These are notes from a talk i gave at a one-day conference at the University of Inland Norway, “INN-puf” (pedagogisk utvikling og filosofi / pedagogical development and philosophy). The audience was primarily teaching faculty from the departments of film, TV, and games, and I tried to pitch it so it would be accessible to practitioners who do not necessarily have a background in either pedagogy or philosophy.

These notes will form the core of an article I am writing, and hope to have done before the summer. This talk was loosely chronological; I am not sure if I will keep that in the artcle, structure it another way.

Film school pedagogy

• My research has showed there is material on «how to»—for example, Training the Trainers from 2005 (Dick Ross, published by the Norwegian Film School & CILECT).
• There is a great deal of material written about the content of what is taught to the students but very little material that related film school teaching to educational theory in general.
• My intro to film school pedagogy: Danish researcher Heidi Philipsen conducted pedagogy lectures for staff at NFS in 2010.
• Her study of the Danish Film School of the late 1990s and early 2000s revealed the key role of scaffolding and constraints in their teaching model.

Areas of investigation

• Vygotsky and the Zone of proximal development and Dewey’s focus on the connection between experience, reflection, and learning.
• 4E Cognition: the embodied, extended, and enactive mind.
• Phenomenology and perceptual learning give us a better understanding our sensory interactions with the world.
• Situated learning examines how learners are integrated into professional fellowships.
• The nature of imagination, emotion, and creativity. And the role of art in human evolution…
• From tacit to explicit…micro-phenomenology, focussing and deep analysis of the particular, specific experience.

Experiential learning–Dewey

• John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the originator of modern theories of experiential learning.
• For Dewey, experience was essential to understanding ourselves and to how philosophy is done. Experience is the result of us engaging with the world, of living.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results. (Democracy and Education, 1916)

• Believed that we learn “…to know by doing, and to do by knowing.” (An Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Education, 1889)
• Many of his ideas continue to resonate in contemporary theories of enactive cognition.

As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another. (How We Think, 1910)

Experiential learning

• David Kolb (1939- ) — see Kolbs learning cycle. A useful model, but also limited in the way it separates thinking / reflecting from action and experience, rather than integrating them.
• Donald Schön (1939-1997) wrote extensively about reflection-in-action: the ability to reflect while in a situation, showing experiential learning as a continuous process—what can be colloquially called “thinking on our feet”.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

• Paolo Freire (1921-1997). Brazilian educator who conceived of education as a process of liberation. For education to function as a liberating force, there must be a democratic relationship between the students and teacher.
• Very critical of the “banking model of education”, where teachers “deposit” knowledge in the student, that the student will utilise later. This perpetuates a rigid power dynamic, with the teacher cast as the infallible expert.

For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970)

Engaged pedagogy

• bell hooks (Gloria Watkins, 1952-2021) was an American writer, feminist, activist, and educator. Inspired by Freire and education as a tool for liberation.

To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. Not only did it require movement beyond accepted boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without a full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices. Agendas had to be flexible, had to allow for spontaneous shifts in direction. Students had to be seen in their particularity as individuals […] and interacted with according to their needs. (Teaching to Transgress, 1994)

Experiential learning and art

• Maxine Greene (1917-2014) was a pioneer for women in the field of philosophy of education.
• Wrote about the connection between artistic practice and experiential learning; focussed on the arts as a method for us to find our own voice in society.
• Pioneered the concept, “wide-awakeness”.

Informed encounters with works of art are always new beginnings. New perspectives open in experience; new possibilities of seeing, hearing, feeling are revealed. When individuals are released to be personally present to paintings or poems or sonatas, when they learn how to let their energies go out to the works in an enlarging perception and a focusing of attention, the fields over which their imaginations can play deepen, diversify, and expand. (“The Spaces of Aesthetic Education”, 1986)

Scaffolding – Vygotsky

• Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Soviet psychologist who worked extensively with children’s development.
• Fell out of favour with Stalin, and his works were suppressed until 1956; not well known in the west until the 1970s.
• Did extensive studies of how we learn language.
• Best known for the “Zone of proximal development” (ZPD).
• ZPD emphasises the social aspect of learning.
• The term “scaffolding” was coined by Jerome Bruner, David Wood, and Gail Ross in 1976 as a metaphor for what educators do to enable the ZPD.
• A scaffold is a temporary structure that is adjusted and adapted to serve the needs of the construction—analogous to what educators do to support the students appropriate to their skill level.
• 5 criteria for effective scaffolding:
  • Student ownership of the learning event
  • Appropriateness of the instructional task
  • A structured learning environment
  • Shared responsibility
  • Transfer of control
  • (Applebee, A. N. 1986. ‘Problems in process approaches: Towards a reconceptualization of process instruction’)

Phenomenology

• Examines our perceptions and how they inform our experience of and interaction with the world we inhabit.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61), wrote, “Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945/1962)
• Wrote about the overlapping and intertwining between the artist and the world and the artwork as the representation of this relationship.

Cognitive science

• 4E Cognition: Embodied, Enactive, Embedded, Extended—emerged from psychology and philosophy in the 1990s as a response to computational theories of mind.
  • Embodied cognition is the claim that cognition is routinely shaped in fundamental ways by bodily forms, movements, states and processes.
  • Enactivism claims that cognition is enacted (unfolds) through looping sensorimotor interactions between the agent and its environment, implying both a close relationship between perception and action, and that there is continuity between the properties of life and of mind. (ref. Dewey)
  • Embedded cognition is the claim that external factors (such as resources or environments) act as noncognitive aids to an internal thinking system located in the brain; so, while the external factors enable cognition, they are not themselves counted as cognitive.
  • Extended cognition instead argues that cognition can involve a coupled system of brain, bodily and external factors: all of which count as cognitive.
  • (Definitions from “4E Cognition and the Mind-Expanding Arts”, Miranda Anderson, 2022)
• 4E cognition gained prominence after the publication of The Embodied mind (1991 / 2017) (Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch).
• Further developed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their article “The Extended Mind” (1998), which introduced the concept of the tools we use being part of our cognition as well.
• The notion of “embodiment” comes naturally for the arts. Using 4E cognition as a framework for understanding how to teach artists has particularly been prevalent in music teaching.

[We] are thoroughly permeated by emotion and by readiness for action. Emotion, cognition, and preparation for action here form a single whole, self-organized around precision weighted, prediction-error minimizing interactions that span cortical and sub-cortical circuits. These interactions couple the active body to the predictive brain. (Miller, Mark and Andy Clark, «Happily entangled: prediction, emotion, and the embodied mind», 2018)

4E and the arts

[…] embracing enactivism in the idea that embodiment and culture are integrated to form a whole, [we] propose to regard aesthetic experience as a “double attunement” toward the objects: immediate and affective, re-organisational and reflective at once. [W]ithin a 4E perspective “[b]ody, brain and environment form one system in which aesthetic experience can be simultaneously and variously characterized as sensory-motor, affective, cultural, and cognitive” (Batisti, Filippo & Elena Valeri, “Embodiment and Aesthetics: Cognition Going Wider”, 2020)

• Anthropologist Tim Ingold invokes Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind theory and describes making (sketching, for example) as thinking, not just the product of thinking.
• Shows how art and creativity are an essential part of humanity throughout history and across cultures.

Perception

• 3rd Century Greek philosopher Diogenes Laertius wrote about how a lay person will see something different than a sculptor will when looking at a statue.
• Perceptual Learning (developed by psychologist Eleanor J. Gibson, 1910-2002) describes long-term changes in our perception—our senses—as a result of practice or experience.
• Classic example: the sommelier, who has trained their sense of taste to perceive details of grapes, terroir, vintage, etc. that the ordinary wine-loving amateur cannot sense. These changes in perception are significant, permanent, and the result of practice.

Micro-phenomenology

• Micro-phenomenology builds on the phenomenological idea of the relationship of the consciousness, the body, and the world and applies it to a particular experience.

The specificity of the micro-phenomenological interview method is that it focuses on a singular experience. […] This act enables us to leave our “natural attitude” of absorption into the content of experience (the “what”), to reorient our attention towards the way this experience appears to us (the “how”), and notably towards the usually prereflective micro-acts through which this appearance is constituted. (Claire Petitmengin, ‘Discovering the Structures of Lived Experience’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 18, no. 4, Sept. 2019)

• Can be used as a technique for helping the individual understand what happens in the moment of intuition, inspiration, or creation and thus learn to both anticipate the moment as well as more reliably create the conditions for these moments in the future.

Embodied critical thinking

• Arises both from micro-phenomenology and from the American philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, who wrote about “focussing” and the “felt sense”.

Focusing is an experiential, embodied and evidence-based practice of self-reflection. During Focusing , your attention will open up to multiple layers and aspects of living.  It’s called Focusing because it requires a special kind of focus to notice what is not yet clear, fuzzy and vague, implicit in how you interact with your situations and environment.  This fuzzy dimension of experience is called the “felt sense.”  Focusing on the felt sense allows an in-depth clarification process to happen. (‘What Is Focusing?’ The International Focusing Institute, https://focusing.org/felt-sense/what-focusing)

• There is currently an international research project on embodied critical thinking coordinated by the University of Iceland, involving several European institutions: Training embodied critical thinking and understanding. (https://www.trainingect.com/)