students had already enough related deployment experience, Stage 4 for decontextualized or extrapolative achievement (Production stage), or Stage 5 for mastery achievement or creativity and invention (Innovation stage). 3. Overall difficulty, which specifies on a specific rating scale the item inherent overall cognitive/behavioral difficulty given how intricate it is (cognitive and physical demands) by nature and within the context of the course(s) for which it is designed. For instance, on a 3-point scale, item difficulty may be rated as follows: lower level (1), for elementary or little difficulty given how extensively the item objective has already been tackled in the course(s) and respective cognitive/behavioral demands have been met, mid-level (2), for moderate or average difficulty, and higher level (3), for considerable or major difficulty. 4. Context, which specifies whether the item context is a familiar one, given student past experience with the item objective, similar to familiar contexts, or totally new. Indication may also be made whether or not the item requires transfer from or to discipline(s) or disciplinary branch(es) outside course scope. 5. Deployment nature, namely whether achieving the item requires simple recall of prior knowledge (assumed then to be already properly encoded or consolidated in student memory), or adaptation to a certain level of complexity to new conditions. This level may be indicated on a rating scale similar to the one adopted for item difficulty (spec. 3). 6. Format, e.g., whether the item, say, in conceptual items, is a closed item (multiple choice, rating scale, etc.), open-ended, case study, project, etc.

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7. Procedure, which includes steps or stages that one needs to go through in order to achieve the item to the desired level of satisfaction (spec. 2), along with welldefined criteria for figuring out the level at which students will accomplish each step or stage. That level may be indicated on an appropriate rating scale as illustrated in Table 4.5 for items requiring systemic investigation competencies in accordance with Table 2.1 and Fig. 4.4. Finer, say, 5-point rating scales may be adopted in Table 4.5 and in spec. 3, whenever appropriate for more precision and fairness provided that students (and teachers) are capable of appreciating the minute details differentiating two consecutive levels. 8. Duration, in minutes, that most students realistically need to achieve the item, given what is known about students’ prior knowledge related to that item and their performance history on similar and related items.

4.8.2 Assessment Rubrics For all practical evaluation and learning purposes, and especially in order to provide students with appropriate feedback systematically, item maps need to be coupled with assessment rubrics. An assessment rubric is a comprehensive marking and annotation template that systematizes how the same and different teachers (or examiners in general) go about grading student work and providing necessary feedback for insightful regulation and learning mediation. In contrast with quantitative scales or breakdown of scores commonly used in traditional norm-referenced assessments, and as illustrated in Table 4.6 for a systemic investigation competency item (Tables 2.1 and 4.5), an assessment rubric may include: 1. Item identifiers, which include some labels like the ones in the first two rows of Table 4.6 that help documenting and tracking item and student history in a given course and across different courses. 2. Inherent specifications, which include specifications from the item map that can be fully determined before students are assessed, and independently of the actual student performance on that item. Rows 3 through 6 in Table 4.6 include such specifications. 3. Procedures and respective performance weights, which include all major steps indicated in the item map that are necessary to achieve the item properly, along with student performance on each step weighed or ascertained in accordance with the rating criteria designated ahead of time in the manner shown in Table 4.5. Performance may then be weighed in two complementary manners: (a) using the rating scale specified ahead of time, like in Table 4.5, and indicated in Table 4.6 under “Achievement level”, and (b) assigning a matching (somewhat proportional) numerical “score” out of the allocated maximal score. Achievement level and score thus complement each other with the former being assigned qualitatively on an ordinal rating scale that applies virtually the same

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Table 4.5 Achievement levels for major steps in a conceptual task requiring systemic investigation Procedure

Level 3a (Satisfactory)

2 (Moderate)

1 (Weak)

Analysis

Primary physical and/or conceptual entities (events and processes included) and their primary properties are all well specified in accordance with appropriate norms and criteria, under appropriate framework, and referred to with appropriate concepts

Most primary entities (and properties) are specified in accordance with mostly appropriate criteria, under appropriate framework, with the inclusion of some unnecessary secondary entities

A few primary entities (and properties), if any, are specified in accordance with mostly flawed criteria, under perhaps the wrong framework, with the inclusion of secondary entities

Formulation

All necessary connections are well specified (epistemically) among all primary entities (and properties) in accordance with appropriate norms and criteria, and referred to with appropriate conceptions (e.g., laws and principles)

Necessary connections are partially specified among most primary entities in accordance with mostly appropriate norms and criteria, and with minor flaws

A few necessary connections, if any, are specified among some primary entities with major flaws, along with flawed connections among secondary entities, mostly or entirely in accordance with inappropriate norms

Depiction and operation tools

Appropriate terms and representations (e.g., pictures, diagrams, graphs, mathematical formulas), if necessary, are properly chosen and used to depict primary entities and connections, along with appropriate operators (e.g., syntactic, mathematical) for processing entities and connections

Mostly appropriate terms and necessary representations are chosen but used with some flaws to depict most primary entities and connections, and most operators are chosen with some flaws

Mostly inappropriate and insufficient terms, representations, and operators, if any, are chosen

Processing

Primary entities and/or corresponding depictions and operators are duly processed in accordance with appropriate rules

Necessary processes are partially carried out in accordance with partially flawed rules

A few processes, if any, are carried out in accordance with mostly flawed rules

(continued)

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Table 4.5 (continued) Procedure

Level 3a (Satisfactory)

2 (Moderate)

1 (Weak)

Answer/solution

Questions are answered and/or problem is solved to the desired level of satisfaction

Questions are partially answered and/or problem is partially solved to some level of satisfaction

Questions are mostly or entirely unanswered and/or problem is mostly or entirely unsolved

Interpretation and extrapolation

Results are properly interpreted regarding the situation at hand and in accordance with the chosen framework, and extrapolated, if necessary, beyond the scope of that situation

Results are partially interpreted regarding the situation at hand, not entirely in accordance with the chosen framework, and partially extrapolated whenever necessary

Results, that are mostly flawed in the first hand, are not properly interpreted and extrapolated

Justification

Due justification is provided whenever necessary for a given step or result in accordance with the chosen framework

Justification is partially provided whenever necessary, but not entirely in accordance with the chosen framework

Little justification, if any, is provided whenever necessary, and not in accordance with the chosen framework

a

Inconsequential mistakes may be made in any stage/step with no repercussions on what follows

way to all similar items in any sort of assessment, and the latter assigned quantitatively as an interval-type variable, or very cautiously for statistical and administrative purposes, as a ratio-type variable, with either type of variable depending on both the said “level” and the assigned maximal score. An overall item achievement level may then be adequately inferred along a rating scale similar to the one chosen for individual steps in Table 4.5, and a total item score may also be computed as a sum of scores on various steps. One has to be very cautious in interpreting quantitative scores. For instance, a student who scores “4” on a given step or item can never be said to have achieved “twice” as good as a student who ends up with a score of “2”. All we can say is that the former student scored 2 points better than the latter, with the score difference interpreted in terms of criteria like those indicated in Table 4.5. Furthermore, two students may end up with exactly the same total score on a given item for different reasons indicated by different achievement levels and scores on each procedural step. These students may then not be said to have achieved that item identically or that they hold knowledge of similar quality in relation to that item. The same is true about students who end up with the same total score on an entire assessment, or the same cumulative score on a series of assessments. Assessment

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Table 4.6 Assessment rubric Course:

Assessment date:

Assessment ID/focus:

Item ID/No:

Objective: Systemic investigation competency for conceptual tasks Item format:

Duration:

Developmental stage:

Overall cognitive difficulty:

Context:

Deployment nature:

/Transfer to:

Procedural step/stage

Achievement Level

Max score

minutes

Feedback

Score

Analysis Formulation Depiction and operation Processing Answer/solution Interpretation and extrapolation Justification Overall level/total score Additional notes/hints

rubrics are very crucial to discern differences in student performance and make appropriate inferences about related knowledge state. 4. Feedback given on every procedural step and for the overall item performance, and aiming primarily at: (a) clarifying student strengths and weaknesses, and (b) providing guidelines for insightful strength reinforcement and weakness remedial. In the latter respect, any “failure” would be treated not as drawback in student profile evolution, but as a stepping stone or an indicator for how knowledge evolution should proceed so that such failure be overcome insightfully and prevented in the future. 5. Additional notes or hints that go beyond the feedback above may be provided to individual students, or kept separately in teacher records for subsequent learning mediation and course and curriculum evaluation and refinement.

4.8.3 Maps and Rubrics for Authentic Assessment Item maps and assessment rubrics may seem at first sight a bit involved and not feasible for implementation in any assessment or knowledge construction and deployment exercise, especially in regular course quizzes and homework. With the use of

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computers, these tools can be turned into digital templates that can be affordably adapted to different items. The use of such templates become even more affordable, more systematic, and more efficient and beneficiary across different courses and among various teachers in the same and different schools, from elementary to tertiary education, when used in digital assessment platforms designed to customize assessment (and assignment) design and administration to particular student and teacher needs. Under any circumstance, item maps and assessment rubrics are crucial for authentic assessment to be properly carried out “for” learning and “as” learning. These tools help boosting assessment efficacity and efficiency and bring about many advantages including the following: 1. Systematic assessment and feedback. Maps and rubrics systematize assessment (and various other forms of knowledge construction and deployment) in all its forms within the same course and across courses given by the same and different teachers when they all adapt such tools to their needs in accordance with common design and deployment rules and in relation to systematically designed course content (e.g., in the form of Tables 2.1 and 4.3 and further discussed in the next chapter). They also systematize feedback for insightful regulation of student (and teacher) knowledge. As such, assessment becomes a collective endeavor among concerned teachers that brings consistency within and across courses for the advantage of both student and teacher, particularly with regard to learning mediation for the evolution of individual students’ profiles as discussed below. 2. Insightful regulation. Feedback provided to students through rubrics help them evaluate their performance and knowledge that brought about that performance, and regulate themselves appropriately on their own and/or with appropriate mediation. The entire process may be achieved most efficiently and meaningfully when students evaluate and negotiate each other’s performance based on rubric criteria, and come to a consensus on the regulation process and outcome. Students learn better when they think aloud and negotiate ideas with each other than when they depend exclusively on teacher intervention. The more diverse the learning agents other than teacher, the merrier, especially when teachers mediate discussions in insightful directions. 3. Transparency. Maps and rubrics allow assessment and deployment exercises to be transparent enough for students to figure out what they were supposed to do in any accomplished exercise, and to even know ahead of time what is expected of them in any prospective exercise. Feedback allows students to proceed vividly in insightful self-regulation and to concentrate on pertinent knowledge. Students would then be encouraged to take control of their own learning, and figure out what evolution course is most appropriate to take. These tools, along with schemes and schemata they rely upon (e.g., Figs. 1.1 and 4.4; Tables 2.1, 4.3 and 4.5), make exercises in question also transparent to parents, administrators, and

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4.

5.

6.

7.

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all those concerned inside and outside the school, and help them make informed decisions about students, exercises, learning, instruction, and curricula. Profile evolution. Systematic use of maps and rubrics allow teachers to chart the evolution of individual student profiles along developmental stages like those in Table 4.4, and subsequently make informed decisions regarding learning mediation needed to properly promote such evolution under realistic terms. When deployed systematically within and across courses taught across all schooling years by the same and different teachers, especially with the same cohort of students, these tools help to systematize, and somewhat unify, charting the evolution of individual student profiles and driving it in realistic directions with proper learning mediation, especially when such evolution is indexed against common cognitive and behavioral benchmarks or criteria along commonly agreed upon developmental stages. Constructive focus. Maps and rubrics help direct teacher attention more toward providing necessary feedback for student insightful profile regulation and drawing necessary lessons for lesson planning and learning mediation than toward achieving the traditional requirement of assigning grades to students for the mere purpose of ranking them and sanctioning them to pass or fail a given course. As such, the focus and main purpose of instruction is no longer student test performance, and implicitly the short-term, transient assimilation by rote of traditional course materials behind it, but what and how students can actually learn well-designed, systemic materials meaningfully to make their profiles evolve in sustainable and productive, and ultimately innovative, ways. Professional development. Feedback and lessons teachers draw from student assessments (or any other evaluation exercise) using rubrics concern teacher profiles as much as student profiles. Assessment data help teachers make informed decision about how their own content and pedagogical knowledge and instructional practice need to be regulated and constantly developed, and subsequently what professional development programs they need to seek and contribute to, locally (e.g., professional learning communities) and globally (e.g., formal workshops and courses offered by professional organizations and universities). Curriculum reform. Any evaluation carried during the course of learning and instruction has major implications for course content (as part of action research) and the entire curriculum a course is part of. Assessment data, especially when gathered and analyzed systematically using tools like item maps and assessment rubrics, help teachers refine their courses properly and come to informed consensus with various other stakeholders on how curriculum needs to be refined or even reformed in order to meet actual student potentials and needs, particularly in relation to the community they are part of and the job market they will eventually become part of.

Chapter 5

Systemic Education Curricula and Governance for the Twenty-First Century

Contents 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transcending Traditional Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Systemic Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Differential Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scope and Sequence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Praxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Educational Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.1 Paradigm Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.2 Middle-Out Systemic Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.3 Partnerships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.4 Teaching Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.5 Exchange Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.6 Student Certification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8.7 Culture of Excellence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5.1 Introduction Formal education must be a quality public good that is affordable to all school age youngsters to empower them for excellence in life and not merely for passing school and high stakes exams. In particular, formal education must be for self-fulfillment and development of systemic, 4P profiles that empower students for lifelong learning, enlightened citizenship, successful and propitious career, and significant contributions to sustainable development at the local, national, and global levels. The development of such profiles can only take place in systemic education, i.e., through formal education carried out in accordance with systemic, mind-and-brain-based pedagogy in the manner discussed in the previous two chapters, and in the context of systemic curricula and educational systems of true systemic governance as discussed in this chapter. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. A. Halloun, Systemic Cognition and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3_5

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Traditional curricula, particularly in general education, have been governed by somewhat outdated and unsubstantiated pedagogy that goes back to the late nineteenth century and that is at odds, in many respects, with the way the human mind and brain are and work as revealed by reliable research in cognitive science and particularly neuroscience (Halloun, 2017, 2018a, 2019). These curricula are predominantly informational about certain disciplines. They focus on transmitting specific disciplinary knowledge that is mostly of epistemic nature in general education and that students often assimilate by rote, loosely compartmentalized, for passing school and high stakes exams rather than for their self-fulfillment and success in life, as constantly revealed by the plethora of educational research in the past six decades. Most importantly, traditional disciplinary curricula fail to meet the realities of the twenty-first century that increasingly call for systemic competencies that bring coherently together epistemic and procedural knowledge from different disciplines in order to tackle daily issues in the workplace and various other aspects of life. Such competencies can only be developed through experiential learning that brings coherently and productively together, in real life settings, theory and practice from different communities of practice, and most meaningfully, as discussed in this chapter, in the context of curricula designed at all educational levels for systemic, praxis immersive, convergence education (SPICE). SPICE curricula must be designed so as to take advantage of, and resonate well with, major developments in the twenty-first century, including the digital revolution, and be accordingly deployed and continuously evaluated and regulated in the context of educational systems of systemic governance that transcends many traditional premises and practices. Actors within and across various organisms of a given educational system must share power and work together with distributed responsibility, leaving individual educational institutions with a relatively high level of autonomy so that teachers and other stakeholders in a given institution properly adapt their curricula and various operations to the actual potentials, needs, and aspirations of its students and local community. The institution should then work in partnership with other educational institutions in its vicinity and with various sectors of society, and it should live by and for a culture of excellence within and outside its boundaries, so that students, teachers, and all other stakeholders continuously evolve to the best they can and should, given the realities of the time. Curricula and governance in question make the object of this chapter only to address concisely enough certain issues we deem critical to spread the seeds of systemic cognition and education in educational systems. The chapter comes in eight sections, the second of which outlines how we need to transcend traditional disciplinary curricula. Section 5.3 introduces what we mean by systemic curricula before we embark in the following four sections on discussing how such curricula can reasonably and feasibly be SPICE curricula by bringing together many disciplines under what we call differential convergence (Sect. 5.4), and then how such curricula can be most efficiently designed with proper scope and sequence (Sect. 5.5) and implemented in experiential learning ecologies that rely to the extent that is possible

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on praxis that brings theory and practice together in real life settings (Sect. 5.6) with proper use of technology (Sect. 5.7). Major aspects that help an educational system to be operated under a truly systemic governance for the benefit of SPICE are then discussed in the eighth and last section.

5.2 Transcending Traditional Curricula A curriculum is normally designed and implemented to fulfill a specific function for the supposed benefit of a given population of students at a given educational level. This function may fall in one of two broad categories, subject matter-focused or learner-focused. Subject matter-focused or disciplinary curricula are designed mostly for informing students about certain disciplines, not forming them or developing their profiles with useful disciplinary knowledge. They focus on the delivery of epistemic and/or procedural knowledge pertaining to a particular academic discipline in general education, and to a particular community of practice (CoP) in technical and vocational education (or career and technical education) and in traditional tertiary education majors. In contrast, learner-focused curricula are designed for the development of people with specific traits, and treat subject-matter not as end by itself but fall back on it to provide a viable context for developing such traits. Target traits could either make up a single universal profile of dogmatic nature that fulfills the aspirations of a given authority (e.g., a totalitarian regime) or some broad qualities of libertarian nature that characterize distinct profiles of individual learners that are self-fulfilling while they decently meet the realities of the time like in the case of our systemic 4P profiles discussed in Chap. 2. Curriculum design and implementation are supposed to be governed by welldefined pedagogical frameworks that come in a variety of form, and particularly in their foundational premises. At one end of the spectrum are pedagogical frameworks dominated by dogmatic and/or mythical premises that focus more on authoritative instruction than on insightful learning. On the other end, are frameworks grounded in cognitive sciences and, lately and to a certain extent, in neuroscience, and focusing on insightful, experiential learning with instruction at its service. Between the two is a plethora of frameworks with a mix of implicit and explicit premises from both ends of the spectrum, including old psychological conjectures that may or may not be consonant with the way the human mind and brain are and work. Curricula mandate under their frameworks, also in a variety of form and content, and to different levels of clarity and comprehensiveness, what students are expected to accomplish at specific grade levels, how they are supposed to do so, and how teachers and other master learning agents are supposed to help in this respect. At one end of the spectrum are curricula made up almost exclusively of programs of study that spell out epistemic and, to a lesser extent, procedural knowledge that students are supposed to assimilate in specific forms about a given subject matter. Teachers are then often left to figure out on their own, and mostly to improvise, what didactic processes of mainly lecture and demonstration suit them, not their students, best to deliver

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mandated programs. As a consequence, students achieve their mandate passively and submissively, and end up mostly with compartmentalized, loosely structured, transient information and routines of little utility outside the school walls. Student achievement is then ascertained on norm-referenced scales and reported exclusively with letter or numerical grades that no two people, student and teacher included, can ever agree on how to interpret. At the other end of the spectrum are curricula that mandate programs of study advocating a somewhat comprehensive paradigmatic picture of any subject matter, along with detailed norms and guidelines for various means and methods of learning, instruction, and assessment that are necessary to bring about graduates with specific profiles. Between the two is a variety of curricula that focus to different extents on some of these aspects but not others. Most curricula around the world fall closely to the first end of the spectrum mentioned above, and are primarily governed by the 2-4-6 fallacy at virtually all educational levels in various sectors, but especially in K-12 general education. Accordingly, it is falsely believed that a curriculum is about subject-matter information packed between the two covers of a textbook and meant to be delivered between the four walls of a classroom during six teaching periods or so a day. Most traditional textbooks provide compartmentalized, sometimes watered down, information about disciplinary episteme and routines for answering questions and solving problems that students are usually conditioned to assimilate by rote and retain temporarily in memory for the purpose of passing course examinations and, perhaps, eventual use in future courses, but not necessarily for taking advantage of in daily life. Part of this fallacy is the one size-fits-all, “conveyor belt” assumption that all it takes to “learn” (in fact, assimilate by rote) pre-canned textbook materials is for teachers to “deliver” them didactically through lecture and demonstration to students sitting still and quiet in class and watching passively the teacher act. This fallacy is rooted in the assembly line culture that prevailed in industry for a good part of the past century, and that required workers to merely accomplish narrow tasks mandated by their firms in prescriptive ways with no necessary insight or innovative thinking required, and often not even any feedback expected outside reporting any failure in the handled machinery or service line. Under such and similar fallacies and myths, traditional curricula bring about mostly reproductive, submissive consumers (along with some rebellions and anarchists) who evolve at best to the third developmental stage in Table 4.4, and who are not prepared to cope with the unprecedented demands of the twenty-first century. Knowledge of all sorts is developing so rapidly in our era that no curriculum or textbook can keep up with. New requirements and challenges keep popping up constantly because of the digital revolution and unforeseeable local and international events and crises like the Corona virus pandemic. In short, the twenty-first century requires all people to develop, more than any time before, habits for lifelong learning and various other aspects of life that empower them, individually and collectively, to readily adapt to any situation that may emerge in daily life with new cognitive or behavioral demands. Traditional curricula need then to be transcended in all foundational and practical respects in order to allow students develop specific and, especially, generic competencies that may gradually evolve into the required habits

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of life (Sect. 2.3). In particular, transcendence should be in the following respects, and in the specified directions, for any curriculum, particularly in traditional K-12 general education: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Function: To bring about self-fulfilled, committed citizens empowered for individual and collective success, even excellence, in life, and ready to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world and of local and national sustainable development, armed with meaningful cognitive and behavioral knowledge that is drawn from academia or CoPs and that they can systematically deploy (and develop) in any situation, and thus adapt to any unfamiliar situation through either the transfer there of such knowledge, its transformation to meet new needs, or its use for the development of all new knowledge. Population (Human domain): Students of different aspirations, different interests, different background (educational, cultural, economic, etc.), different potentials (mostly because of their background, not of so-called innate intelligence), belonging to a particular community and a particular nation in an inter-dependent world. Context (Academic domain): Professional paradigm(s) from which is (are) drawn cognitive and behavioral knowledge that the curriculum is concerned with, with a focus on generic paradigmatic premises and knowledge that cut across disciplines (or CoPs) and that allow for productive and innovative deployment (and development) within and among disciplines. Pedagogical framework: Substantiated, viable mind-and-brain-based, studentcentered premises for meaningful learning of desired knowledge in its paradigmatic context, and for efficient, lucid, and flexible implementation and continuous evolution of all aspects of the curriculum in foundational and practical harmony with other curricula mandated for the same student population in order to ensure cross-curricula coherence and consistency, smooth transition to upper grades, and even smooth mobility across schools and communities. Program of study: A coherent body of essential and generative cognitive and behavioral knowledge satisfying the “less is more” maxim, and focusing on paradigmatic aspects and generic competencies that cut across various parts of a given discipline and across different disciplines, and that allow students to establish meaningful connections across a wide range of traditional subject matters, develop a coherent big picture within and across disciplines, and sustain productive and innovative habits of life, including habits for lifelong learning. Learning: Meaningful learning of required knowledge through individual and collective experiential activities (Sect. 4.4), of realistic cognitive and behavioral demands and expectations, carefully designed with student participation so as to willfully engage every student actively and insightfully (Sect. 4.6), and allow them to develop efficient learning styles with metacognition and modulatory brain systems consciously and purposely attended for—not according to the socalled “learning styles” myth dismissed by reliable research (Willigham et al., 2015), and evolve systematically in all cognitive and behavioral respects along feasible and flexible non-linear progression tracks.

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7.

Learning ecology: Students, like teachers, assume, to the extent they can afford it, the role of learning agents toward their classmates, which helps them develop their own knowledge meaningfully, and have at their disposal makerspaces and other facilities and resources, inside and outside school, for putting in practice what they learn in theory and carrying out projects related to everyday life and of possible benefit to their community as apprentices under out of school mentors whenever possible. 8. Teaching: Teachers are well-prepared and continuously trained professionals afforded propitious working conditions so as to act as efficacious learning mediators (Sect. 4.7) in accordance with the assumed pedagogical framework and following a mix of instructional methods that all students may benefit of through structured learning cycles (Sect. 4.5), and to account in the process to individual differences among students in order to accommodate all aspects of the curriculum to actual student potentials and needs, and allow individual students proceed through feasible and flexible learning progressions, without losing sight of curriculum mandates or compromising the paradigmatic quality of course materials. 9. Assessment: Assessment is not an end by itself but insightful means for meaningful learning and for efficient learning mediation, and is carried out with appropriate tools like item maps and assessment rubrics (Sect. 4.8) in order to systematize and optimize mediation modalities and learning progressions of individual students. 10. Technology: Educational technology, and particularly digital technology, is not an add-on conceived by curriculum outsiders, but an integral part of the learning ecology designed, with student and teacher participation after bridging the digital gap between the two, under the curriculum pedagogical framework that includes premises to make technology resonate well with learners’ mind and brain at specific ages, and particularly their modulatory systems, and bring about a significant and affordable added value, not a burden, to both student meaningful learning and teacher mediation of learning progressions.

5.3 Systemic Curricula SCE calls for systemic, all-inclusive and liberal learner-focused curricula that abide by everything mentioned in the ten points above, under an overall systemic governance. A systemic curriculum has the main function of bringing up and about systemic citizens with 4P profiles. It is governed by a pedagogical framework that accounts for all cognitive and pedagogical aspects discussed in the previous two chapters and mandates for mediating experiential learning in a systemic learning ecology that accounts for individual differences among students. Its programs of study for various grade levels revolve flexibly, in the context of systemic paradigms, around a

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limited and powerful set of conceptual and physical systems and systemic processes and competencies that are most crucial for success in the twenty-first century and beyond. Defined in accordance with the systemic schema of Fig. 1.1, a systemic curriculum is characterized as follows: Framework, consisting of systemic pedagogical premises that govern the curriculum constitution and performance within the perspective offered in the previous chapter and that are drawn from: (a) reliable cognitive and educational research, particularly in relation to mind-brain aspects discussed in Chap. 3 and accounting for students cognitive and behavioral potentials at given age and educational level, and (b) CoP(s) paradigm(s) which the curriculum pertains to and from which are drawn programs of study that properly demonstrate the rigor of these paradigms in relation to everyday life. Scope, specifying what the curriculum is supposed to accomplish in terms of helping students develop systemic 4P profiles to a reasonable extent by the end of each grade level, and in relation to other grade levels, within the context of what students are capable of adapting from CoP(s) paradigm(s) given their overall background (educational, cultural, etc.) and the school and community conditions in which the curriculum is being implemented. Constitution, bearing mainly on systemic programs of study along with necessary learning and teaching means and methods, assessment included, all prescribed flexibly in a systemic learning ecology of well-defined norms and terms that teachers and various other elements in the ecology need to satisfy. Performance, prescribing how to efficiently mediate systemic experiential learning in the defined ecology and ensure that individual students learn things meaningfully and develop desired competencies and all sorts of systemic cognitive and behavioral knowledge to satisfactory levels, as well as how to constantly evaluate and regulate various aspects of the curriculum based on student achievement and the demands of our constantly evolving world. A systemic curriculum is above all a dynamic system in perpetual evolution. It is designed with explicit prescriptions for continuous evaluation and regulation along its four schematic dimensions. Curriculum evaluation and regulation are constantly carried out in terms of student (and teacher) profile development, and of the efficacity and efficiency of the processes (learning and teaching, assessment included) that bring about such profile development, on the one hand, and of the continuously developing knowledge and changing life demands in the world around us, on the other. Systemic curricula share many foundational and practical pedagogical aspects with other student-centered, experiential curricula. However, they are distinguished from all other curricula in certain foundational and practical respects, stemming primarily from their drive for systemic worldview and mindset in consonance with how the human mind and brain are and work along with the universe. In particular, systemic curricula focus as much on content organization as on pedagogy, on “what” to teach and “how” to teach, and are distinguished in fostering systemic convergence among traditionally segregated disciplines as much in their programs of study as in the

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experiential learning ecology they mandate (Fig. 4.3). Unlike traditional curricula that push for compartmentalized content knowledge drawn following rules of thumb from the episteme of academic communities or communities of practice (hereafter referred to collectively as CoPs), systemic programs of study focus on a coherent paradigmatic picture of CoPs episteme and methodology (Box 1.1) and on systemic patterns, processes, and competencies that facilitate disciplinary convergence and that students find pertinent to their own lives and develop in the context of a limited number of conceptual and physical systems. Experiential learning of various materials takes place insightfully and involves, to the extent that is possible, in-school and out of school praxis, and takes advantage of technology as an integral part of the learning process as mandated by the adopted pedagogical framework.

5.4 Differential Convergence Systemic curricula are designed to prevent students from developing compartmentalized knowledge regarding any discipline or field, and to help them instead develop a coherent body of cognitive and behavioral knowledge that draws systematically and systemically on different CoPs paradigms and that empowers them for success and excellence in life. Systemic curricula thus transcend traditional disciplinary curricula and focus on paradigmatic patterns that help converging, i.e., bringing together, disciplines from the same and different fields in order to tackle issues of interest and value to students in their daily lives. They focus, in particular, on systemic epistemic and methodological patterns that bring together disciplines that have been traditionally separated by impenetrable boundaries or unbridgeable chasms like arts and humanities on the one hand, and science and technology on the other. Traditional educational systems have kept K-12 general education (GE) and technical and vocational education and training (TVET, or career and technical education, CTE) completely segregated, and treated GE and TVET realms as totally foreign to each other, and did virtually the same to various fields and disciplines within each realm. Furthermore, these systems have often kept GE disconnected from the job market and the realities of the time, and thus failed to prepare students for an informed career choice and for proper induction in, and significant contributions to, various aspects of society. A strong desegregation movement came along with the digital revolution that keeps bringing together more and more traditionally segregated CoPs to tackle issues of mutual interest in innovative ways, and to bring to the table new questions and new problems that can be best—and sometimes only—answered and solved through joint ventures that require these CoPs to converge on common foundational and practical grounds and benefit as much from their distinctive features as from their common and similar features in all paradigmatic respects, particularly in epistemic and methodological respects. Such convergence reverberates increasingly in various aspects of life to the extent that GE and TVET have to get desegregated

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and seek effective convergence modalities within and among their respective fields and disciplines in order to empower students of all educational levels to cope with the constantly emerging new and unprecedented realities of our time. Systemic pedagogical frameworks are optimally fit to bring about such desegregation and to allow for convergence education that brings disciplines from the same and different fields together in the same curriculum so as to help students develop generic systemic competencies which they can readily take advantage of in the workplace and in other aspects of life. Under a systemic framework, any discipline is presented in the form of a limited set of powerful systems and systemic processes and competencies that reveal epistemic and methodological patterns in that discipline (Halloun, 2018b, 2020b). The scope of a given system may then be extended or extrapolated to other disciplines, system elements and systemic processes shared among disciplines, and/or systems, processes, and patterns in various disciplines compared to each other, along with foundational paradigmatic premises, in order to realize disciplinary convergence that builds on common aspects and that establishes bridges or communication channels among disciplines so as to also take advantage of their distinctive features in tackling issues of interest. With reasonable expectations, and especially when carried out differentially, convergence education can be feasibly carried out to suitable extents even within the confinements of traditional disciplinary curricula whereby each curriculum is devoted exclusively to a particular discipline or a particular branch in a given discipline. Differential convergence education (DCE) brings together two or more disciplines from the same and/or different fields without blending them and fusing them in a single body that annihilates or supervenes individual disciplines in any respect. DCE honors and spares the integrity and sovereignty of each discipline in all foundational (paradigmatic premises) and practical (episteme and methodology) respects, while recognizing the interdependence of certain disciplines in specific respects and the possibility of any discipline to benefit from other disciplines at any time and in any place. Even when transcendence is required, i.e., when convergence needs to go beyond disciplinary boundaries into novel paradigmatic territories not ventured before, DCE is achieved not to the detriment of any discipline, but by widening horizons and opening new doors in ways which existing disciplines may benefit of. As such, DCE can be feasibly afforded even in the context of traditional disciplinary education, along with or part of, but not instead of, disciplinary courses, though this may require and/or lead to some affordable changes in the curricula in place (Halloun, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d). Different convergence modalities are distinguished in the literature based on different criteria, whether among CoPs or in educational settings. In the CoP realm, we distinguish five DCE modalities of increasing cohesiveness and productivity that educational systems and curricula can take advantage of the most. These are: pluridisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. These modalities are distinguished as outlined in Table 5.1 based on the following criteria (ibid.):

Yesa

Yesa

Crossdisciplinarity Opena

Transdisciplinarity Opena

Invtv LT Colb

Crtv LT Colb Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

Common transcendent framework

Common emergent framework

Common hybrid framework

Separate conformist frameworks

Separate conformist frameworks

Framework(s) and grounds in disciplinary paradigms

5

8

Refined rules

Refined rules

None

Novel Novel conceptions procedures

b

10

Yesa

Yes

No

No

Yes

No

No

No

No

Extrapolation Ultimately new discipline(s)

9

Significant/Invtv Yesa

Significant/Crtv

Slightly

Insignificant

None

Methodological Output changes in each originality discipline

7

New New conceptions procedures

Refined semantics and syntax

Refined semantics

None

Epistemic changes in each discipline

6

Long-term projects related to everyday life and involving non-academic fields that are not traditionally the object of general K-12 education Cnsrv = Conservative; Crtv = Creative; Invtv = Inventive; ST = Short Term; LT = Long Term; Coop = Cooperative; Colb = Collaborative Details elsewhere (Halloun, 2020b)

a

Yes

Open

Interdisciplinarity

Cnsrv ST Colb

Cnsrv ST Coop

Multidisciplinarity Discipline May be

Pluridisciplinarity

Cnsrv ST Coop

Disciplines Collective Disciplinary from workb bridges different fields

4

Scope of work

3

2

1

Characteristics

Issue only May be

Modality

Table 5.1 Major convergence modalities and their characteristics

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1. The scope of work, and more specifically whether it is strictly confined to a given issue of common concern and its time frame or it extends to other matters of everyday life and of theoretical and practical nature within the disciplines implicated in the convergence and beyond (Column 1 in Table 5.1). 2. The closeness of the implicated disciplines, and primarily whether or not they belong to the same field or the same CoP, be it academic or not (Column 2). 3. How professionals from different CoPs come together and carry their collective work, and specifically whether they do so under cooperative or collaborative terms and in conservative, creative, or innovative ways (Column 3). 4. The extent to which these professionals work across mutual disciplinary boundaries, bridge disciplinary divides, and come to mutual understandings on various foundational and practical respects in their collective work and beyond (Column 4). 5. The theoretical framework in the context of which convergence takes place, and particularly whether or not this framework entirely conforms to the paradigms of the respective disciplines/CoPs, and whether it brings together needed premises in cumulative or synthetical/integrative ways (Column 5). 6. The extent of conservation or, alternatively, regulation of conceptions and procedures brought from different disciplines, and whether or not new or novel conceptions and/or procedures emerge in the process (Columns 6 and 7). 7. The quality of convergence output, and particularly whether the issue of concern is brought to an end with familiar features or with original features that may reflect some innovation, i.e., creativity or invention (Column 8). 8. The extent to which framework and convergence process and output can be extrapolated beyond the original scope of work, if any (Columns 9 and 10). Ample details about the five DCE modalities are provided elsewhere (Halloun, 2020b). We hereby limit our discussion to crossdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, the last two modalities in Table 5.1 that give convergence in CoPs as well as in education its full significance and that are particularly important at the secondary school and tertiary education levels. Discussion begins with an outline of modalities as practiced among CoPs (mostly reproduced from the last cited reference) and ends with implications for educational curricula. The first three convergence modalities, pluri-, multi-, and inter-disciplinarity, are the most conservative modalities in the sense that that they entirely preserve all foundational and practical aspects of converged disciplines and, except for some semantic and syntactical refinements that infuse some harmony into existing disciplinary conceptions and procedures, these modalities bring no new significant conceptual or procedural component to any of the disciplines in question. The three modalities are mostly suitable for elementary and intermediate education (primary and middle schools). Crossdisciplinarity brings real significance to convergence, whether differential or not, through creative collaboration that goes beyond infusing relative harmony into disciplines in conservative ways. This modality synthesizes or blends various disciplinary elements in somewhat integrative ways that allow for the emergence

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of new paradigmatic aspects, foundational, epistemic, and methodological, in any implicated discipline. More specifically, CoPs resort to this modality in productive ways that include the following: 1. Participants from necessarily different realms (CoPs and fields), including traditionally non-academic fields, come together for a long-term and equitable, creative and not conservative collaboration that is life related, no longer confined to any particular issue, and not necessarily limited to one particular project. 2. Participants work together all along under one common emergent framework that draws upon, and conforms to, all their paradigms with synthesis or relative integration, and thus that implies some additions to, and/or changes in, the paradigmatic premises of their individual disciplines. 3. Participants rely mutually on their disciplines in creative ways that involve reiterative, critical evaluation and insightful regulation of various disciplinary premises and components, and that lead to any or all of the following: (a) Deployment of existing conceptions and procedures in unprecedented ways. (b) Regulation of conceptions and procedures in ways that may change any of them significantly, and not only infuse harmony in conceptual semantics and syntax or induce conservative procedural refinements. (c) Inception of new conceptions and/or procedures by derivation from, or extrapolation of, existing epistemic or methodological components. 4. The output is creative and no longer cumulative and reminiscent of existing disciplinary products. It comes about with significant originality in many or all respects, and is prone to extrapolation in ways to widen the scope of implicated disciplines in both domain and function. 5. Unlike the previous three modalities, crossdisciplinary convergence is truly systemic and somewhat integrative. With the former three modalities, participants focus on specific conceptual and/or procedural components of their individual disciplines, and only in relation to a given task and not to the big disciplinary picture. With this new modality, the focus becomes on each discipline in its entirety, its wholeness, and in relation to other disciplines. A truly systemic perspective begins to take shape here in a critical and insightful way so that creative disciplinary changes may subsequently be brought about. Those changes often result from synthesis and integration of disciplinary components in the manner discussed in point 3 above. Crossdisciplinarity is a cross-breeding, cross-fertilizing, or cross-pollinating convergence modality (whence the cross- prefix in the name of this modality) that requires continuous crossing of boundaries among disciplines, mutual and reiterative critical evaluation and insightful regulation of various disciplinary aspects, and bridging of disciplinary divides. It leaves it subsequently to participants’ creativity to bring about significant changes in all foundational and practical respects. Those changes are emergent in the sense that they stem from existing paradigmatic premises

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and epistemic and methodological components and come out with new aspects that cannot be attributed to anything they emerge from but that can always relate and conform to implicated disciplines. Crossdisciplinarity is the optimal convergence modality that may be carried out in traditional CoP disciplinary settings at a reasonable cost. The modality is quite differential and does not call for, or result into, a paradigmatic shift or revolutionary disciplinary changes, which may help taming down opposition from conservative voices anywhere they might come from. Changes it brings about are yet systemic and significant as they may affect various paradigmatic aspects of any given discipline. Through creative collaboration, this modality removes all paradigmatic and practical barriers among disciplines, bridges disciplinary divides, and brings about original, systemic disciplinary and practical daily life outcomes that could not be brought about under any of the previous three conservative modalities. Transdisciplinarity is the ultimate convergence modality that surpasses by far all other modalities. Like crossdisciplinarity, it fosters non-conservative, long-term collaboration among CoPs and brings about original outcomes in disciplinary and daily life respects. However, it goes a leap ahead the latter modality by not simply linking existing disciplines in different realms, but by going outside and beyond disciplinary boundaries altogether to transcend without giving away existing disciplines. As such, transdisciplinarity differs from crossdisciplinarity and other modalities in the following respects: 1. Participants from different realms (CoPs and fields) work together all along under one common transcendent framework that integrates premises from the paradigms of implicated disciplines and adds new premises that transcend those paradigms. 2. Participants rely mutually on their disciplines in innovative ways that involve reiterative, critical evaluation and insightful regulation of various disciplinary premises and components, leading to completely novel premises and components that do not necessarily relate to existing ones and that bring about a novel output that is completely original in most if not all respects. 3. The entire experience is continuously extrapolated in all systemic perspectives to bring about innovative products leading possibly to the creation of an entirely new discipline that may cut across existing fields and realms or lay the ground for a completely new field. Transdisciplinarity is a convergence modality that transcends existing disciplines (whence the trans- prefix in its name) in all foundational and practical respects in order to bring about novel and unprecedented outcomes that could not be conceived or even foreseen in the confinements of existing disciplines, whether separated or integrated. When all other modalities, and especially crossdisciplinarity, fail to meet the ends set for collective work, transdisciplinarity becomes the only resort. This is especially the case when faced with unprecedented issues with no known ways out, like a totally new disease that has not been confronted before in any form and for which no treatment is available or may be conceived in the confinements of existing paradigms and knowledge in health sciences.

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Transdisciplinarity requires significant compromises in traditional CoP disciplinary settings. Though differential and leaving enough room for traditional disciplines to coexist on distinct territories, it does not totally preserve the integrity of such disciplines, and it leads to conceiving new knowledge outside their confinements. This may, and already did, raise numerous eyebrows and confrontation with significant opposition from conservative academics and other professionals on all fronts. However, transdisciplinarity is yet the most productive and innovative convergence modality that opens the door to seeing the world with new paradigmatic lenses without denying the merits of existing disciplines. As such, it allows tackling any issue in innovative and not just creative or conventional ways, and raising new issues that cannot be handled or even conceived with other modalities, and especially not with traditional segregated disciplines. The digital revolution of our era, the breakthroughs in neuroscience, especially cognitive neuroscience, which education may benefit of most, and the many new careers that keep popping up in the job market and that could not have been foreseen or even imagined just a decade ago, are all compelling testimonies in favor of crossdisciplinarity and, especially, transdisciplinarity. Many universities and enterprises are already there or heading this way. Others, especially in education, have no choice but to shoot for transdisciplinarity, or at least crossdisciplinarity, and work urgently to get there progressively, beginning with the modality that suits them best. Convergence of traditionally distinct disciplines is an utmost necessity in education to empower students for self-fulfillment and for meeting the realities of our era, especially in the job market. To be realistic and affordable given the still prevalent discipline-based academia and educational systems, convergence education can only be differential, and to be feasible and efficient, it would better be systemic (Fig. 5.1). As mentioned above, differential convergence education (DCE) is not about integrated curricula and not about giving away totally discipline-based or disciplinary education at any level. The latter education will always be needed, and so will discipline-based educational research to enhance the quality of student learning, especially to bring coherence of student knowledge within and across disciplines. However, and among many other drawbacks, conventional disciplinary curricula are

Fig. 5.1 Convergence of disciplines, especially from different fields, optimized in education through systemic differential lenses

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overwhelmed with academic knowledge that students can live without in their daily life and the workplace, and they concentrate on epistemic and reproductive routine knowledge to the detriment of productive and innovative procedural knowledge in academia. Disciplinary curricula can become more efficient and more appealing to students, and can better meet the realities of the twenty-first century if they are revamped in at least three respects. First, they need to trim academic knowledge in accordance with the “less is more” philosophy, and concentrate more on “how” students should learn things meaningfully and deploy their knowledge efficiently and creatively in practical situations, than on “what” to assimilate by rote from disciplinary knowledge. Second, they need to concentrate more on what helps bridging disciplinary divides than on what sets disciplines apart, and help students figure out common conceptual and procedural patterns and develop systematic ways for transfer of knowledge within and across disciplines. Third, they need to engage students in experiential learning experiences that help them develop, in addition to other life related knowledge and competencies, the skills and dispositions of collaborative teamwork and of systematic and constructive engagement with others and the ecosystem. A systemic perspective on individual disciplines can significantly help in this direction. It can especially help students realize and appreciate common conceptual and procedural patterns in different disciplines, transfer knowledge systematically within and across disciplines, and infuse order in their memories, efficiency in knowledge retrieval, and innovation (creativity and invention) in handling any situation (Halloun, 2017, 2019). Most importantly, such a systemic perspective allows for differential convergence education (DCE) to take place feasibly with the modality that suits best any school and educational system (Table 5.1), and with the ultimate aim to design, implement, and constantly evaluate and regulate, under systemic pedagogical frameworks, crossdisciplinary curricula at the secondary and early tertiary education (Fig. 5.2), and transdisciplinary curricula at higher levels. Differential convergence can even take place in the context of traditional disciplinary education, and concerned authorities can feasibly accommodate it in their curricula, especially if they follow a systemic approach. Individual schools must then have some leeway in this respect. Depending on the situation in each school, or school district, teachers and administrators can choose the modality and implementation strategy that suit them best at any level. They may choose to begin by allocating a certain number of weekly periods to convergence projects managed collectively by concerned teachers, or by including one course or more in their weekly schedule entirely dedicated to differential convergence. Guidelines for DCE projects are provided elsewhere (Halloun, 2020c). Educators may also choose a mix of both strategies, applying one in a given cycle, and the other in another cycle. Ultimately, it would be better for a school to reach a point where weekly courses can be entirely dedicated to systemic DCE.

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Fig. 5.2 Crossdisciplinary curriculum in systemic DCE. Differential convergence is established among many disciplines through didactic transposition that organizes target knowledge in each discipline aroung a limited number of powerful systems and systemic competencies, benefits from common paradigmatic disciplinary aspects, and builds bridges (dashed arrows) among disciplines for mutual adaptation of their distinctive features. Teachers mediate students’ development of crossdisciplinary knowledge in praxis-immersive experiential learning ecology under local and global influences as indicated in Table 1.2 and Fig. 1.6

5.5 Scope and Sequence Systemic curricula, whether disciplinary or convergence curricula, mandate systemic programs of study revolving around conceptual systems and systemic endeavors (Figs. 1.3 and 1.4) that are drawn and adapted from a particular CoP paradigm (disciplinary curricula) or from a number of paradigms pertaining to different CoPs (differential convergence curricula as in Fig. 5.2) and that students are expected to benefit of for the purpose of developing systemic competencies that would eventually turn into habits of life in their 4P profiles. Up to advanced levels of tertiary education, students can be expected to develop only certain but not all systems and processes shared by members of a given CoP (or number of CoPs), and only to a certain level of understanding and achievement. CoP systems and processes need

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197

then to be adequately chosen and sequenced in terms of students’ potentials at a given educational level, and they need to undergo proper “didactic transposition”, i.e., pedagogical transformation and cognitive adaptation that brings them down to students’ level while preserving and demonstrating their rigor and power in the context of professional paradigms (Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6). Conceptual systems are at the center of middle-out cognitive hierarchy between individual conceptions (concepts, laws, principles, and other relationships among concepts) on the one hand, and conceptual patterns and the big paradigmatic picture of a given CoP, on the other (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). As such, they allow meaningful understanding of conceptions by conceiving them, delimiting their scope, and relating them coherently to each other for the prime purpose of system construction and deployment by way of systemic endeavors and competencies. Systemic programs of study, and thus textbook chapters, are then structured not around individual conceptions and procedures, but around carefully chosen systems that allow, under the “less is more” maxim, in-depth development of the most powerful and generic conceptions and systemic processes for creating a coherent paradigmatic picture of a given subjectmatter and specific and generic competencies that students can take advantage of in everyday life and sustain in their systemic 4P profiles. Systems and systemic processes and competencies are chosen, delimited, and transposed in accordance with students’ cognitive and behavioral potentials at given age and school level. Students develop them within a given course, and across a series of related courses, in a sequence that matches those growing potentials and that comes in line with the paradigmatic complexity of each system and the subsequent cognitive demands it imposes for learning it meaningfully and developing the needed systemic processes and competencies. Each system is developed during a given learning cycle or series of cycles (Sect. 4.4) in ways to gradually widen its scope and develop its constitution and performance in a helicoidal progression (Fig. 3.6). System development may then begin with a subsidiary system. A subsidiary system is a particular instance of the target system that refers or applies to particular entities or events in the system domain that students are familiar with or that they can relate to more readily than other entities or events, and that constitutes a significant and necessary pedagogical vehicle for developing the target system. For example, students may develop conceptions and processes of narrative texts pertaining to various dimensions of Table 1.3, particularly the constitution and performance dimensions, beginning with the factual investigation of a particular situation they heard about in the news, and based on some investigative reports available in the media. Students may then be asked to write their own factual report about that particular situation, and, subsequently perhaps, their own inferential and judgmental reports about it (Fig. 1.4). These reports would constitute subsidiary instances of narrative texts, instances pertaining to a situation that students are, or will come to be, familiar with. Various conceptual systems that make the object of any curriculum can be classified into clusters of increasing paradigmatic and cognitive complexity, and programs of study can then be structured and sequenced accordingly for any pedagogical purpose, including course syllabi, textbooks authoring, learning, and teaching. At

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the lower end of the spectrum (easiest but most crucial) is the cluster of core systems that are most critical for students to develop meaningful understanding of all materials in a given course and enough competence to start gradually relying more on themselves than on teacher (and other learning agents) in learning other systems. At the upper end of the spectrum is the cluster of emergent systems that students may be anticipated to develop creatively and almost independently of the teacher, should they have developed all other systems meaningfully. A number of thresholds may thus be defined from both paradigmatic and cognitive perspectives to delineate the boundaries between various clusters of conceptual systems (and sometimes between individual systems) in any program of study, whether pertaining to a single discipline or a number of disciplines in a convergence curriculum. Students may then be expected to readily cross a given threshold only if they have developed meaningfully all systems in the cluster falling below this threshold. Like all program materials, thresholds are set based on: (a) the inherent ontological complexity in the corresponding CoP paradigm of systems in each cluster, and (b) the cognitive demands for constructing and deploying the systems in appropriate respects at given age and school level. The most critical of these thresholds are the “basic threshold” and the “mastery threshold” respectively at the lower end and upper end of a spectrum of system clusters (Fig. 5.3). The basic threshold separates core systems from fundamental systems (and related competencies), while the mastery threshold separates the latter from emergent systems. Other thresholds may of course be delineated within fundamental systems to break them into two or more clusters. In any course, core conceptual systems are the ones that allow students to develop to a certain satisfactory level of understanding the basic and most critical conceptions and processes, along with specific competencies, which the curriculum is about. Fundamental systems are more complex systems in the context of which students reinforce, and widen the scope of, core conceptions and processes, and derive from them new conceptions and processes on the road toward consolidating specific competencies and developing generic competencies. Emergent systems may emerge creatively from the composition of two or more core or fundamental systems, or may be entirely new and more complex systems, thus requiring the development of generic more than specific competencies. A student needs to meaningfully develop the entire set of core systems before s/he can proceed to fundamental systems. Any flaw in developing any conception or process in the core cluster prevents the student from crossing the basic threshold, and thus from developing fundamental systems meaningfully. Students normally require considerable learning mediation in order to reach such threshold, especially at the epistemic level. Once students cross the basic threshold, teacher and other learning agents can gradually retreat from the picture until students cross the mastery threshold beyond which they should be capable of developing the more complex emergent systems with the least, but most creatively oriented mediation ever. To put thresholds and subsidiary systems together into perspective, let us take for example the case of Newtonian theory in classical mechanics. Two conceptual systems (scientific models), the “free particle” model and the “uniformly accelerated

5.5 Scope and Sequence

199

Fig. 5.3 Critical thresholds in a systemic program of study

particle” model, are most crucial for students to develop all Newtonian conceptions of translational motion, from state, kinematical concepts to Newton’s laws of dynamics, and related processes (Halloun, 2001a, 2004/6, 2007). The first model is a conceptual system that represents physical objects moving with constant velocity (constant speed in a straight line) under no net external force. The second model is a conceptual system that represents physical objects moving with constant acceleration, i.e., with a velocity that varies with constant increments during equal time intervals. The two models make up the core cluster in any classical mechanics course. Once students meaningfully understand all Newtonian conceptions and processes these two systems require, they reach the basic threshold and they become ready to develop more complex particle models (say the particle in uniform circular motion and the simple harmonic oscillator) and to gradually evolve towards the mastery threshold and beyond. The uniformly accelerated particle model is particularly important for developing fundamental concepts like acceleration, force, work, and energy, that are crucial along with related physical and mathematical processes to develop all particle models of classical mechanics. The model in question represents all translational motion of physical objects that are usually grouped in three categories in introductory physics courses, and each category may be introduced with a subsidiary model representing objects released or thrown in particular ways near the surface of the Earth as indicated

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in Table 5.2 and shown in Fig. 5.4. The three categories are distinguished based on the initial conditions of motion (model scope), and more specifically, the relative directions of two vectorial concepts: (a) the velocity (vo ) of a particle-like object of constant mass at the instant one begins to explore the translational motion of the object, and (b) the net constant force (F) exerted on the object by outside agents throughout its translation. As mentioned above, thresholds may sometimes be set between individual systems rather than clusters of systems. For instance, in some elementary physics courses, the content pertaining to Newtonian theory of mechanics may be limited to two systems: the free particle model and the uniformly accelerated particle model. The core cluster of the course would then consist of the free particle model and the instance with subsidiary model S1 in Table 5.2 and Fig. 5.4 representing physical objects that accelerate linearly in one specific direction like in free fall. The fundamental cluster would then consist only of the instance with subsidiary model S2 representing physical objects that accelerate linearly but that reverse direction along the same line, and the emergent cluster, of the single instance with subsidiary model S3 representing physical objects in parabolic motion on Earth or in space. In all three clusters, the same Newtonian conceptions and processes apply, but with increasing complexity, and some other ones are added to complement the picture as we gradually move Table 5.2 Subsidiary models of the uniformly accelerated particle model in the Newtonian theory of mechanics Initial conditions of motiona

Trajectory

Speed

Subsidiary model

vo and F are parallel (θ = 0)

Linear

Constantly increasing

S1: Particle in free fall

vo and F are opposite to each other (θ = π)

Linear

Constantly decreasing until S2: Particle thrown it becomes zero at which vertically upwards near instant the object turns the Earth surface back to move with increasing speed in the opposite direction along the same line of launch

vo and F make an arbitrary angle θ different from zero and π

Parabolic

Constantly increasing if θ is right or acute; constantly decreasing, if θ is obtuse, until it reaches a minimum non-zero value at the top of the parabola at which instant the speed starts increasing

a

S3: Particle thrown at an arbitrary angle with the vertical different from zero and π

vo is the initial velocity of a particle-like object at the instant one begins to explore motion F is the net constant force exerted on the object of constant mass throughout its motion θ is the angle (vo , F) between vo and F. Illustration in Fig. 5.4

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Fig. 5.4 Trajectories of a uniformly accelerated particle (thick, long arrows) determined by the relative direction of its initial velocity, vo , and the net constant force F exerted on the particle by external agents

from the core models to the emergent model. The latter model “emerges” from the superposition of the free particle model and, depending on the initial conditions of motion, the uniformly accelerated particle model with either subsidiary system S1 (θ = π/2) or S2 (otherwise).

5.6 Praxis Experiential learning always involves transaction with objects of learning (O/Ls), whether the transaction is concrete with physical O/Ls or abstract with conceptual O/Ls, and whether it takes place directly with physical O/Ls or indirectly, say, through physical models, videos, or photos of O/Ls, or through computer simulations. Abstract transactions may be somewhat concretized by relating conceptual O/Ls to physical situations (e.g., relating derivatives in mathematics to the change of state of physical objects, like in the case of acceleration that measures the change of velocity in time), and/or by depicting them with geometric diagrams and graphical representations. Experiential learning is most efficient when carried out insightfully and collectively with other people (classmates and master learning agents) while benefiting the most of all human and physical resources in the learning ecology (Fig. 4.3). It is most meaningful and rewarding when students engage in it for testing and reifying their own ideas about life-related matters that they deem worth investing their effort in rather than carrying out course prescribed transactions, and when they subsequently put what they learn into practice for developing conceptual and physical processes and products to come up with innovative answers and solutions to these matters. Such meaningful and satisfactory experience comes about best through praxis. Praxis in CoPs is about bringing theory and practice together in order to evaluate and regulate their professional paradigms, and particularly to bring episteme and methodology in consonance with each other, and to ensure that various elements

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of the epistemic corpus (theory or theories) and related processes and output (practice) viably correspond to what the theory is about in the real world and fulfill the function set in the theory’s scope. For instance, in science, engineering, and technology, scientific models (conceptual systems) are validated by deploying them for investigating existing real world, physical systems, especially for describing, explaining, and predicting/postdicting system constitution and performance, controlling and changing such systems, and inventing all new ones (i.e., for serving innovative purposes and expanding the models’ scope). Should things work out properly in investigative and innovative practices, the models and the scientific theory to which they belong would be reinforced, and thus collectively “consolidated” in the concerned CoP paradigm. Otherwise, theory, models included, and/or practice would be regulated properly (Halloun, 2004/6, 2018b). The same goes when putting, say, an economic theory in practice, or when deploying a given style in the production of literary or artistic works for the general public. Praxis in education is meant to help students appreciate, and take advantage of, CoP professional paradigms in both theoretical and practical respects. To this end, experiential learning should come, whenever possible, as close as possible to CoP praxis and turn into what we call “education praxis”. Education praxis would then have two complementary aspects: praxis education and praxis for education. Praxis education is about learning how professionals engage in praxis within their own CoPs to bring their theory and practice into consonance with each other and continuously enhance them in the framework of their professional paradigms. Praxis for education serves to help students evaluate their own profiles, their own paradigms, and regulate them through insightfully to make them inherently coherent, consistent, and viable in theoretical and practical respects, and, especially, to bring them into consonance with professional paradigms. In both respects, education praxis needs to take place in authentic CoP settings, or related real world settings, including the job market, community service, or any other real life setting that students can directly relate to and that provides them with the opportunity to put what they learn about professional paradigms into practice within each paradigm natural scope, appreciate what these paradigms can offer at the personal and collective levels, and subsequently take full advantage of them whenever and wherever they fit in their daily lives. Insightful dialectics (Fig. 4.6) that should constantly take place in experiential learning now involve a fourth aspect or dimension, dialectics between professional paradigms and the real world just like professional praxis (Fig. 5.5). Education praxis (praxis for short hereafter) may take place during regular class hours and after school, on-campus and/or off-campus. Though it may be carried out under disciplinary education, it gains full significance under differential convergence education (DCE). Whatever the pedagogical framework might be, it should always bring about physical and/or conceptual products that carry added value to experiential learning and that students can directly benefit of, and benefit others from, in theoretical and practical respects. Products and processes that bring products about should well reflect what the corresponding paradigm(s) is (are) about, and, at an advanced

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Fig. 5.5 Insightful dialectics for education praxis

tertiary education level, they may even imply necessary changes in any paradigmatic aspect (Box 1.1) and/or the emergence of new epistemic and methodological components. Praxis may take place on-campus in dedicated makerspaces or in traditional facilities, like laboratories and computer, arts, or technology workshops, provided that these facilities be run with the spirit of makerspaces. A makerspace simulates an authentic CoP field of work, whether it pertains to a single CoP or a number of CoPs converging to work on issues of mutual interest (Table 5.1). It provides students with actual CoP tools and with the opportunity of working collectively, hands-on, mindson, to design and realize CoP conceptual and physical products following systemic rules and processes that characterize the community(ies) in question. Makerspaces are run by teachers and/or qualified technicians or mentors who treat students like apprentices in need to master the “rules and tools of the trade”, but especially to think outside the box, try out their own ideas, and produce things to the highest, and most reasonable, professional standards possible. As such, makerspaces are dedicated not only to praxis in the limited sense of bringing theory and practice into consonance, but to all sorts of productive and innovative experiential learning, particularly under DCE. When a school cannot afford it alone, a number of schools may share common makerspace(s) located within or outside their campuses. In addition to developing individual students’ competencies and bringing them self-satisfaction, what students produce in a makerspace should be of value and benefit to them in practical daily life, to their school(s), and/or to their own community. Praxis becomes most productive when it engages students from different schools and different educational levels, along with members from concerned CoPs. This may be best achieved when praxis takes place off-campus in actual CoP settings and facilities, and, if feasible, in dedicated makerspaces there. In the latter event, makerspaces may be open to the general public, and not only to school students, to exchange and try out some innovative ideas, which, as it has actually been sometimes the case, turn makerspaces into incubators of inventions and new business startups that are particularly successful when involving crossdisciplinarity and especially transdisciplinarity. Off-campus praxis requires that the curriculum be designed to

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accommodate for such endeavor, and that both school and the surrounding community be prepared to manage things as specified in the curriculum and under terms and conditions mutually agreed upon by the school and the hosting professional facilities. Mutual agreement should cover, among others, student physical and psychological safety and the way student praxis must be prescribed, followed up, ascertained, and regulated jointly by concerned teachers and CoP supervisors qualified to serve as mentors for students of specific age and background. Different off-campus praxis modalities can be envisaged based on curriculum provisions and school and community affordability. These may go from simple apprenticeship in pre-college education, to internship and entrepreneurship in tertiary education. In the latter respect, long-term cooperation can be envisaged between schools, CoPs, and concerned public and private organisms (authorities, agencies, enterprises, etc.) to have students involved in projects of immediate community impact, and of financial benefit to students and schools. Leading universities around the globe have actually embarked on entrepreneurial ventures that take praxis into new dimensions involving distant CoPs and other organisms, as well as a mix of cultures from different parts of the globe. In the latter respect, some universities and K-12 schools engage their students via internet with students, facilities, and mentors located in different countries. Other universities even require their students to spend semesters on university campuses abroad to get immersed in multicultural, professional experience. Whatever modality is adopted for on-campus or off-campus praxis, crucial issues need to be attended for that distinguish praxis, and particularly systemic praxis, from other forms of experiential learning. Among these issues: 1.

2.

3.

Proper praxis provisions need to be explicitly spelled out in a given curriculum, including time allocation in school schedules, and proper arrangements need to be institutionalized, perhaps in the form of formal consortia, among different schools (universities included) in a given community and between schools and CoPs in their vicinities in order to share human and material resources and jointly set up and manage on-campus and off-campus makerspaces (or regular CoP facilities). Praxis in systemic education (systemic praxis) is not restricted to bringing theory and practice together in harmony. It is further meant to bring added value to experiential learning to the extent that it should allow students to coordinate what they deem beneficial cognitive and behavioral knowledge, motivate them to think outside the box, and consolidate coordinated knowledge involving particularly long-range connections among a variety of brain regions concerned with different sorts of cognitive and behavioral knowledge (Sect. 3.6.1), all as part of specific and generic competencies that allow students to gradually evolve to productive and innovative levels (Table 4.4) that they cannot reach without the advocated praxis. Systemic praxis is always carried out in the framework of systemic CoP paradigms the episteme of which revolves around clearly defined conceptual systems located in the middle of the conceptual hierarchy between individual

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conceptions and the big theoretical picture, and the methodology of which is primarily about systemic endeavors (Figs. 1.3 and 1.4) that students benefit from, along with systemic episteme, to develop specific and generic systemic competencies necessary for success in daily life. Systemic praxis is most beneficial when carried out under convergence education (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2) that brings together traditionally distinct disciplines or CoP fields under the same framework (crossdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in Table 5.1) so as to let students give away all sorts of compartmentalized knowledge and bridge creatively different subject matters, as apparently remote as arts and sciences, in order carry out processes and bring about conceptual and physical products that could not be carried out and brought about without such bridging. Praxis should be carried out under the supervision of qualified mentors, teachers included, who are capable of setting proper learning ecologies (Fig. 4.3) for mediating students’ learning through well-designed learning cycles (Fig. 4.5) and helping them continuously evaluate and regulate their personal knowledge explicitly through all sorts of insightful dialectics (Figs. 4.6 and 5.5). Praxis is best fit to help students inhibit, or at least control, their negative emotions like fear, anxiety, and low self-esteem, by allowing them to become competent and confident enough to develop productive processes for coming up with valuable conceptual and physical products, and develop their entire modulatory systems (Sect. 3.8) constructively especially with regard to so-called social emotional learning (Sect. 3.8.3). This can be achieved in the context of activities designed explicitly to help students develop CoP constructive dispositions including readiness for cooperative and collaborative work with the spirit of partnership not competition, autonomy and self-confidence in making and carrying out personal and collective decisions, risk taking, open-mindedness for alternative ideas, putting self in the shoes of others and seeing things from different perspectives, and caring for others’ welfare through the engagement in projects that contribute to solving community problems and to community development. Themes to be considered for praxis projects need to be constantly revised in terms of their viability for the corresponding curriculum and for matching students’ interests and needs and new demands imposed by the job market and various other aspects of life, and, of course, in terms of their feasibility given the school conditions and availability of required materials and mentors on-campus and off-campus. Assessment of student performance and achievement on praxis projects need to be systematically carried out, jointly by concerned teachers and supervising mentors, using viable tools like project maps similar to item maps (Sect. 4.8.1) and assessment rubrics (Sect. 4.8.2) that allow charting, and steering in the right direction, student progress on these projects as part of their overall course and curriculum progress in terms of appropriate cognitive and behavioral benchmarks.

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Decision makers in both education and CoPs need to regularly come together in order to evaluate education praxis and regulate respective curricula and related CoP aspects so that student profiles better match the actual needs of the job market and the community at large, and college graduates be afforded smooth induction in the workplace and appropriate continuous professional development afterwards. 10. Different on-campus and off-campus makerspaces can significantly boost their productivity when they constantly exchange ideas and coordinate their efforts on joint ventures, particularly when it comes to long-term entrepreneurial modalities in tertiary education which all stakeholders, students and their schools included, can benefit of in financial and various other respects. For any on-campus or off-campus praxis modality to succeed and bring about significant added value to education, traditional curricula need to be transcended in all foundational and practical respects, and so should be traditional educational governance. Among other things, and as discussed later in this chapter, the demarcation lines need to be blurred, even removed altogether, among traditionally distinct academic disciplines and between general education and technical and vocational education (or career and technical education), and educational governance should take an explicitly systemic direction that involves not only educators and educationists, but various other stakeholders concerned with CoP praxis and community and nation development (Sect. 5.8). All in all, praxis is needed to optimize meaningful, experiential learning and to viably connect curricula of all levels, especially in secondary and tertiary education, to the realities of the time, whether in the job market or any other practical aspect of life. These ends can be best achieved when praxis is carried out in the context of systemic curricula under DCE. With crossdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as ultimate convergence modalities, systemic, praxis-immersive, convergence education (SPICE) requires that traditional education be transcended in many respects as already discussed. In particular SPICE requires that the following measures be taken (Fig. 5.6):

Fig. 5.6 Systemic, praxis-immersive, convergence education (SPICE)

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1. Convergence should take place with systemic lenses not only among general education (GE) disciplines and fields, or independently among technical and vocational education (or career and technical education, CTE) disciplines, but most importantly among a mix of traditional GE and CTE disciplines so as to blur, even remove altogether, the boundaries between GE and CTE. 2. Convergence should also take place systemically between paradigms that govern research and entrepreneurship as structured and practiced in academia and other sectors of society (humanitarian, artistic, social, economic, industrial, etc.), and professionals from all sectors should come on board of educational systems as true stakeholders (Sect. 5.8) within and beyond the scope of praxis and makerspaces. 3. SPICE is most meaningful and productive (and ultimately most innovative) when it brings together learners and mentors from different communities and different cultures, even if only remotely via internet, so that they may benefit from each other customs and daily life experiences, and open up wider horizons for thinking outside the box.

5.7 Technology Educational technology, and particularly digital technology, is commonly developed by commercial companies in the context of their own pedagogical frameworks, if any, mostly for one-size fits all curricula. Teachers and students then “import” affordable technology into their schools and homes as add-ons to increase the efficiency of learning and instruction more in time and effort than in quality, especially not with regard to meaningful learning. That is why, the value of educational technology has been often debated in the literature, and particularly why mixed results keep being reported in educational research, a good proportion of which showing the failure of educational technology to result in, or to boost, meaningful learning. For instance, flipping a digital textbook on a screen can be no better, if not worse, than flipping a paper textbook with regard to understanding the same content offered in soft and hard forms. Carrying out a given laboratory experiment in science with computerized data collection and analysis equipment does not lead to better understanding of what the experiment is about than when carried out with traditional equipment. Online learning has often failed to even be as efficient as traditional face-to-face instruction at all educational levels, especially as revealed during the Corona virus pandemic that plagued the world beginning in late 2019. In short, add-on technology cannot enhance learning, especially not when curricula are designed and implemented under traditional pedagogical frameworks without consideration to the ten points mentioned in Sect. 5.2. Educational technology needs to be significantly reconsidered in both foundational and practical respects. At the foundational level, technology needs to be designed under the same pedagogical framework as the curriculum it is meant to serve, or at least designed to be readily and efficiently incorporated in that curriculum

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under its own framework. The framework needs then to include premises for the development and deployment of various educational tools, particularly digital devices and educational software, and the curriculum constitution and performance should also account explicitly for the use of appropriate hard and soft tools. Digital devices and other technological means should be considered only to bring added value that cannot come about without such means, particularly with respect to meaningful learning. Notwithstanding instances with detrimental impact, such devices have already proven their value in gaming where they managed to attract and sustain players’ interest and attention at all ages, and to help them develop coordinated rational and sensorimotor skills in unique ways. Educationists and educators need to follow the lead of constructive game technology to take full advantage of what computers and various digital devices can offer to bring meaningful experiential learning to new levels. To this end, and among other things, the following issues need also to be accounted for in developing and deploying educational technology (technology, for short hereafter), particularly digital devices (hardware and software included), whether the latter are stand-alone devices or part of other technological equipment: 1.

2.

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Systemic curricula require that technology be designed, developed, used, and constantly evaluated and regulated in conformity and along with the pedagogical framework of the corresponding curriculum. Technology should then help reveal the systemic nature of any disciplinary content and process knowledge that the curriculum is about explicitly in the context of concerned professional paradigm(s). Technology should take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), automation, and all sorts of interactive hardware and software to help individual students discover their cognitive and behavioral potentials and to adapt any learning task, assessment included, to such potentials. It should then help sustaining individual students’ development of systemic competencies and profiles along viable adaptive evolution tracks leading them ultimately to the production and innovation stages of development (Table 4.4). Technology should also help students figure out “the rules of the game” in non-prescriptive systemic activities rather than following blind trial and error tactics, and thus provide each student with automated, prompt, adaptive, individualized feedback for insightful knowledge regulation. Technology, along with, and in the context of, praxis, should help translate neuroscience and cognitive research findings into practical, experiential pedagogy that significantly enhances coordination of students’ rational and sensorimotor skills and takes full advantage of, and develop their PFC executive functions (Sect. 3.5.1). It should also facilitate the meaningful consolidation of students’ systemic episteme, processes, and competencies through activities that require a proper mix of short- and long-range connections among a variety of brain regions concerned with concrete and abstract thinking, and help students realize and appreciate the role of patterns and patterning in CoP paradigms and in how their own minds and brains are and operate.

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Technology should build explicitly on student modulatory systems (Sect. 3.8), help developing these systems constructively, especially in the context of praxis, and be designed to captivate and sustain users’ attention and motivation through reasonably challenging activities of gradually increasing cognitive and behavioral demands that are within students’ potentials. Activities should also be designed to keep students in conscious control of their learning processes so as to help them, with timely feedback for insightful self-regulation, develop efficacious metacognitive skills and dispositions (Sect. 3.9) that they can take advantage of in any aspect and at any stage of life. 5. Online learning and instruction, no matter to what extent it is being used, should be carefully designed and deployed under particular cognitive and pedagogical premises that differ from those set for face-to-face learning and instruction. Lessons gained worldwide in this respect during the aforementioned Corona virus pandemic should well direct the way in this respect. 6. Teachers and students should be actively represented in all phases of technology development, from initial conception to regulation based on the results of deployment in experiential learning, praxis included, so as to ensure that developed tools actually meet student and teacher interests and potentials, and that they actually enhance meaningful learning and its mediation in ways that cannot be made possible without the use of technology. 7. Teachers, school supervisors, course coordinators, and parents should be afforded user-friendly digital platforms that allow them to constantly monitor the progress of individual students in terms of well-defined profile benchmarks along flexible, helicoidal, not linear, learning progression tracks (Fig. 3.6). Platforms should also help all stakeholders exchange ideas on how to keep each student on track, and come to informed and viable decisions regarding each stakeholder role in ensuring that the student develops her/his systemic 4P profile as anticipated. 8. Students, teachers, and all other stakeholders should be well trained to take full advantage of technology, and especially to bridge any gap between teachers and students who are sometimes well ahead of their teachers when it comes to digital literacy. 9. Interactive digital platforms should be at the disposal of teachers, praxis mentors, coordinators, and supervisors, within the same school and across different schools, teacher training institutions and universities included, to help them share ideas and exchange best practices for mediating meaningful learning particularly under SPICE. Platforms may be part of and/or complement professional learning communities and other viable institutions and programs of continuous professional development. 10. Technology should bring affordable added value to experiential meaningful learning and its mediation, particularly by allowing students to come up with self-fulfilling conceptual and physical processes and products that they and others at school and in the community can take advantage of and that bring student competencies up to unmatched productive and innovative levels. Most importantly, technology should not intimidate any user, should not impose any

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burden or obstacle on all those concerned, and should not infringe on any personal or collective right, particularly with respect to equity, privacy, and dignity of individuals and communities.

5.8 Educational Systems Systemic education, and particularly when of DCE and ultimately SPICE nature, requires transcendence not only of curricula and related structural and practical matters. It requires above all transcendence of traditional top-down, command and control governance and practices of educational systems that go back to the rise of assembly lines in industry about a century ago. These outdated lines required workers to be educated and trained to accomplish mechanically certain narrow tasks designed and controlled down to the last, minute details by the highest authority in any industry. Assembly lines paradigms no longer allow people to cope with the realities of the twenty-first century in industry and everywhere else in society, and they should then be abandoned altogether especially in education. Educational systems need instead to be structured following true systemic premises and operated under a true systemic governance so as to allow all its members, from students to teachers and all other stakeholders, to interact efficiently and evolve individually and collectively for continuous profile and community development. Addressing the makeup and governance of educational systems and the reform they need to undergo in most parts of the world in order to meet the realities of the twenty-first century is beyond the scope of this work. However, some issues are critical for these systems to serve systemic education as called for in this work. These issues, going from the necessary paradigm shift to a culture of excellence that should prevail across all organs of an educational system, are concisely addressed in the following. But first, and in order to put our brief discussion of these issues into perspective, let us outline what an educational system may look like in accordance with our systemic schema (Fig. 1.1), whether it is a local system pertaining to a given community, district, or set of such entities, or a national system covering an entire country. Whether of local or national domain, an educational system should be an open, adaptive, dynamic system (Sect. 1.2.2) characterized as follows: Framework consisting of systemic tenets and principles that govern the system constitution and performance and that draw, among others, on: (a) systemic governance paradigms, (b) a national vision and related policies for education and development and for how the two relate to each other and affect each other, (c) what citizenship and residency in the respective country entail in all respects, including contributions to sustainable development and peace at the local, national, and global levels, (d) the country’s constitution and universal charts it subscribes to, particularly in relation to individual and collective human rights and values and the preservation of the local and global ecosystem, (e) local culture(s) and heritage,

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and (f) universal best practices in educational governance, learning, and teaching, as demonstrated in reliable international comparative studies. Scope, with: Domain consisting of: (a) educational institutions within the constituency that the system serves, and (b) curricula implemented in these institutions, all within the limits of the mandate set for the system in its incorporation bylaws. Function consisting of what is sometimes called a mission and that is primarily about: (a) turning students into well-rounded global citizens who live with and for a strong national identity, and who are empowered with systemic 4P profiles for self-fulfillment, excellence in life, and significant contributions to sustainable development in accordance with the national vision mentioned above, as well as about (b) sustaining dignifying and propitious working conditions for all those working in the system to fulfill that mission to the highest standards possible. Constitution, with: Composition consisting: (a) at the human level, of all students in the institutions falling in the domain of the educational system, along with teachers and all other people, agencies and organisms concerned with running these institutions, all of whom and which distributed into subsystems or system organs (i.e., public and private authorities and organisms directly involved in the operations of the system), and (b) at the physical level, of material resources and facilities, school campuses included, put at the disposal of all mentioned people and organs, along with (c) teacher and administrator pre-service and in-service training institutions (which are sometimes considered and treated not as inherent system organs but as outside agents in the local environment). Endo-structure including local and national laws and regulations that govern the relationships among all people and organs in the human composition, as individuals and groups (Fig. 1.6 and Table 1.2), among all entities in the physical composition, and between human and physical constituents. Local environment consisting of local (e.g., district) and national public and private organisms in various non-educational sectors of society which students may eventually serve and work in, and that are concerned with: (a) specifying student profiles to meet local and global realities of the time, and with (b) providing necessary support and resources to design and implement curricula that help students develop such profiles. Concerned organisms (environment agents, as opposed to composition organs) also include parents’ associations, educational research centers, publishers and developers of educational materials, and teacher syndicates. Global environment consisting of: (a) international organizations concerned with teacher and administrator professional development and with setting education standards and policies at the global scale, and (b) international agencies, movements, and trends that affect daily life and local development.

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Exo-structure including all charts and bylaws that govern the relationships between the system, in its organs and its entirety, and the local and global environments in their agents and the entirety of each environment. Performance, specifying how various pedagogical and administrative processes/operations should be carried out within individual subsystems or system organs and coordinated among all organs in accordance with well-defined norms, rules, and guidelines in order to fulfill the educational system vision and mission, bring about students with desired systemic profiles, ensure proper working conditions and continuous professional development of teachers and all other people working in various subsystems, and sustain continuously evolving system in all aspects and respects.

5.8.1 Paradigm Shift The twenty-first century has been marked by a remarkable fluidity in the job market and various other aspects of life that traditional educational systems could not keep up with. Workplace requirements keep changing in unprecedented ways to the extent of forcing increasingly more people to change career more than once in their lives. Unparallel challenges keep popping up with global repercussions that no country seems prepared to cope with, like in the case of the Corona virus pandemic and of numerous conflicts between rival groups and countries. These and other new realities of the century, good and bad, have demonstrated that a paradigm shift is required in education at large. New concepts should then be considered for educational system, school, and university; for pedagogy, learning, and teaching; for student, instructor, and administrator; for grade levels, student and teacher certification and diplomas, and university majors and degrees; for what education tracks and streams, curricula, and courses should be about and how they should relate to one another; and virtually for every other aspect of education (Halloun, 2016a, 2018a). In particular, traditional education need to be transcended in the following respects: 1. Disciplinary or discipline-focused, show and tell education should make way for systemic, profile-focused, differential convergence education that fosters experiential, hands-on, minds-on, coordinated development of cognitive and behavioral knowledge related to students’ daily lives and prospective careers, and particularly the development of systemic generic competencies that blend knowledge from different disciplines so as to help students meet the realities of the century in the most meaningful and innovative ways possible. 2. Prevalent segregation among disciplines within and between general education (GE) and technical and vocational education (TVE, or career and technical education, CTE) should make way for systemic convergence that permeates boundaries among disciplines and educational sectors, and that would preferably bring about a new concept of universal education that removes these boundaries altogether.

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3. Common disconnect and disparities among educational systems, among educational institutions within the same system, and often among curricula and courses within and across different educational levels, particularly between secondary and tertiary education, should make way for across the board connectivity, consonance, and relative stability that allow smooth mobility within and across systems, and especially smooth transition of students across grades and educational levels. 4. Careers fluidity and changing daily life realities require that education: (a) pays significantly more attention to helping students “how” to learn and empowering them for lifelong learning and cognitive and behavioral plasticity that allows them to feasibly adapt to unforeseeable changes and challenges, and (b) opens up multiple pathways to future careers that may take the form of multiple crossdisciplinary streams in secondary education and ensuing transdisciplinary majors in tertiary education where short-program certificates need to be considered as part of pre-service career education, adult education, and in-service continuous professional development (CPD). 5. Informed and judicious decisions across the board in an educational system require that stakeholders from GE, TVE, academia, and all sectors of society take part in decision making and in monitoring the performance of the system for continuous evaluation and regulation (Fig. 1.3), and particularly in fostering praxis in secondary and tertiary education, ultimately as part of systemic, praxisimmersive, convergence education (SPICE).

5.8.2 Middle-Out Systemic Governance An educational system, like any enterprise in the twenty-first century, cannot operate under a top-down authoritative governance whereby the highest authority in the system, e.g., a ministry of education in centralized educational systems or a district authority in decentralized systems, comprehensively dictates curricula on various educational institutions along with various policies and routine operations on these and other subsystems or system organs. For an educational system to fulfill its function properly as defined above in this section, its organs and members of any organ should constantly interact and work together under a middle-out systemic governance (Fig. 5.7) that fosters power sharing with distributed responsibility that rises above simple accountability among all organs in the system and within organ constituency. An educational system should be a dynamic, open, adaptive system as mentioned above. Every subsystem or system organ affects the system in its entirety like it is affected by other organs in the system, and, similarly, every person in a given organ affects the entire organ and is affected by other people in the organ, whether the organ is a school, any other educational or training institution, or any agency or other organism in the system. Furthermore, the system in its entirety affects and is affected by its local environment consisting of various non-educational authorities and various sectors in its immediate society, and is also affected by and may affect other organisms in its global environment (Fig. 1.6 and Table 1.2). The system performance should

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Fig. 5.7 Middle-out systemic governance in education

be constantly monitored, and all four schematic dimensions (Sect. 1.2) of the system evaluated and insightfully regulated as indicated in Fig. 1.3 in terms of the system viability to serve its mission according to its vision, to adapt mission and entire system to emerging new realities, and to continuously optimize its synergetic operations and outcomes (Sect. 1.4.4). Insightful regulation and adaptation, and subsequent system evolution, must then be intrinsically motivated and undertaken within each organ interactively, and almost autonomously through self-regulatory processes like homeostasis and autopoiesis (Sect. 1.4.3), not externally imposed through top-down command and control. All these aspects and more must be acknowledged and duly accounted for and managed in a systemic governance that affords every organ and every person in any organ enough power, authority, and leeway to share and realize productive and innovative ideas, make informed decisions and plan and carry out their individual and collective operations autonomously, and assume their respective responsibility to the fullest based on their actual competence and what they can actually contribute to the system vision and mission. Reliable comparative international studies (e.g., McKinsey and NCEE reports, authored respectively by Mourshed et al., 2010, and by Tucker, 2019) continue to demonstrate that educational systems perform best when individual schools, even individual teachers, are afforded a high margin of freedom in making certain decisions regarding their curricula and daily operations, and when they are held accountable toward local not national educational authorities. For, teachers and schools know

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best their students and how to take care of them, and local authorities know best their communities and how to cater to their needs. This of course suppose that informed decisions be made by competent people at all levels, and that various actors and decision makers work in tandem with mutual trust, and assume responsibility, and thus be held accountable, to the extent that their position and competence allow it. For an optimal system efficiency in these and other respects, an educational system would better be structured and operated under a middle-out systemic governance (Fig. 5.7). Local authorities would then constantly interact with schools falling under their mandates and with national authority(ies) so that each organ fulfills its parts of the educational system mission in harmony with other organs and within the limits of its own mandate. In this respect, local authorities do not operate as intermediaries between schools and national authority, but as agencies that translate national vision and mission into local policies and curricula that are adapted to the realities of the communities they serve. They do so in concert with their schools which they actively engage in all decisions, and with all other authorities and organs in the system so as to bring coherence and consistency to the operation of the system at large without supervening any school or any other system organ. Middle-out, systemic governance is thus established and proceeds through a sort of systemic differential convergence or differential collective engagement (whence another DCE referent!).

5.8.3 Partnerships Systemic governance should bear not only on organs (subsystems and people in each subsystem) that make up the composition of an educational system, but also on the relationships between organs and the system environment, particularly the local environment, so that all concerned parties work in partnership with each other as true stakeholders in the education of students of all educational levels. An educational system should then be structured and operated so that various organs and particularly various educational institutions within a given community work together with mutual trust, as partners not as competitors, and interact systematically with various sectors of society which students will eventually become part of. In this respect, K-12 schools should operate in partnership with local universities and local communities in order to adapt their curricula to the realities of these communities. Sufficient and reliable information would then be gathered about community needs and provided to students for proper choice of eventual majors and career. Meanwhile, realistic crossdisciplinary streams related to those needs would be offered in secondary education, to afford students smooth transition into tertiary education and eventually into the workplace. To the latter end, universities and other tertiary education institutions are particularly concerned with maintaining close relationships with various sectors of society in order to offer transdisciplinary majors and degrees these sectors actually need, along with the rest of the world, and entertain with them related entrepreneurial praxis.

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It has often been argued that education must be a public good not a marketable commodity, and that all youngsters of schooling age must be equitably afforded education to the highest quality standards possible (e.g., UNESCO, 2016). Quality education for all requires that all be for quality education. All sectors of society should be actively involved in supporting their educational systems as true partners and stakeholders, each sector within the limits of its capacity and its interest to have graduates sufficiently informed about its activities and perhaps interested enough to eventually make their career in this sector. All these stakeholders are thus concerned with specifying graduates’ profiles, and even in taking part in specifying and implementing certain aspects of curricula, like in the case of praxis, in order to ensure that students develop, from early age, generic systemic competencies that they can eventually develop into what is needed to succeed in any prospective career, and particularly lifelong learning habits that allow them to continuously adapt their competencies to future needs and evolve along with their careers.

5.8.4 Teaching Profession Teaching should be practiced as a true, worthy, licensed, and highly esteemed and compensated profession that attracts dedicated and qualified people. Pre-service PreK-12 teacher education institutions should then: (a) be operated under strict norms and standards set and strictly implemented in coordination between agencies concerned with educational quality and highly qualified faculty members and administrators, and (b) implement teacher education with clinical practice, i.e., systemic, praxis immersive, mind-and-brain-based curricula that empower prospective teachers to implement PreK-12 curricula they are being prepared for, ultimately SPICE curricula. More importantly, P-12 schools should offer attractive working conditions and incentives for continuous professional development (CPD) and active, research-based participation in the design and continuous evaluation and regulation of curriculum and various aspects of the educational system (à la action-research). Praxis that should be part of pre-service training of teachers and other educators is of two types, educational and technical, and should take place under the oversight of local educational authorities to ensure that it actually matches local school and community needs. Educational praxis is about clinical practice, i.e., internship in local schools involving insightful teaching for the mediation of meaningful learning under clear pedagogical frameworks and the mentorship of master teachers. Technical praxis is meant to empower teachers and school supervisors to engage their students in career-related praxis in adequate on-campus and off-campus makerspaces and other propitious settings. It should be designed and run in close cooperation with concerned enterprises and other organisms in society. Similar pre-service and in-service conditions should also apply to university professors whose doctoral degrees in their out-of-education specialties prepare them for induction in their respective CoPs but not for teaching at the university level. Like PreK-12 teaching, university teaching and engaging students in

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sponsored research projects outside course requirements, including entrepreneurial praxis, require special pre-service training as well as well as CPD while in-service. Many universities around the globe have already instituted special departments and programs for faculty pedagogical training upon hiring them and for CPD, as well as for advising faculty members on handling learning issues their students might face. These programs often include training and formal arrangements for professors to engage in formal action research for continuous evaluation and regulation of their courses, and to assist teachers in local schools to do the same. All other universities that have not instituted yet such programs need to do so urgently.

5.8.5 Exchange Platforms School teachers (and university professors), like all other professionals, need to continuously develop their profiles and to have access to timely support whenever needed. Such matters cannot be handled by individual schools alone. Local educational authorities and the educational system at large should institutionalize related programs and mechanisms that may be shared by various schools and engage concerned sectors in the society, including appropriate exchange platforms. Such platforms may entail physical venues for face-to-face interaction, and/or digital devices for remote, online communication. Real or virtual platforms may then facilitate appropriate exchanges through workshops, seminars, conferences, professional learning communities (PLC), or any other form of gathering. Whatever the form they might take, exchange platforms should be designed and operated for the prime purpose of helping instructors mediate experiential learning of their students, ultimately in the context of SPICE, to the highest quality standards possible. Platforms should also be meant to let other stakeholders stay constantly informed about what they need to know about their educational system and up to date on latest educational developments elsewhere around the world so that they can make informed decisions about the system. In all respects, and particularly with regard to learning, teaching, and pedagogy, platforms should allow for efficacious and efficient sharing of local and global patterns of success and excellence, including culturesensitive and a-cultural patterns. Platforms should especially help and encourage instructors think outside the box so that they can educate their students do the same, particularly in praxis. Best practices should always be exchanged as prescriptively as possible, and with sufficient reliable data about their feasibility, so that concerned instructors be convinced of their viability for themselves and for their students and do not hesitate considering them for their courses. Digital platforms can additionally serve a variety of purposes including: (a) monitoring teachers and all other school actors through periodic surveys and performance reports handled by local authorities in order to provide actors with timely and efficacious feedback whenever necessary; (b) monitoring, to the extent that data confidentiality allows it, student profiles evolution in relation to teaching and learning

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efficacy so that local authorities may intervene properly and/or suggest proper regulatory actions; (c) real-time exchange of ideas and best practices among all actors in different schools, particularly to resolve in timely manner any issue that may arise with any actor; (d) monitoring the performance of the entire educational system in relation to the vision and mission it serves; and (e) efficient dissemination of necessary data about local communities and various sectors of society at large so that informed and timely decisions can be made about continuous improvement of the educational system.

5.8.6 Student Certification Certification of student qualifications should always provide an authentic account of individual students’ profiles and profile evolution during a specific schooling period, whether the certification comes in the form of school transcripts or in the form of diplomas of any sort. Qualifications should then be reported not in the simple form of grades of any type, but against clear norms and standards, preferably in relation to systemic competencies, so that they may be objectively and uniformly interpreted by all concerned individuals, students and parents included, and organisms, whether upper level schools and universities or prospective employers. Grades of all sorts that are traditionally norm-referenced or that are even claimed to be criterion-referenced fail to indicate what knowledge a student assigned a particular grade has actually understood about exam or course material and what s/he can actually accomplish, conceptually and practically, with that knowledge. Documenting and reporting student knowledge at any given time and tracking knowledge evolution in intelligible form may have not been quite feasible or affordable with traditional means and methods a few decades ago. Digital technology has nowadays the potential to help educators and educationists turn things around and come up with revolutionary means and methods for fair, just, objective, and intelligible certification of student qualifications. Certification, especially when coming in the form of diplomas granted up to secondary education, should never be issued based on student achievement on a single set of high stakes or exit exams, and students should never be held solely accountable for their exam performance and sanctioned accordingly (Halloun, 2016a, 2016b). Notwithstanding the validity and reliability of prevalent high stakes and exit exams that are often questionable, and the unfairness of sanctioning students based on a single set of exams, student exam performance often reflects the quality of the completed curricula (teaching included) and of schools attended by students more than the students’ ability to bring themselves up to the required achievement level. Therefore, diplomas and all other forms of certification (including school transcripts and report cards) should not be based solely on exams of any sort, and should not come in the form of traditional norm-referenced letter or numerical grades. Furthermore, and for fair judgment, appropriate school credentials should be taken into consideration, whenever reliably available, when evaluating student qualifications.

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In this respect, when two students coming from different schools appear to have about the same qualifications at a given educational level, the one coming from the lower credentials school should be ranked higher than the other student and not the other way around. For, the former student must have had deployed more personal effort than the latter student who would have benefited from better school support than the former. That extra effort must be duly acknowledged and rewarded in ascertaining any qualification.

5.8.7 Culture of Excellence Empowering students for excellence in life requires that a culture of excellence prevail throughout the educational system—as well as throughout the surrounding communities—and that all stakeholders strive individually and collectively to continuously enhance the efficacy and efficiency of every component of the system. Instilling such a culture begins by enforcing high standards of performance at all levels of the system, and by providing proper incentives, including a diversified and fair reward system, for students, teachers, and all actors at school and in various system organs so that every organ and individual may convincingly value and adhere to such standards for their own good and progress. The bar may then be raised progressively in order to meet the continuously evolving realities of our era and defy any emerging hurdle or challenge. Among others, two conditions are particularly crucial for a culture of excellence to prevail first among students and then throughout society: (a) helping students evolve in all respects, at the proper age and educational levels, to the productive and subsequent innovative stages of development (Table 4.4), and (b) bringing students up to live whole-heartedly by a duly acclaimed value system as part of constantly evolving 4P profiles as discussed in Chap. 2. The first condition can best be realized through praxis that help students come up with and reify productive and innovative ideas, particularly by thinking outside the box. This condition should never be enforced by pushing for high norm-referenced grades that make certain students “rise above all others”, thus getting these others intimidated, and, along with parents, deluded by the merits of such grades. The second condition can also be realized through praxis, along with various forms of collective work and community engagement, by letting students appreciate their accomplishments for self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction, and for contributing to the welfare of others and to the development of their school and community. A culture of excellence prevailing in an educational system makes the system a truly open adaptive and dynamic system. The system stays in perpetual evolution in all aspects, from framework to curricula, and from organs to individuals, in order to continuously improve its mission, serve the national vision for education and development, and implement related policies to the highest quality standards possible. Informed decisions need to be made in this direction based on reliable individual and collective research, action-research included, that is carried out systematically by

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various competent actors and organisms and that takes full advantage of the exchange platforms mentioned above. The Corona virus pandemic of 2019 has shaken educational systems around the globe, like it did with various other sectors. However, and except for sporadic successful improvisations, the pandemic has demonstrated that these systems were often not made to face up to such crises and adapt themselves properly, just like they did not adapt yet properly to the digital revolution and other realities of the twenty-first century! Educational systems need to be operated with truly systemic governance in line with the above in order to enjoy systemic advantages discussed in Sect. 1.4, particularly synergy among individuals and among organs that brings about and sustains patterns of excellence throughout the system, and dynamic stability and efficiency to continuously adapt to the changing realities of the time. System efficiency can be enhanced regarding student outcomes by giving away altogether all forms of disciplinary segregation and didactic pedagogy, and by designing and implementing curricula at all levels under systemic, mind-and-brain-based pedagogical frameworks for students’ development of systemic 4P profiles. Efficiency can be optimized when educational systems ultimately opt for systemic, praxis-immersive, convergence education (SPICE) with the mission of empowering students for excellence in life.

Glossary1

Adaptative system A system the composition and/or structure of which can be modified to cope with changes in its function and/or its ecology and maintain its performance at a level that ensures its efficient sustainability. Adduction Bringing into a given situation elements from outside that situation, particularly conceptions and conceptual systems and tools, in order to tackle that situation meaningfully and successfully. Agent (of a system) A primary entity in the environment (context or settings) of a system that significantly contributes to the system ecology (i.e., the system relation to and interaction with its environment) and that affects the system function and performance. Assessment rubric A template with valid criteria to systematically and reliably ascertain and interpret performance and achievement of individual people on given tasks, assessments included, provide efficacious feedback for insightful regulation of all stakeholders’ profiles and of all task/assessment related matters, and take and implement viable decisions about the system that people’s achievement helps evaluating and regulating. Assimilation by rote (Rote learning) Accumulation without understanding of certain procedures and/or information through blind imitation or memorization by heart for the sole purpose of passively meeting certain externally imposed requirements, mostly for passing exams in formal education. Authentic assessment Assessment that provides valid and reliable indicators of particular aspects of a person’s profile, and that the person and other stakeholders can take advantage of for insightful profile regulation and evolution and for making viable decisions about the system in which they are operating. Axio-affective Pertaining to how good and how useful things are from a value-laden (axiological) perspective, and to personal emotions, dispositions, and other affects that significantly affect our thoughts and actions and determine their outcomes in any situation. 1

The following terms are used in SCE as indicated.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. A. Halloun, Systemic Cognition and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3

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Behavioral knowledge Sensorimotor skills, along with perceptual and motor procedures, corresponding rules and schemes, and dispositions retained in memory and meant to carry out specific physical actions. Cognitive demands Cognitive knowledge and mental processing capabilities required, but not necessarily acquired, to successfully achieve a given physical or conceptual task. Cognitive knowledge Conceptions, reasoning skills, along with conceptual procedures, corresponding rules and schemes, and dispositions retained in memory and meant to carry out specific thoughts. Cognitive resources Cognitive knowledge retained in memory and cognitive processing capabilities that one can deploy to carry out specific conceptual or physical tasks. Collective work (Teamwork) Joint venture assumed in collaboration with other people (with individuals handling all the same conceptual and/or physical tasks with shared responsibility) or in cooperation with others (with individuals handling separate tasks with distributed responsibility) in order to serve common purposes and achieve common goals. Commensurability Compatibility between two conceptual entities, from concept to system, or between two processes that can be objectively established in measurable ways. Community of Practice (CoP) A group of professionals sharing common interests and aspirations and working toward the same goals in the same field (or, narrower, in the same discipline in a given field) with relatively identical conceptual and physical tools under a common paradigm. Competency A mix of cognitive and behavioral knowledge, thus of epistemic, rational, sensorimotor, and axio-affective knowledge required to accomplish similar tasks that may fall in a restricted domain of a particular discipline (specific competency) or a variety of tasks that cut across different disciplines (generic competency). Conception A mental construction that consciously represents a particular entity, a set of similar entities, or a common property of these entities (object or property concept), or that relates such entities or their properties in the form of a law, principle, theorem, or any other conceptual relationship among different concepts. Conceptual image A partial mental representation of a physical reality (entity or event) that one develops consciously and deliberately during real or virtual transaction with the reality in question in order to make sense of it and interact with it in meaningful ways. Constitution (of a system) The set of organs in the composition of a system, the set of agents in its environment (context or settings), and the primary relationships among organs (structure) and between organs and agents and between the system as a whole and its environment (ecology). Conventional instruction Didactic instruction exposing learners to some CoP episteme and/or procedures through show and tell, or through lecture and demonstration, under the false assumption that people can acquire meaningful knowledge

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passively by simply listening to others’ talks and/or watching them perform certain acts. Convergence education Formal education that brings together knowledge from traditionally different fields and disciplines in order to tackle issues related to everyday life and to prepare students for assuming future careers and for coping with the realities of the twenty-first century. Corroboration The process or outcome of establishing empirical evidence that is hard (but never impossible) to dismiss or disprove regarding the existence of a certain physical reality or set of realities (entities or events) or the validity of a given conception or conceptual system (scientific models and theories included) to correspond to such realities in certain respects. Creativity Extrapolation of existing conceptions and/or procedures beyond their original scope in order to come up with new answers or new solutions to questions or problems already tackled before and considered then to fall beyond the scope of conceptions and procedures in question. Crossdisciplinarity Convergence of disciplines (and CoPs) under a common framework that emerges from the paradigms of individual disciplines and that brings about new conceptions and new procedures that could not be brought about under any of these paradigms independently of the others and that allow extrapolation of original paradigms for tackling old and new questions and problems about existing realities in innovative ways. Curriculum A conceptual system for the design and implementation under a specific pedagogical framework of learning and teaching means and methods, assessment included, in order to fulfill the primary function of empowering students with profiles for success in life in the context of a program of study consisting of professional (CoPs) epistemic and procedural materials adapted to students’ cognitive potentials. Declarative knowledge Factual information and conceptions that come together in memory to serve specific purposes, and that are typically drawn in formal education from the episteme of one or more CoPs. Deployment (of knowledge) Choice, adaptation, and implementation of specific cognitive and/or behavioral knowledge (or competency) in particular contexts, following well-defined engagement rules, for the deliberate purpose of achieving certain tasks. Description Providing information about “how” concrete or abstract entities and events or processes are and evolve independently of, or in relation to, each other, without specifying the causes or the reasons, if any, behind the way they are and evolve. Dexterities Sensorimotor skills required or deployed to perform certain physical actions. Dialectics Negotiations undertaken within one’s own knowledge, with other people’s knowledge, CoP paradigms included, and/or with empirical data from the real world in order to evaluate and regulate personal knowledge (thus involving coherence, commensurability, and correspondence assessment respectively) and develop it in specific respects.

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Didactic instruction cf. Conventional instruction. Didactic transposition (from French “transposition didactique”) Transformation of CoP episteme and procedures deemed suitable for students of specific age and educational background so as to adapt these professional materials without losing their rigor to the actual cognitive and behavioral potentials of target students and without imposing unrealistic cognitive demands on these students. Differential convergence Convergence of different disciplines to tackle issues of common interest to corresponding CoPs in ways to preserve the identity and sovereignty of individual disciplines under their respective paradigms. Emergent property A property of a new physical or conceptual entity, particularly a system, that results from the synthesis of two or more entities to bring about the new entity in question, and that could not be attributed to either entity independently of other synthesized entities or from loosely agglomerating various entities without significantly connecting them or letting them interact with each other. Engram A network of connected neurons from different regions of the brain that constitutes the physical substrate of a particular short-term or long-term memory, i.e., of a particular piece of cognitive or behavioral knowledge retained temporarily or permanently in the mind of a given person. Entity A conceptual or physical object (living organisms included) with specific properties that may take part in certain conceptual processes or physical events independently of, or in concert with, other entities. Episteme The repertoire of conceptions that a person holds in mind or, particularly, that makes up the distinctive disciplinary content knowledge shared by all members of a given CoP usually, and especially in science, in the form of a corroborated theory. Experiential learning Learning about physical or conceptual objects of learning (OLs) through transaction involving insightful dialectics with these OLs, as well as with other people and corresponding CoP paradigms, so as to constantly evaluate, regulate, and develop one’s own meaningful knowledge about these and related OLs. Explanation Providing the primary causes or reasons, if any, accounting for “why” concrete or abstract entities and events or processes exist and evolve independently of, or in relation to, each other. Exploration Surveying a given situation in order to come up with a rough, comprehensive sketch of that situation that could subsequently be systematically analyzed as part of investigative or innovative endeavors to be carried out for serving clear and well-defined purposes. Feedback (in/for a system) Instruction on how a system can be regulated, and perhaps its constitution modified, transformed, and/or further developed, following the evaluation of its performance in terms of the function it is meant to fulfill under stable or variable conditions. Framework A coherent body of ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological premises (tenets, principles, rules …) drawn from appropriate paradigms and collectively referred to as “paradigmatic premises”, along with ensuing schemata and schemes for making and implementing appropriate

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decisions regarding particular situations, and specifically, for us, for systematic construction, deployment, evaluation and insightful regulation of systemic knowledge and competencies. Habit A well sustained competency that can be readily and almost spontaneously and quasi-instinctively deployed for carrying out one’s thoughts and actions in everyday life. Holism A consequence of bringing many entities together, particularly a system, to form a coherent whole or a unity with emergent properties and synergetic functions that no entity or number of entities can bring about independently of any other entity and so as to make the whole more than the simple sum of its parts and more complex to be understood through reductionist analysis of the whole into parts. Hypothesis An uncorroborated idea about a given reality that needs to be tested against empirical evidence in order to ascertain its merits under a particular framework, and that should be clearly distinguished from corroborated theory, particularly scientific theory where a hypothesis usually pertains to specific aspects of a particular scientific model. Inference An assertion made about an imperceptible aspect (unexposed to our senses and unmeasurable directly) of a given reality from perceptible aspects (perceivable and measurable) of that same reality, like guessing and ascertaining the hidden cause of a given event or predicting what the event might lead to in the future from perceiving and ascertaining how it currently proceeds in certain describable respects. Innovation Tackling existing realities using existing knowledge in creative ways or by transcending existing knowledge in certain respects, or inventing totally new realities under new paradigmatic frameworks. Insightful (approach) Approaching a situation critically and reflectively from different perspectives, teasing out primary from secondary aspects in the situation, concentrating not on isolated aspects but on how different aspects are actually related and how they significantly affect each other, ideally in a systemic framework, continuously evaluating how the situation is being tackled, figuring out what viably works and what not in the process, and drawing valid lessons regarding this and related situations, and especially regarding the regulation and development of personal knowledge deployed in the situation at hand. Intuitive (approach) Approaching a situation spontaneously and reflexively, thus almost instinctively and not quite insightfully, relying mostly on common sense and apparent aspects that may not be pertinent to the situation, deploying what knowledge comes first to mind without consciously ascertaining its validity for the situation at hand, and thus proceeding in ways and bringing about outcomes that may not be necessarily appropriate for that situation and that may not necessarily help regulating and developing personal knowledge in the right direction. Invention Coming up with totally new conceptions and/or procedures for framing and tackling new questions and problems about existing realities and bringing about unprecedented outcomes with these realities, and/or for designing and realizing new realities of unprecedented features and scope.

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Investigation Providing a reliable factual, descriptive and/or explanatory account of perceivable aspects of a given situation, formulating inferences about unperceivable aspects in the past, present, or future of the situation, and/or making a judgment about the merits of specific aspects. Item map A generic tool for the systematic design of learning tasks, assessments included, in accordance with well-defined content and format specifications set in the context of an appropriate framework. Learning agent Any person, be it peer, classmate, mentor, teacher, or any other competent individual capable of assisting a learner in the development of certain knowledge or competency. Learning cycle A structured but flexible learning and instruction protocol to systematize knowledge construction and deployment within the same course and across different courses. Learning mediation Timely and efficacious guidance and assistance provided to learners by a competent learning agent, particularly a well-trained instructor (teacher, mentor, etc.), and tailored to their individual potentials and needs to ensure meaningful learning of target knowledge and sustain development of individual learners’ profiles along realistic and feasible evolution tracks. Learning outcome A unique bit of epistemic, rational, sensorimotor, or axiological knowledge that learners have actually developed, or are expected to develop, about a particular object of learning. Locus of control The person or people behind a learning experience and driving it toward specific ends, be it the learner herself/himself (intrinsic locus), teachers, parents, or any outside authority (external locus). Makerspace A praxis workshop located inside or outside a school campus, equipped with professional tools, and designed to help individual learners think outside the box and come up with their own designs, under proper CoP frameworks and the supervision of trained mentors, to reify and test the merits of their own innovative ideas for tackling real life issues of their own interest. Meaningful learning Constructing new knowledge (and/or developing prior knowledge) under intrinsic locus of control while understanding insightfully and to the extent allowed by one’s own cognitive resources what this knowledge is about and good for, relating it explicitly to and consolidating it with existing memory patterns, and preparing oneself for successfully deploying it where appropriate in its original scope and beyond. Metacognition Cognitive demands and resources, including particularly modulatory factors and brain systems, that govern a learning experience and that one needs to be consciously aware of and capable of mastering in order to bring about meaningful and sustainable learning outcomes. Middle-out (organization) An organization of physical or conceptual elements classified and grouped into categories of increasing structural and operational complexity, with groups or categories in the middle of the hierarchy being the most important to endow individual groups and whatever may consist of them with their full significance, sustain their coherence and durability in relation to each other, and optimize their productivity and efficiency.

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Misconception An intuitive conception that does not viably correspond to what it is supposed to correspond to in the real world (not a valid conceptual image of corresponding realities) and that subsequently is at odd with corresponding conceptions in a concerned CoP episteme. Mnemonics Cognitive keys and procedures that we rely upon to access and retrieve from memory (remember) cognitive or behavioral knowledge needed in a given situation. Model A physical or conceptual system that we construct to embody or represent a particular morphological or phenomenological pattern manifested by a number of systems and that consists of some but not all organs and agents, or of their conceptual representatives, that are common to all these systems and that we deem primary for the pattern in question. Modulation (of cognition) Control and shaping by particularly PFC executive functions and axio-affective control centers in the limbic system of the course and outcome of cognitive processes, including memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval, and thus of the course and outcome of any learning experience. Nomic isomorphism Syntactical and functional resemblance or correspondence between two entities, particularly for us between a conceptual image, on the one hand, and corresponding physical realities and memory patterns on the other. Object of learning A physical reality or a conceptual entity or process which learners are supposed to develop meaningful knowledge about. Organ (of a system) A primary system constituent that is significantly connected to other primary constituents in the system composition, and that works in tandem with these other organs to let the system perform and fulfill its function properly. Paradigm A conceptual system consisting of ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological premises (tenets, principles, rules …), along with ensuing episteme and procedures, that govern all thoughts and actions of an individual person or group of people, particularly a CoP, in various situations that typically make the object of a given CoP field of knowledge. Pattern A morphological or phenomenological aspect that we find regularly and repeatedly in space and time in the constitution or performance of physical realities (entities or phenomena), particularly physical systems, or of conceptual entities and processes. Perceptual image A partial first image that sensory regions of the brain construct unconsciously and involuntarily of a physical reality detected by the senses. Performance (of a system) The related set of operations or processes that a system undertakes to bring about a certain output and fulfill the function of the system in its domain. Phenomenon A set of connected events reflecting a performance pattern across a variety of physical systems. Postdiction Inferring the past of a given reality from its current state (or change of state). Praxis Bringing theory and practice into consonance particularly for innovative purposes.

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Prediction Inferring the future of a given reality from its past and/or current state (or change of state). Premise A tenet, axiom, law, principle, theorem, rule, or any other commonly accepted (and corroborated in CoPs) assertion according to which we carry out specific thoughts or actions. Primary (aspect) A conceptual or physical aspect (entity, process, property …) that is deemed to significantly affect a given situation under specific conditions and from a particular perspective, particularly the constitution or performance of a system under a given framework/paradigm, and that we should take into consideration in any endeavor about that situation given the conditions and perspective in question. Principle A law, particularly in science, that has been corroborated enough and that has proven to be so useful and productive across centuries that it becomes hard (but not impossible) to reject it altogether. Procedural knowledge Reasoning and sensorimotor skills, along with conceptual and physical procedures and corresponding rules and schemes, including norms and standards for choosing appropriate tools, that come together in memory to serve specific purposes, and that are typically drawn in formal education from the methodology of one or many CoPs. Profile The entire repertoire of cognitive and behavioral knowledge, specific and generic competencies and habits included, that a person possesses with characteristic traits that we call in SCE on being primarily those of progressive minds, productive habits, profound episteme, and principled conduct (4P Profiles). Prototype A physical or conceptual system chosen among all systems classified in a given category to represent all systems in this category in their entire primary and secondary aspects. Reasoning skills Acquired cognitive faculties for conscious and deliberate rational processing of information in the brain and involving, among others, analysis, criterial comparison, establishing relationships, and critical and logical thinking to bring about conceptual outcomes for their own sake or for the sake of achieving physical tasks. Referent A physical reality which a conception corresponds to, or that falls in the domain of a conceptual system. Regulation Modification of a conception, conceptual process, or conceptual system following its evaluation by correspondence to its referents and in terms of the purpose it is meant to serve, in order to fix any revealed flaws, enhance its performance, and/or extrapolate it beyond its original scope. Rote learning cf. Assimilation by rote. Schema (plural, schemata) A generic template, particularly of systemic nature, that serves to systematically put together any conception or conceptual system. Scheme A plan of action for systematically carrying out certain procedures or endeavors. Scope (of a system) The set of referents making up the domain of a system along with the function that the system is supposed to fulfill regarding these referents.

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Secondary (aspect) A conceptual or physical aspect (entity, process, property …) that is deemed not to significantly affect a given situation under specific conditions and from a particular perspective, particularly the constitution or performance of a system under a given framework/paradigm, and that we can ignore in any endeavor about that situation given the conditions and perspective in question. Sensorimotor skills Acquired perceptual and motor brain and organs faculties for conscious and deliberate physical engagement with others and the environment involving various communication modalities and manipulative, artistic, and other perceptual and motor acts necessary to achieve physical tasks and bringing about concrete outcomes. SPICE Systemic, Praxis Immersive, Convergence Education. Stakeholder A person concerned with the performance of a given system (or any other organism) who may be a system organ or an agent in its local environment. Subsidiary (system) A particular subsystem that people are most familiar with among all subsystems of a particular physical or conceptual system, and that can help them the best construct that system meaningfully. Subsystem A complex organ of a system that may be defined, like the system it is part of, in accordance with the systemic schema. Sustained knowledge Knowledge permanently retained in mind as a consolidated long-term memory (LTM). Synergy A major characteristic of a number of physical entities (humans included) or conceptual elements working systematically together as group members, ideally as interdependent system organs, in order to fulfill a communal function that no member can fulfill alone independently of other members, at least not as efficaciously, while bringing about emergent properties that cannot be attributed to either member alone. System An orderly unit of interdependent and interrelated physical entities (physical system) or conceptual elements (conceptual system)—unless it is a “simple” or “elementary” system made up of only one organ (entity or element)—that work together within conveniently set boundaries in order to serve certain purposes under certain conditions that no organ, and no subset of organs, can serve alone, at least not adequately, independently of all other organs. Systematic A consistent, methodical, and orderly way of doing things. Systemic Pertaining to systems or to systemism. Systemic schema A schema for the definition (and construction) of physical or conceptual systems, subsystems, or any of their organs or agents, along four dimensions: framework scope, constitution, and performance. Systemism A coherent worldview whereby the physical world around us and the conceptual realm within our minds can be best and most systematically conceived as interrelated physical or conceptual systems (subsystems, or system organs) exhibiting specific morphological and/or phenomenological patterns, and a generic mindset whereby we constantly look at the world with systemic conceptual lenses, and we systematically carry all physical and conceptual endeavors following systemic schemes for the exploration, construction, validation, and deployment of systems.

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Taxonomy Systematic classification of conceptual or physical entities (originally of living organisms in biology) and/or of their properties, or of mental or physical processes, into categories of well-defined characteristics and in accordance with clear and objective criteria and schemes. Tenet An assertion of axiomatic nature about physical realities or conceptual constructs typically shared by all members of a given community, particularly a CoP, and shaping to different extent the formulation of other paradigmatic premises (laws, theorems, rules …) and the entire repertoire of conceptual and procedural knowledge of that community. Theory A corroborated set of paradigmatic premises (theoretical or conceptual framework), along with corresponding conceptions, means and methods, norms and standards for making proper choices and decisions, that typically characterize a CoP and a particular discipline, or branch of a discipline, it is dedicated to, and that the CoP relies upon in any conceptual or physical endeavor it undertakes in relation to that discipline or branch of the discipline. Threshold A separation between two coherent corpuses of related knowledge, each of which consisting of interrelated packets of declarative and procedural knowledge learning of which imposes relatively similar cognitive demands within the same corpus but significantly higher or lower demands than packets in the other corpus, so that one cannot cross the separation in the direction of the corpus imposing higher demands before achieving meaningfully the entire corpus imposing lower demands. Transaction Active engagement with a physical reality (entity or event) and/or with concrete or abstract representations of the reality, involving conscious analysis of empirical data emanating from or corresponding to the reality in question and leading to the construction of a conceptual image to represent it partially in mind and make sense of it in what we deem to be primary respects. Transcendence (of a paradigm) Transgressing an existing paradigm in certain respects, and bringing about novel and unprecedented paradigmatic premises, along with novel epistemic and methodological aspects, that are meant in differential convergence more to complement than to supervene the paradigms in question. Transdisciplinarity Convergence of disciplines (and CoPs) under a common framework that transcends the paradigms of individual disciplines and that brings about new conceptions and new procedures that could not be brought about under any of these paradigms independently of the others, thus allowing to ask new questions and identify new problems that could not be conceived before and to come up with entirely new ways of conceiving the world, for changing existing realities, and for inventing totally new realities and even a totally new discipline. Transient knowledge Knowledge temporarily encoded in mind as a short-term memory (STM) that may not be eventually consolidated as long-term memory (LTM). Viable Characterized, among others, by being realistic, valid, reliable, useful, efficacious, affordable, feasible, reasonable, unambiguous, harmless, and dynamically sustainable.

Glossary

231

Wholism The interdependence among various constituents of an organism, particularly among system organs, resulting into a cohesive whole that substantially depends on each constituent and that may be significantly demoted in, or deprived of, any of its synergetic functions and emergent properties, or even disintegrated or forsaken altogether, if any of these constituents is taken away or loses any of its primary properties.

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Index

A Adduce/adduction, 154–156, 172 Agent learning, 29, 30, 96, 122, 132, 147, 148, 152, 160, 163, 165, 166, 179, 183, 186, 198, 201, 226 system, 8, 16, 21, 24, 26, 30, 201, 211, 212 Assessment “as”/“for”/“of” learning, 170, 172, 173, 179 authentic, 173, 178 item map, see Item map, 173, 175, 226 rubric, 123, 173, 175, 178–180, 186, 205, 221 Assimilation, 100 by rote, 104, 122, 123, 125–127, 165, 168, 169, 180, 182, 184, 195, 221 Attention endogenous, 108, 109, 112 exogenous, 108, 112

B Brain and/vs mind, 3, 6, 19, 23, 24, 29, 54, 61–64, 72, 73, 79, 89, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124, 144, 148, 156, 181–183, 185–187, 208, 216 association areas, 73, 79, 85, 89, 90, 92, 95, 101, 116, 149 cortical areas, 69, 75, 77, 78, 92, 98, 148 discrete regions/functionality, 67, 90, 100

limbic system, see Limbic system, 70, 107 prefrontal cortex, see PFC, 78, 95 readiness for learning, 64, 78 synapses/synaptic networks, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 85, 89, 98, 149

C Cognitive demands, 57, 68, 97, 98, 110, 134, 144, 148, 149, 155, 197, 198, 222, 224, 226, 230 disequilibrium, 157, 159, 163, 167 efficiency, 102, 103, 106, 115 resources, 102 Collective work, 21, 52, 58, 59, 146, 170, 191, 193, 219, 222 collaboration, 222 cooperation, 148, 204, 216, 222 differential collective engagement (DCE), 215 Common sense, 3, 164 Community of Practice (CoP), 1, 2, 10, 12, 14, 18, 42, 43, 54, 55, 116, 118, 125, 127, 128, 134, 150, 162, 163, 183, 185, 187–189, 191–194, 196–198, 201–206, 208, 222, 230 Competency, 30, 33, 38, 41–44, 46, 48, 50, 53–56, 73, 115, 116, 122, 124, 126, 127, 132–134, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149–153, 155–157, 159–161, 167, 169, 173–175, 178, 182, 184, 185, 187–189, 195–198, 203–205, 208, 209, 212, 216, 218, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. A. Halloun, Systemic Cognition and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24691-3

239

240 Conception, 4, 12, 18, 23, 25, 45, 47, 54–56, 65, 76, 81, 99, 106, 128, 130, 131, 134, 141, 157, 164, 167, 169, 176, 191, 192, 197–200, 205, 209, 221–225, 228, 230 Conduct (principled), 38, 48–50, 55, 57, 59, 119, 228 Convergence (education) crossdisciplinarity, 193, 194, 205, 206, 223 differential (DCE), 182, 188, 189, 191, 194–196, 202, 212, 215, 224, 230 modalities, 189–193, 206 transdisciplinarity, 193, 194, 205, 206, 230 Curriculum disciplinary, 182, 188, 189, 194, 196 systemic, see Systemic D Dexterities, see Skills, 128, 131, 149, 223 Dialectics, 23, 66, 76, 82, 87, 96, 97, 109, 112, 116, 160–169, 202, 205, 223, 224 Didactic instruction, 169, 183, 184 transposition, 197 E Education career and technical, 42, 183, 188, 206, 207, 212 convergence, see Convergence, 182, 189, 194, 205, 212, 223 disciplinary, 189, 194, 195, 202 function/mission, vii general, 29, 57, 150, 182–185, 188, 206, 207, 212 system, educational, see System, 9–11, 20, 21, 37, 52, 57, 181–183, 188, 189, 194, 195, 207, 210–220 technical and vocational, 29, 42, 150, 183, 188, 206, 207, 212 technology, 207 traditional, 122, 206, 212 vision, 29, 210, 212, 218, 219 Emergence/emergent, 22, 66, 81, 82, 96, 109, 117, 190–192, 198, 200, 201, 203, 224, 225, 229, 231 Emotions, 40, 41, 54, 58, 64, 81, 87, 107, 109, 111–114, 118, 131, 133, 169, 205, 221

Index Engram, 63, 72–78, 84–86, 88–96, 98, 99, 101–105, 107, 116–118, 124, 127, 148, 171, 224 Episteme, 2, 17, 18, 23, 40–42, 54–57, 59, 66, 84, 122, 128, 184, 188, 189, 201, 204, 205, 208, 222–224, 227, 228 epistemic knowledge, see Knowledge, 13, 23, 40–42, 54–56, 66, 70, 84 profound, 38, 49, 54, 55, 57, 59, 228 Evaluation, 2, 14, 16, 17, 43, 51, 53, 65, 66, 76, 80, 95–97, 108, 154, 156, 159–161, 170, 171, 173, 175, 178, 180, 187, 192, 193, 213, 216, 217, 224, 225, 228 Evolution, 20, 50, 54, 63, 100, 122, 140, 144, 149, 161, 171, 173, 178–180, 185, 187, 208, 214, 217–219, 221, 226 Excellence, 29, 30, 38, 49–51, 59, 119, 125, 132, 168, 181, 182, 185, 188, 210, 211, 217, 219, 220 Executive functions, see PFC, 30, 78, 85, 107, 110, 111, 208, 227 Experiential, 30, 54, 64, 69, 85, 86, 89, 96, 107, 108, 112, 117, 118, 122, 149–157, 159–161, 164, 165, 169, 182, 183, 185–188, 195, 201–204, 206, 208, 209, 212, 217, 224 Exploration, 4, 14–17, 24, 43, 130, 131, 150, 153, 157–159, 224, 229 F Feedback, 13, 14, 16, 28, 113, 168, 173, 175, 178–180, 184, 208, 209, 217, 221, 224 Framework, 6, 7, 9–14, 16, 17, 21, 26, 29, 31, 34, 41, 43, 44, 46, 51, 54, 57, 59, 62, 67, 73, 119, 122, 127, 132, 134, 135, 141, 150, 152–161, 176, 177, 183, 185–189, 191–193, 195, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 216, 219, 220, 223–226, 228–230 H Habit, 3, 38, 41, 42, 46–48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 115, 126, 127, 143, 147, 169, 184, 185, 196, 216 of life, 38, 41, 43, 46–48, 50, 52, 115, 127, 147, 185, 196 productive, 38, 48, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 118 systemic, see Systemic

Index Holism, 22 I Image conceptual, 39, 65, 66, 77, 79–81, 83, 84, 94, 96, 107, 108, 112, 153, 154, 161 perceptual, 65, 66, 79–85, 94, 95, 104, 108, 109, 112, 161, 227 Innovation, 16, 57, 147–150, 155, 174, 191, 195, 208, 225 creative, 16, 18, 52, 53, 95, 146, 150, 155, 191, 194, 225 inventive, 11, 18, 52, 146, 155 transcendental, 155 Insightful, 12, 16, 30, 48, 50, 51, 59, 66, 71, 76, 82, 87, 96, 97, 109, 112, 116, 123, 127, 130, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 163, 164, 168–171, 173–175, 178–180, 183, 186, 192, 193, 202, 205, 208, 209, 214, 216, 221, 224, 225 Instinctive, 40, 57, 64, 75, 112, 119, 225 Intuitive, 3, 13, 41, 46, 50, 53, 54, 119, 164, 225, 227 Investigation, 15, 16, 44–46, 150, 153, 155, 162, 175, 176, 178, 197, 226 factual, 15, 155, 197, 226 inferential, 15, 16, 155, 162, 197 judgmental, 15, 16, 46, 155, 197 Item map, 123, 173–175, 178–180, 186, 205, 226 K Knowledge axio-affective, 40–42, 44–46, 55–57, 65, 66, 70, 71, 77, 115, 222 behavioral, 41–43, 46, 50, 52, 66, 71, 74, 78, 80, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 143, 144, 149, 151, 155, 156, 160, 161, 164, 169, 171, 185, 187, 188, 204, 212, 222–224, 227, 228 cognitive, 41, 71, 222 content, 2, 13, 23, 40, 41, 48, 49, 54, 111, 122, 128, 180, 183, 188, 208, 224 declarative, 23, 40, 41, 44–46, 54, 128, 134, 149, 223, 230 deconstruction, 14, 44, 79, 80, 82, 85 deployment, 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 24, 38, 41, 43, 47, 52, 63, 72–74, 76, 78, 88, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102–107, 115, 117, 118, 126, 128, 131, 143, 145, 148,

241 153, 157, 159, 167, 168, 171, 173, 174, 178, 179, 185, 192, 197, 208, 209, 223, 225, 226, 229 epistemic, 13, 23, 40–42, 54–56, 66, 70, 84 explicit, 59, 63, 64, 76, 90, 92, 95, 106, 119, 126, 133, 164, 183, 187 implicit, 62, 64, 76, 95, 133 procedural, 2, 40, 42, 44–46, 54, 56, 57, 59, 75, 87, 100, 167, 182, 183, 195, 228, 230 rational, 75, 96, 115, 133, 142, 161, 162 reconstruction, 80 sensorimotor, 2, 41, 42, 92, 95, 149, 222, 228 sustainable/sustained, 4, 41, 78, 82, 87, 116, 118, 149, 166, 185, 229, 230 synthesis, 15, 46, 79–81, 84, 157, 159, 192, 224 tacit, 133 transient, 71, 84, 166, 168, 184, 230 L Learning agent, see Agent, 29, 30, 96, 122, 132, 147, 148, 152, 160, 163, 165, 166, 179, 183, 186, 198, 201, 226 cycle, 122, 153, 156–160, 170, 186, 197, 205, 226 experiential, see Experiential, 122, 127, 149–151 lifelong, 29, 30, 37, 50, 54, 67, 115, 125, 126, 181, 184, 185, 213, 216 locus of control, 51, 147, 226 meaningful, 38, 52, 57, 87, 107, 110, 112, 113, 122–125, 127, 165, 168–170, 172, 173, 185, 186, 207–209, 216, 226 mediation, see Mediation, 145–147, 165, 166, 168, 169, 175, 178–180, 186, 198, 226 object of, 107, 111, 115, 117, 118, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129, 132, 142, 145, 226, 227 outcome, 74, 110, 111, 115, 116, 119, 122, 124, 127–129, 133, 134, 140–144, 151, 155, 156, 161, 167, 173, 174, 226 rote, see Assimilation, 110, 123, 221, 228 social-emotional (SEL), 113, 119 systemic, see Systemic, 52–54, 122, 135, 150–153, 156, 157, 166, 186, 187

242 Limbic system, 70, 82, 85, 107, 109–111, 227 amygdala, 111 hippocampus, 85, 111 hypothalamus, 109 thalamus, 79, 93, 95, 108, 109

M Makerspace, see Praxis, 150, 186, 203, 204, 206, 207, 216, 226 Meaningful learning, see Learning, 38, 52, 57, 87, 107, 110, 112, 113, 122–125, 127, 165, 168–170, 172, 173, 185, 186, 207–209, 216, 226 Mediation, 122, 145, 146, 151, 153, 166–170, 173–175, 178–180, 186, 198, 209, 216, 226 Memory consolidation, 74, 81, 88, 89, 91–95, 97–100, 102, 104, 106, 117, 154, 157 encoding, 63, 74, 77–79, 81–84, 86–91, 93, 94, 96, 100–105, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 157, 227 engram, see Engram, 75, 85, 91, 93, 96, 105, 148 episodic, 76, 86, 91, 102 explicit vs implicit, see Knowledge, 76, 95, 133 long term (LTM), 71, 74–77, 81, 83–86, 88–100, 102–104, 106, 112, 126, 127, 144, 145, 148, 149, 155, 166, 168, 172, 229, 230 modulation, see Modulation, 107 patterns, 81, 85, 86, 103, 126, 145, 146, 148, 226, 227 rehearsal, 88, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 105, 157 retrieval, 74, 100–106, 111, 114, 117, 159, 171 short term (STM), 71, 74, 75, 77, 82–85, 88–91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 114, 126, 127, 145, 148, 224, 230 working (WM), 71, 74, 83, 84, 97, 128 Metacognition, 107, 115, 118, 119, 125, 185, 226 Middle-out, 122, 141–143, 197, 213–215, 226 Mind and/vs brain, see Brain, 3, 6, 19, 23, 24, 29, 54, 62–64, 72, 73, 79, 89, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 116–118, 121, 124, 144, 156, 182, 183, 186, 187

Index progressive, 38, 48, 50–52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 116, 228 readiness for learning, 64, 78 Mindset, see Systemic, 2, 4, 12–16, 24, 25, 41, 44, 48, 187, 229 Mnemonics, 72, 100, 104–106, 114, 126, 227 Model/modeling, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 34, 35, 46, 47, 66, 84, 136–138, 142, 157, 162, 198–202, 223, 225, 227 vs prototype, 11, 45, 135, 153, 228 Modulation, 107, 114, 133, 170, 226, 227 factor/system, 90, 107, 109, 113, 123, 226 Motivation, 59, 81, 82, 108–111, 118, 119, 131, 146–148, 169, 209

N Nomic isomorphism, 94–96, 106, 118, 161–163, 227

P Paradigm, 1–4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 20, 21, 43, 47, 50, 53, 56, 67, 122, 126, 136, 140, 145, 160–164, 166, 167, 170, 185–188, 191–193, 196–198, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 210, 212, 222–224, 227–230 premises, 1, 2, 7, 56, 185, 189, 191–193, 224, 227, 230 Pattern, 13, 14, 16, 18–20, 24, 39, 41, 47, 53, 55, 56, 66, 69, 76, 89, 91, 93–97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 118, 130, 132, 134, 141, 142, 145, 146, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 168, 170, 188, 189, 195, 197, 208, 217, 220, 227, 229 memory, see Memory, 81, 85, 86, 103, 126, 145, 148, 226, 227 Praxis, 150, 152, 155, 159, 182, 183, 188, 201–206, 208, 209, 213, 215–217, 219, 227, 229 makerspace, 150, 203, 204, 207, 216, 226 Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) executive functions, 30, 78, 107, 110, 111, 208, 227 Profile 4P, 38, 48–50, 52, 55–57, 59, 64, 115, 122, 126, 144, 150, 181, 183, 186, 187, 196, 197, 209, 211, 219, 220, 228

Index systemic, 29, 30, 38, 43, 46–48, 50, 55, 57, 151, 168, 212

R Reflective vs reflexive, 76, 77, 90, 92, 161 Regulation, 14, 43, 51, 53, 65, 66, 76, 95, 96, 109, 114, 159–161, 170, 171, 173–175, 179, 180, 187, 191–193, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 221, 225, 228 Rubric, see Assessment, 123, 173, 175, 178–180, 186, 205, 221

S Schema, 6, 9–11, 13, 14, 16, 18–20, 24, 25, 41, 46, 66, 73, 94, 99, 105, 140–142, 144, 145, 153, 155, 158, 159, 187, 210, 228, 229 Skills dexterities, 128, 149, 223 motor, 40, 41, 70, 75, 76, 87 perceptual, 76 reasoning, 39, 41, 76, 87, 115, 128, 134, 149, 169, 222, 228 sensory-motor/sensorimotor, 2, 41, 42, 75, 76, 114, 208, 222, 223, 228, 229 SPICE, 182, 183, 206, 207, 209, 210, 213, 216, 217, 229 Stakeholder, 168, 170, 180, 182, 206, 207, 209, 210, 213, 215–217, 219, 221, 229 Subsystem, see System, 4–6, 9–11, 14, 19, 69, 70, 74, 76, 98, 144, 211–213, 215, 229 Synergy, 21, 22, 25, 220, 229 System adaptive, 11, 14, 79, 151, 152, 210, 213, 219 agent, see Agent conceptual, 4–6, 9–16, 19, 24, 45, 46, 56, 66, 87, 99, 142, 144, 153, 154, 156, 157, 161–163, 196–199, 202, 204, 221, 223, 227–229 constitution, 7, 9, 13, 16, 202, 210 educational, 9–11, 20, 21, 37, 52, 57, 181–183, 188, 189, 194, 195, 207, 210–220 modulatory, see Modulation, 63, 73, 107–112, 114, 115, 118, 169, 186, 205, 209

243 organ, 8, 13, 211–213, 215, 219, 229, 231 performance, 7–9, 13, 14, 45, 152, 213 physical, 4, 66, 83, 153, 154, 157, 161, 164, 170, 187, 188, 202, 227, 229 referent, 132, 145, 146, 148, 215, 228 scope, 6, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 16, 25, 43, 56, 63, 73, 75, 94, 99, 106, 135, 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, 169, 189, 197, 198, 202, 210, 228, 229 subsidiary, 43, 197, 198, 229 subsystem, 4–6, 9–11, 14, 19, 69, 70, 74, 76, 98, 144, 211–213, 215, 229 Systematic, 23, 24, 47, 48, 52–54, 57, 105, 126, 131, 144, 157, 170, 171, 179, 180, 195, 225, 226, 229, 230 vs systemic, 4 Systemic agent, see Agent, 221, 229 competency, 43, 73, 144, 157, 167 curriculum, 38, 99, 114, 119, 121, 122, 151, 180, 186, 187, 189, 196, 198, 208, 216 habit, 41, 143, 144 learning, 52–54, 122, 135, 150–154, 156–158, 166, 186, 187 mindset, 4, 12–16, 25, 41, 44 processes, 134, 151, 152, 154, 159–161, 187, 189, 197 schema, see Schema, 6, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 41, 46, 55, 66, 73, 83, 94, 99, 105, 132, 142, 144, 153, 155, 158, 159, 187, 210, 229 worldview, 5, 17, 23, 48, 141, 187 Systemism, 2, 4, 5, 17, 18, 23, 24, 132, 229

T Taxonomy, 10–12, 63, 73, 75–77, 122, 127–129, 133, 134, 141, 144, 147, 149, 150, 156, 169, 174, 230 Threshold, 111, 198–200, 230 Transaction, 9, 23, 63–67, 69, 71, 77, 79–83, 85, 86, 88, 94–96, 104, 109, 112, 113, 123, 149, 151–156, 160, 161, 163–166, 201, 222, 224, 230

W Wholism, 22, 231 Worldview, see Systemic, 2, 4, 5, 17, 23, 24, 31, 48, 141, 187, 229