Second E-MAPS annual conference

From "Learning" to "Learning to Learn" - Knowledge is a matter of doing

The reformulation of the most basic concepts of education by such educationalists as Dewey and Montessori at the turn of the 20th century was very much a response to the times, as it sought to steer the human being's formation process towards child-centredness and away from the stranglehold of patriarchal power, from a mentality of dominance to one of creative empowerment and open innovation.

Those times were seeing the West's edifice of unshakable, time-hallowed structures creaking at the seams; a centuries-old social fabric reeled as the industrial revolution's failed promises choked streets with workers marching and suffragettes chanting.

Façades collapsed with stock markets in clouds of dust. The hounds of war, unleashed by tottering empires, barked and wreaked havoc; the canons of the arts shook, the pillars of metaphysics swayed, evolution cast doubt on our pride of pedigree, while revolutions sent rights and wrongs reeling in a frenzied gavotte, in freedom's name bathing everything in gore.

Man's calculation makes us - alas, all too often - fall prey to a coldness that, out of the human beings we are, engenders the inhuman. "It seems we have the capacity to be wrong in rather creative ways - so wrong that this world we cannot understand may become one in which we cannot live" warns Gregory Bateson.

In such a scenario, working in the wake of Pestalozzi, Dewey and Montessori, theatre-masters started seeing their art-form's uniqueness: the performer works and creates without any medium, elevating his very being to the level of an opus, a work of art.

In 1918/1922, in the face of World War I and of the Russian revolution, Stanislavski's exhortation to performers was "You must radiate beauty so as to make others want to radiate beauty too", defying the bedlam of a time indulging in horror, death, destruction. With that as his project, he intuited that if this art form was to be able to constantly re-form those engaging in it, then it required a potent pedagogy that could enable one not only to develop but - more importantly - to become aware of that development, notwithstanding there being no product which its maker could scrutinise retrospectively to evaluate whether or not he was indeed empowering himself. And that would be a pedagogy of change and innovation, not one that "teaches facts".

Cognitive scientists S. Goldin-Meadow and S.M. Wagner (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, May 2005) say: "We know a great deal about the stages children pass through as they go from knowing less to knowing more. But we understand very little about how these changes take place, that is, about the mechanisms responsible for knowledge change. An excellent place to begin an exploration of the mechanisms underlying change is at the points of transition - moments when a learner is on the verge of change." Performers train and work, specifically, to keep themselves continually on that verge of change, endlessly at the point of transition.

Consider how absurd for a performer to tell someone "you should have seen my performance yesterday; creative changes occurred in it, but today I only repeated them." Performers have no fixed products to offer. What they offer is to be seen engaged in the very act of taking action creatively, elevating human action and behaviour aesthetically and ethically. Performance art is precisely that.

Stanislavski's lifelong work sought nothing else. Nearly a century before cognitive science's amazing discoveries, and under Soviet "fundamentalist" pressure not to be "mystical", he says: "What I am doing doesn't mean I want to create inspiration by artificial means, of course. No, that would be impossible. What I would like to learn is how to create favourable conditions for the creation of inspiration at will, that condition in the presence of which creativity is almost likely to enter an actor's soul." Creativity is not a sellable commodity. It can only be fostered, by the facilitation of contexts which promote it.

In The Emergence of Intelligence (Scientific American, October 1994), prefacing his statement with "as improbable as the idea initially seems", W.H. Calvin holds that language, music and intelligence were promoted by changes resulting in man's brain as a consequence of it needing to meet the demands of planning ballistic movements (extremely rapid and precise limb movements which, once started, can in no way be changed; striking a nail with a hammer, for example). The brain's motor programme enabled the emergence of intelligence and of linguistic and musical capabilities. It is the engine of change, the force behind transition. Small wonder that theatre pedagogues, dealers in precise human action, hold, with Educators, that knowledge is a matter of doing.

At this point in time, with the new "Creativity Economy" paradigm emerging and overtaking the former "Knowledge Economy" (Business Week devoted practically its entire August issue to warning big business and multi-nationals to abandon the old paradigm fast if they want to survive), E-MAPS is poised to ride the "tide in the affairs of men", as Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar.

Recognising that tide, in December 2003 the EU gave Malta's E-MAPS the third largest of the 50 grants it awarded for Tertiary Curriculum Development applications from the 25 EU States. With that grant E-MAPS has to design, in three years, a two-year Master's programme in five disciplines, with students travelling to Paris, Rome Leicester, Poznan and Malta to study in three of its network's five universities. But what will they be studying?

E-MAPS' five disciplines are Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy, Performer Studies and Sports Sciences. Clearly enough, then, E-MAPS is not setting out to "prepare" performers or sportsmen. What is this master's mission statement, then, its aims and objectives? Its approach is two-pronged.

Recent cognitive studies show that today's sophisticated training regimens power contemporary performers' memory systems and learning processes - structures underpinning the creative faculty. Research into the physiological foundations of these phenomena is opening hitherto unforeseen vistas for creativity and education. On the one hand, therefore, E-MAPS proposes to prepare researchers for this exciting field, thus homing into the creativity economy.

On the other hand, E-MAPS' declared aims and objectives, the strength of which secured it the EU grant, commits E-MAPS to "study contexts which encourage and contexts which inhibit the fundamental human need to be creative". The European Union's transversal policies set out to tackle contexts which all too often result in impairments of self-awareness, contexts as xenophobia, racism, socio-economic disadvantages, inequality.

Strengthened by the insights accruing from its research on memory, learning and creativity, E-MAPS graduates will be prepared to generate programmes of work aimed at enabling and strengthening Creativity in persons inhibited by such crippling contexts, thus seeking to combat such impairments by means of their very antithesis.

Of interest in this field will be the talk of Dr M.A. Umiltà, research collaborator to world-renowned Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti, discoverer of mirror neurons. This key speech, opening the conference on Wednesday, is entitled "Inter-personal Relation - a Neuro-physiological Perspective". Dr Umiltà will preface it with a public talk on Tuesday at 6 p.m., also at the Italian Cultural Institute, entitled "Actions, Intentions, Emotions: Understanding the Behaviour of Others. Underlying Physiological Foundations".

E-MAPS' second annual conference, entitled "The Arts/Sciences Bridge: its Human Foundations", will present its Curriculum and Methodology. E-MAPS' team believes strongly in the untapped powers of the human being. When launched in October 2007, the Master's course will testify to this holistic belief in the oneness of "the sciences", "the arts" and "the economy".

E-maps' five disciplines, strengthened by the specificities of its evaluator, Joseph F.X. Zahra, are set to produce a truly unique European Master's degree programme, a programme which hopes to give a unique contribution to education, in the widest sense of that word.

The conference opens on Wednesday at 4.30 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, Valletta, and continues at actionbase Studio, Naxxar, on Thursday from 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. For inquiries and reservations (Lm7.50; Lm5 for students) contact Katrina Baillie on kbail01@um.edu. mt or on 2340-2989.