A biosocial education future?

What happens when we learn?

Joining together biological and social research on the effects of environment and nutrition on the body and the effects of social and institutional processes on children’s school experiences and outcomes raises, for me, a profound question about the nature of learning. In my own sociological work on how students come to be seen by teachers and themselves as ‘good learners’, I have paid close attention to the nuances of everyday life in classrooms, looking especially at how meanings stick to particular sorts of people and activities (Youdell, 2006, 2011b). Work of this sort offers substantial insights into how students are included (or not) in classrooms, and why some students are thought of and think of themselves as good learners and other as bad or even impossible learners. Yet it tells us little about what happens when we learn.

In education research, ideas about learning as skill and knowledge acquisition have been challenged by ideas that try to account for a range of social influences on learning. The revolutionary educator Paolo Freire (1970) criticises education based on ‘banking’ information in the minds of learners. His conceptualisation of learning as intrinsically concerned with learners’ understanding their social, economic and political situation underpins his project of ‘conscientization’ in which learning is tied fundamentally to the generation of strategies for social transformation. While Freire’s revolutionary project has slipped from most education theories of learning, the idea that the local and wider situation is important remains. These theories often suggest a complex interplay of social, personal and educational factors that influence learning. Yrjo Engerstrom’s activity theory offers a useful example, as does Etienne Wenger’s notion of learning that takes place in and simultaneously constitutes ‘communities of practice’ (Illeris, 2009). These models offer a compelling sense of learning as experience and doing; as part of our belonging and who we are becoming; as apprenticeships that are built on and build shared meanings and collective practices and as political. But they still do not quite tell us what happens when we learn.

Reading epigenetic research on the way environmental influences effect the way genes are expressed, and so how the cells of a body function, has led me to some unexpected work on learning. In epigenetics, the nature of the question and its answers are quite different. We find learning taken to be the making of memory, and memory taken as the biochemical changes in the brain that occur when something is learnt. As tissue samples cannot be taken from living human brains while they learn, epigenetic researchers set up experiments in which model animals (rats, mice or flies) learn and then the animal is killed so that its brain tissue can be examined. When rats learn fear of/in a new environment by being given an electric shock the learning shows up in their brain tissue – David Molfese (2011) shows how histones (that DNA is stored around) in certain parts of the brain are differently methylated and acetylated (turned off and on). This is unfamiliar, beyond our ethical countenance even, and a long way from a ‘community of practice’. In neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning is used to identify learning inside the brain as it happens, for instance, research showing how working memory activates particular regions of the brain (Jackson et al., 2011).

These are just some, albeit important, approaches to thinking about and identifying learning. The challenge for critical education research is to resist the urge to bring these various approaches and accounts together only in contest, and instead bring them together in productive interaction, or intra-action. This has the potential to allow us to investigate the possibility that all of these might be true at the same time: learning as the interaction between a person and a thing; as embedded in ways of being and understanding that are shared across communities; as influenced by the social and cultural and economic conditions of lives; as involving changes to how genes are expressed in brain cells because it changes the histones that store DNA; as provoking certain parts of the brain into electrochemical activity; as relying on a person being recognised by others, and recognising themselves, as someone who learns. Shared meanings, gene expression, electrochemical signals, the everyday of the classroom and a sense of self all intra-acting parts of the phenomenon that is learning.

Are relationships important in the classroom?

John Hattie’s (2008) high profile review of research evidence identified the central importance of teacher–student relationships for learning. This review echoes longstanding psychoanalytic work in education that emphasises psychic processes in the classroom and the profound importance of the teacher’s relational capacities – to love, after Bion, and to hold the child in mind, after Winicott (Bibby, 2011; Britzman, 1998; Teague, 2015). And it echoes the wealth of work in the sociology of education that shows how teachers’ views about students, and the sorts of relationships they have (or do not have) with them, have profound effects on their educational inclusion or exclusion (Benjamin, 2002; Gillborn, 1990; Youdell, 2006, 2010). Yet in the context of the dominance of outcomes measures and end-to-end assessment and accountability in education, relationality in the classroom is relegated to little more than a side issue whose value is instrumental at best.

Epigenetic research into how rat brains, and so behaviours, are changed by the sort of care they get offers a vastly different account of the significance of relationships, and challenges education to think again about the importance of relationality in classrooms. This research looks at rat mothers’ licking and grooming (LG) behaviour and shows that offspring of ‘high LG’ and ‘low LG’ rats are quite different (Champagne, 2009). In this research on rats, LG is shown to effect the ‘HPA axis’ (hypothalamic, pituitary and adrenal activity) or ‘stress axis’, provoking epigenetic changes that shift key hormones involved in how rats’ stress responses work and how they respond socially and neuro-chemically to stressful situations. LG also effects oxytocin and oestrogen, including in the medial preoptic area of the brain associated with maternal behaviour, influencing the amount of LG that rat mothers do, and then how much LG their offspring do (Champagne, 2009). These changes also effect wider social behaviour through changes to oxytocin in the brain’s limbic system (or ‘social behaviour network’) (Beery et al., 2016). While these patterns can repeat over generations, they can also be changed inside generations. When infant and adolescent rats are fostered to rats with different LG patterns, their brains change and so do their behaviours (Champagne, 2009; van Ijzendoorn et al., 2011).

Of course, we have to take care translating from rats to humans. As the sociological literature documents, children’s worlds are complex. Their days are filled with numerous experiences and encounters that will provoke a whole range of biochemical, affective, intuitive, social and mindful responses.

These responses vary between children but also potentially vary in the same child over time. And in the movements and flows of the day, it might not always be so easy to know what might count as a stressor, and to which child. Children relationships are also complex. They form deep attachments to carers, family members, peers, teachers, including when people do not care for them well. Children’s relationships with individuals shift and change, and children can have caring, supportive relationships with some people, and uncaring and unsupportive relationships with other people. And the impact of relationships can endure long after the relationship has ended. Nevertheless, within the field of developmental epigenetics, it is suggested that the relational and environmental stressors that are introduced to rat under controlled laboratory conditions are reflective of the sort of amalgam of factors that coalesce to create conditions of profound disadvantage for children (van Ijzendoorn et al., 2011).

The plasticity of the brain’s epigenetic responses to environment and experience evidenced in the rat research may offer a positive alternative to the policy emphasis on early intervention which has put responsibility on mothers (Edwards et al., 2015) and insisted that ‘two is too late’ (Duncan Smith, 2012) for the effects of ‘poor parenting’ to be undone. Despite the fact that this epigenetic research is ongoing and application to human children must be undertaken with care (Belsky and Van Ijzendoorn, 2015), these rats studies suggest that two is not too late; that mothers of toddlers cannot possibly be held responsible for the entirety of their children’s futures and that different forms of care affect different children in different ways. In terms of education, it suggests that building strong relationships of care, rather than diagnosing disorder and managing behaviour, should be the priority. And it suggests that when a child is not acting their place in the discourse of the good student, it might not be because they are recalcitrant, disordered or disruptive – it might be because their stress axis or their social behaviour network is responding to the situation in a way that makes it difficult for them to be and do who and what the teacher wants.

Biosocial education research

It is not my intention to suggest that sociologists of education become epigeneticists or neuroscientists, but I do want to suggest that we engage with an open orientation and be well informed about this work. Sociological conceptualisations and research accounts of the social, cultural, institutional, discursive, pedagogic, political, relational, affective and subjective have a major contribution to make to life science’s understanding of ‘environment’ (which is often limited to, e.g. parent–child attachment, the uterus) and its potential influences (Chung et al., 2016). And sociology of education might gain new insight from the knowledge and research techniques being generated in the life sciences. My ambition, then, is for collaborative, inter-disciplinary research across social and biological sciences that develops hybrid conceptual frames; poses new types of questions and develops new forms of hypotheses and envisages research methodologies and methods in new ways. Such biosocial education research would take epigenetics out of the laboratory and into the classroom, adapting its methods to capture bodily molecular activity in real time, as this is enfolded in the nuances of everyday life in school, and as this fine grain of the everyday is captured ethnographically. It would ask how schooling becomes folded into the molecular, psychic and social body, and how the social and the biological intra-act to produce biosocial education.