Biosocial Education

The Social and Biological Entanglements of Learning

Deborah Youdell, Martin R. Lindley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415787109
• eBook ISBN: 9781351850025
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this groundbreaking text, Youdell and Lindley bring together cutting-edge research from the fields of biology and social science to explore the complex interactions between the diverse processes which impact on education and learning.

Transforming the way we think about our students, our classrooms, teaching and learning, Biosocial Education draws on advances in genetics and metabolomics, epigenetics, biochemistry and neuroscience, to illustrate how new understandings of how bodies function can and must inform educational theory, policy and everyday pedagogical practices. Offering detailed insight into new findings in these areas and providing a compelling account of both the implications and limits of this new-found knowledge, the text confronts the mechanisms of interaction between multiple biological and social factors, and explores how educators might mobilize these 'biosocial' influences to enhance learning and enable each child to attain educational success.

By seeking out transdisciplinary and multi-factor answers to the question of how education works and how children learn, this book lays the foundations for a step-change in the way we approach learning. It is an essential read for researchers, teachers and practitioners involved in educational policy and practice at any level.

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The social and biological entanglements of learning

Why we wrote this book

This book brings together the most recent research from the biological and social sciences in order to think differently about education and about learning. The book is unusual because it is written collaboratively by a sociologist of education (Deborah) and a human biologist (Martin). From our first thinking about the book, we wanted to bring the social and the biological together; we wanted to understand, and help readers to understand, how social and biological processes are entangled with each other and the implications of this for how we think about education and learning.

This is a contentious project. Education scholarship carries a longstanding mistrust of biology, due largely to the perception that biology naturalizes and fixes differences (often referred to in critical literature as ‘biological determinism’) and that this naturalizing and fixing is particularly evident when biological knowledge is mobilized politically in ways that segregate and discriminate on grounds of race, disability gender and so on. This has been seen most starkly in eugenicist accounts of who is fit to be educated and the practices of exclusion, and indeed extermination, that eugenic thinking has been mobilized to justify. This history continues to reverberate in education, with ideas of differentially distributed natural intelligence still widely influential. We will return to this in Chapter 3, Optimizing humans.

Yet contemporary education policy is engaged increasingly with the new biological sciences, in particular neuroscience and genetics. And while policy engages biology, the last 20 or 30 years has seen diminishing policy interest in sociologically orientated research – policy concerned with competition and accountability has little or no point of articulation with sociological research concerned with injustices and inequalities in which policy itself is implicated. This sets up a series of alignments and divisions in which biological sciences become more and more central to education and wider public policy, while the sociology of education becomes more divorced from and inconsequential to this policy. The fear amongst critical education scholars is that this turn to neuroscience and genetics will allow education policy to be undergirded by ideas of ‘hard wired’ brains and genetic intelligence, leaving institutional processes and students’ experiences out of the analysis and leading, in turn, to inequalities in education being explained as the biological deficit of particular populations of students and, potentially, not open to intervention.

A key problem for us is that these sorts of accounts of the naturalizing and fixing effects of biology do not reflect the sort of findings that are being presented by research in the new biological sciences. Much of this research is characterized by the recognition of the complex interplay between social, environmental and biological processes and attempts to identify the mechanism of these combined influences. Applied to education, this recognition of the interplay of social, environmental and biological processes suggests that education studies and new biological sciences need to find ways to engage in collaborative scholarship in order to make best use of their respective insights and better understand the biosocial processes at stake in education. Drawing on our own previous research in sociology of education and human biology, and borrowing from cutting-edge developments in epigenetics, nutrigenomics, biochemistry and neuroscience, we want to explore how it is possible to integrate emerging evidence from new biological sciences with evidence from sociology of education, showing how the social and the biological are folded together in an endless exchange of influence and demonstrating how this new insight provides the foundation for a step change in our thinking about and approaches to education and learning. This book is the beginning of this work.

Standardized tests, stress and the biosocial

To begin to illustrate the potential significance of the biosocial approach we are taking, we start by considering Standardized Assessment Tests (SATs), the national standardized assessment tests that children as young as 6 and 7 sit each summer in schools across England. The tests are used to measure the performance of schools and report on the adequacy of progress made by children. As is now common, in the weeks and days leading up to the annual SAT tests, social media and the press carry strings of articles and posts that attest to the limited relevance and usefulness of the tests (Guardian 09/05/17) and the harm done by them to children, and sometimes to teachers (Rosen, 2017).

Educationalists’ concerns over the forms of high-stakes testing that are now well established internationally have focused on the way that such tests alter the way that schools and classrooms operate, drive selective practices and make inequalities worse instead of better (Apple, 2006; Gillborn, 2008; Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Thompson, 2016). More recently, however, popular and educational concern has shifted to the impact of these tests on children’s well-being. In England, the national tests that are compulsory in primary schools have come to be discussed in popular and news media in terms of the ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’ they cause children, reported as manifest in a range of ways: from tears and sleeplessness to one teacher’s account of a child’s eyelashes falling out (Weale, 1 May 2017).

There is a body of critical work in education that engages with the emotional dimensions of education, and foregrounds the importance of the psychic encounter between the teacher, the learner and learning (Bibby, 2011, 2017; Zembylas, 2007), as well as the social nature of feelings as they circulate in classrooms and between students and teachers (Harwood et al., 2017; Hickey-Moody, 2009; Kraftl, 2013; Youdell, 2011). Furthermore, recent research has offered compelling accounts from students and parents of their ‘stressful’ experiences of contemporary schooling in general and assessment regimes in particular, giving weight to the popular accounts discussed earlier (Youdell et al., 2018). Yet while work of this sort tells us much about the psychosocial dimensions of teachers’ and students’ encounters with assessment-driven education, it is not able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of ‘stress’; or what the implications – emotional, educational, embodied – of these experiences might be.

Social media and press reports use ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’ as interchangeable popular terms, calling up our common sense notions or experiences of feeling anxious or stressed. ‘Stress’ and ‘anxiety’ are referenced as though we know in advance what these are, how to recognize them, and what their implications are for children. Yet in scholarly psychological and biological research, as well as in clinical practice, the terms stress and anxiety have specific meanings that are embedded in the typological, diagnostic and biological parameters of the disciplines. This means that when education commentators claim that children are made stressed or anxious by assessment regimes, this may not be demonstrable in the terms of the disciplines in which stress and anxiety exist as identifiable and diagnosable psychological and/or physiological conditions. Furthermore, when critical sociologically and psychoanalytically orientated work seeks to speak to feelings, their flows and their experiences – in particular difficult feelings or feelings of ‘disease’ in the classroom (Bibby, 2011, 2017: 2) – this is seldom in terms of ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’ (whether in scientific or lay terms) and so does not map straightforwardly onto life science definitions. Key here is that existing sociologically informed education research provides important insight into the significance of feeling in education, its capacity to speak to the ‘more-than-social’ is limited (Kraftl, 2013) – it cannot tell us about the physiology, neuroscience or biochemistry of ‘stress’.

When we claim that children are made anxious or stressed by SATs, then, do we really know what anxiety and stress are? Are we able to demonstrate anxiety or stress? Do we know what is happening physiologically? Are we clear about the effects? And can we show how this anxiety or stress is generated in the ebb and flow of pedagogic practices and relationships in the everyday of classroom and school life?

We do not pose these questions to refute claims that education dominated by high-stakes tests is stressful for children, or that this stress might be both bad for their health and counterproductive for their education. Instead, we want to, first, hold over the claim until we have properly furnished it with current understandings of the mechanisms and effects of anxiety and stress drawn from the new biological sciences and, second, interlaced this bioscience with nuanced understandings of school processes and pedagogic practices. By doing this, we may begin to see how stressful educational styles and situations become instantiated in the bodies of some children in ways that can affect both their current and future health and well-being and their current and future educational engagement and capacities to learn. The issue of school and stress, then, provides a useful first illustration of how the social and the biological are tied together, and how schools have everything to do with these entanglements. We will return to the look in detail at stress and other feelings in Chapter 5, Feeling the classroom.

A love affair with biology

Policy makers, the media and the public can at times seem to be involved in a love affair with new biological sciences. Findings from genetics and neuroscience research, in particular, have been made into mainstream media headlines, are shared widely through social media, and furnish evidence for genetic- and brain-science-based policy making and professional practice – seen in particular in the use in early years policies of epigenetic and neuroscience research on attachment and brain development. We explore this in Chapter 3, Optimizing humans. The extent of the popular, policy and professional embrace of these new fields has led neuroscientist and critical policy scholar Nikolas Rose to suggest that a ‘new biological age’ has been inaugurated (Rose, 2013). In this new biological age technologies such as genome mapping and brain imaging are shifting the scale at which the body is engaged and transforming what we aspire to know about it (Gulson and Webb, 2016).

While policy and the media appear full of optimism, critical social science scholars have raised concerns over the way that ideas from these new biosciences have been taken up and put to work in expert discourse, policy and professional practice. Indeed, as ideas drawn from the new biological sciences are used to shape parenting interventions, early years provision, school education and approaches in the criminal justice system, critical scholars have argued that a set of a new ‘bio-rationalities’ can be seen to be taking hold (Baker, 2015; Gulson and Webb, 2016). With policy and popular responses to the promise of new biosciences so positive, it is important to understand the misgivings of critical scholars. Exploring these policy directions and the biological research underpinning them is a central task of this book, and we will explore social science misgivings fully in Chapter 3, Optimizing humans. Here it is useful to illustrate the disconnection between the popular and policy enthusiasm and the critical sociological concern. For instance, in parenting and children’s services, ideas have been taken from bioscience research to inform the way that the quality of parenting is understood and assessed and, in turn, to assert the impact of parenting on child development and promote particular sorts of parenting practice (Allen, 2011; Feinstein, 2003). While for policy makers and practitioners this new evidence helps identify and support better parenting practices, critical scholars have argued that, based on the available scientific evidence, the policy over-claims and even misleads and is intrusive to and demonizing of parents (Wastell and White, 2012; Edwards et al., 2015; Gillies, 2008). Similarly, education policy borrows from behavioural genetics research that uses ‘genome wide association studies’ to support the notion of ‘g’ – generalized genetic intelligence (Ashbury and Plomin, 2014), yet this intelligence research has been dismantled in critical sociological work (Gillborn, 2010, 2016).

Despite the emergent nature of research findings, part of the popular and policy love affair with new biological sciences seems to rest on the fantasy of complete insight and understanding. This fantasy seems to imagine that new technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanners that can image the blood flow of brains while they function, and electron microscopy that can see inside cells and even molecules, enable bioscientists to see into the body across scales to the finest level of granularity – into the cell and on into the DNA itself – and know precisely what the thing seen does. This fantasy, we suggest, is often fuelled by computer-generated images (CGI), which leave unclear the line between seen and imagined, object and function, science and science fiction.

While sociology has tended towards critique of policy uses of new bioscience evidence, we emphasize from the outset that all research in the biosciences is not the same, and that policy makers’ and media uses and abuses of work in these fields is not the same as the research itself. Scientists working in frontier fields such as epigenetics, metabolomics and neuroscience emphasize the preliminary nature of their findings, the fact that molecular mechanisms are being identified that are only beginning to be understood (Pappa et al., 2015; Rose and Rose, 2013, van Ijzendoorn et al., 2011), and the need for further research to support translation down the line (Fischer et al., 2010; Mileva-Seitz et al., 2016). Yet it is easy for this to seem lost in the media hype, popular excitement and policy take-up.

In this book we argue that it is unwise as well as inaccurate to dismiss research in these new biological sciences on the basis that they have been or might be badly used or misused in policy and political manoeuvring; that they have no relevance for educationalists; or that they are regressive, conservative or otherwise against progressive or critical social justice agendas. Such a move, we argue, fails to engage the most exciting and potentially important areas of work in the new biological sciences that are exploring the interface between the biological and the social. This work is generating evidence that the social and the biological cannot be thought of as opposites or even distinct, and so misses the radical or unexpected potentialities of biosciences that are now precisely concerned with the ongoing interplay and exchange of influence between the social, environmental and biological. We need, we suggest, to work across these currents or research in order to develop educational understanding and practice that is biosocial.

People and bodies

Put simply, sociology is concerned with people in their social milieu and in relation to social institutions, and human biology is concerned with the functioning of the human body. A biosocial approach unsettles this neat distinction between a person who is social and a body, which is biological.

Of course, the social sciences have an abiding interest in the body, in particular people’s experiences of embodiment and how the body is made meaningful and how its capacities are socially constrained. Likewise, philosophy has a longstanding concern with the relationship between mind, body, self and brain. Across such engagements with the fundamentally embodied nature of the person, the body remains interpretive, and the interior of the body – from beating hearts to metabolic pathways within cells and movements across membranes – remain out of reach.

In recent humanities and feminist scholarship concerns with embodiment have moved on to consider the human and the relationship between the human and other forms of life, objects, the environment and the planet itself. This posthuman (Braidotti, 2013) work has posited an orientation where the not-human or more-than-human are foregrounded and the distinction between the human and its milieu suspended. This informs much ‘new materialist’ (Coole and Frost, 2010) work that aims to foreground the materiality of the body and the worlds bodies inhabit and interact with; refusing a special status for the human and insisting on the capacity of the non-human to make things happen (Bennett, 2010) and the productive intra-actions of actants in phenomena (Barad, 2007). Like the scholarship in sociology, however, much of this work does not move to an encounter with the scientific evidence of the porosity and malleability of the body, and so the materiality of the body and its milieu remains a matter of theory or poetics.

There are notable exceptions that offer ideas for how we might go about working biosocially. Catherine Malabou works across feminist theories of gender and neuroscientific assertions of brain plasticity to propose a fundamental transformability of sex and gender (Malabou, 2009). Samantha Frost’s work traverses scales and domains of knowledge from the molecular to the cultural builds an account of the human as biocultural creature (Frost, 2016). Elizabeth Wilson’s work on the entanglement of social, cultural and economic forces and the central and peripheral nervous system (Wilson, 2015) and Celia Roberts’ biopsychosocial investigation of contemporary puberty (Roberts, 2015) both demonstrate the possibility of moving across domains of evidence. We extend these approaches through our engagement with the problem of the relationship between body, brain and person, and what new biosocial accounts mean for understanding the human in Chapter 4, Being human.

The new biosciences

The new biosciences that we are interested in throughout this book are those that acknowledge and explore the interaction between the biological and the social, or the environmental as it is more often termed in these sciences. Being concerned with this interaction, these biosciences have particular potential to be articulated with social sciences and, through this articulation, the potential to transform how we think about ourselves, our bodies, and our relationship with our social and material environment, and about education.

Epigenetics is perhaps the most prominent of these and can be thought of as being where work in genetics has moved to since the human genome was mapped. It asks how genes are made to work, how they are regulated and expressed, and importantly, how environments influence how genes work during our lifetimes as well as across generations. Epigenetics findings of environmental influences on how genes are regulated and expressed show that genes and the cellular activities they manage are changeable. This means that genes are not the fixed components of what and who we are, while the social is a separate set of factors that influence just those bits of us that are changeable. Rather, genes and environment are both subject to change and, furthermore, they are enfolded together.

While epigenetics is the area of new biology that has captured headlines and significant engagement from social scientists, it is not the only field in the new biological sciences that recognizes the important entanglement of the biological and social. For instance, nutrigenomics is concerned with the within-generation interaction between diet and the body’s genetic code; metabolomics is concerned with the intermediate chemical processes involved in metabolism through which factors such as nutrition and physi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The social and biological entanglements of learning
• 2 When biology and the social meet
• 3 Optimizing humans
• 4 Being human: brain-body-environment entanglements
• 5 Feeling the classroom
• 6 Biosocial assemblage: the case of Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder
• 7 Biosocial learning
• References
• Index