Reconsidering the concept of difference: A proposal to connect education and neuroscience in new ways

Abstract

Connecting neuroscience and education is a desire in contemporary society, related to the recurring calls for education to become more evidence-based. Research in educational neuroscience strives towards such interdisciplinary knowledge production and to an enhanced interaction between neuroscience research and educational practice. However, various problems and difficulties in achieving these collaborations are often reported. Discrepancies, hierarchies, misconceptions and communication problems can be described as creating a ‘discourse of difficulty’. The aim of this paper is to trace the specific difficulties that have created this discourse, and to problematize these difficulties in ways that enable new conceptions of what might be entailed by interaction and mutual knowledge development between the fields of neuroscience and education, and between academic theory and educational practice. The most significant difficulty is caused by a binary understanding of the concept of difference in relation to understanding the fields. Instead of understanding the fields in opposition to each other, I will suggest an understanding that implies difference emerging in each of the collaborating fields as the self-differing effects of the encounter. In the concluding discussion, I will argue that an understanding of the concept of difference as a process of mutual transformation can be essential for reciprocity and bi-directionality in collaborations. Instead of producing contradictions and hierarchies between scientific fields and between theory and practice, such an understanding of difference might facilitate an investigation of the polarizations that always position something as of lesser value, and ultimately, creates the gaps that collaborations want to bridge.

Introduction

Connecting neuroscience with education is a desire for interdisciplinary research, educators and educational stakeholders, aiming to develop their practices on new or more evidence-based research. Like the overall call for education to be based on scientific evidence, this desired connection has been discussed for 20 years and has been shown to comprise both theoretical discussions on the potential conflicts between scientific paradigms, as well as problems across the theory-practice divide. The first aim of this paper is therefore to investigate the collaborations reported so far in this emerging field, which has sometimes been called educational neuroscience (Fischer et al., 2010), but also has been referred to as Mind, Brain, and Education (Fischer et al., 2007) and neuroeducation (Howard-Jones, 2010). In 2007, advocators for collaboration in this field claimed the necessity of developing a transdiscipline for this connection and collaboration (Fischer et al., 2007). The term ‘transdiscipline’ can be understood as referring to the aim of a joint production of knowledge that exceeds what the disciplines and the relationship between academic theory and educational practice can produce (Della Chiesa et al., 2009; Knox, 2016).

In this paper, I will discuss the difficulties that have been put forward by the researchers in this field, which I will henceforth refer to as the field of educational neuroscience, at the theoretical, methodological, and practical levels. As will be shown, dichotomisations and hierarchical positions constitute recurrent problems at all levels. Depending on whether they concern knowledge production in academic disciplines or the theory-practice relationship, binary divisions are generated in different ways and with different effects. Recurrently, the divisions are expressed in terms of a ‘gap’ that needs to be ‘bridged’ (e.g. Bruer, 1997; Fischer et al., 2007; Samuels, 2009). The research problem for this paper concerns the implications of the taken-for-granted understanding of difference – between disciplines or between theory and practice – as something that is mutually exclusionary, and thereby positioning something in a relation of opposition to something else. When displacing this taken-for-granted binary logic, inherent to the historical and contemporary discussions in the field of educational neuroscience, it becomes possible to think about the relations and differences between disciplines and fields in other ways. The aim in this paper is thus (a) to investigate what the problems of connections and collaborations in the historical and contemporary discussions within educational neuroscience entail and become productive of; and (b) to discuss the possibilities of another way of understanding the perceived differences discussed, and how a displaced understanding of the concept of ‘difference' can potentially become productive of other ways of thinking about connections and collaborations between disciplines and fields in this discussion.

The paper will be organized as follows. In the upcoming background section, I will expand on the arguments made above. This is followed by the main section of the paper, where I will trace the various aspects of what I will describe as an entangled ‘discourse of difficulty’ and its four intertwined and converging discursive articulations .To make the analysis easier to grasp, these are named: the discourse of bridging-the-gap, the discourse of discrepancy, the discourse of myths and (mis)interpretations, and the discourse of reciprocity and hierarchies. In the subsequent section, I will discuss how these entangled ‘discourses of difficulties’ converge in what I understand as the self-taken role and articulations of cognitive psychology as the necessary centre, hub or connecting bridge between the field of neuroscience and teaching practices of education. Cognitive psychology takes this position, I claim, both in terms of a knowledge discipline, and in terms of a practice: a research practice proper for this field and a practice of educational strategies. The subsequent section discusses the knowledge that can be gained from a study that I performed at three preschools outside Stockholm, Sweden, which will be briefly presented in the upcoming background section. The paper concludes by discussing a potential reconsideration of the desired connection between the neurosciences and education. I will argue for a reconceptualized understanding of the concept of difference as something mutually excluding, in favour of understanding difference as what Lenz Taguchi (2017) has theorized as a self-differentiation process, emerging as an effect of encounters, connections and collaborations between different conceptual understandings or practices.

Background

Educational neuroscience constitutes an emerging field of research, which has expanded on a par with the development of non-invasive neuro-image technologies (Howard-Jones, 2010). The expansion of educational neuroscience has been supported by an increased interest among teachers, policy makers and media in what is often referred to as brain-based education (Busso and Pollack, 2015). Among the researchers themselves, a frequently proclaimed aim of this field of research is to emphasize the importance of neuroscience in the quest to achieve more evidence-based legitimacy for educational practice (Fischer et al., 2007). Educational neuroscience research thus assumes that evidence-based education requires research from the natural sciences and primarily experimental research on neural and cognitive processes. In so doing, researchers claim to strive for reciprocal interactions between teachers and researchers in what I will henceforth refer to as the neurosciences (Hruby, 2012). Cognitive psychology positions itself as a sub-discipline of the umbrella term of the neurosciences (Ansari and Coch, 2006). Such relationships aim to counteract simplified conclusions of results from brain-imaging studies and further developments of the so-called neuromyths (Bruer, 2002, 2006; Goswami, 2006). In connection with this increased interest, a recurrent critical discussion, mostly from the outside of the field, on epistemological and methodological implications of applying neuroscience research results in educational practices has arisen (e.g. Vandenbroeck et al., 2017). These criticisms primarily focus on what is perceived as an underlying assumption that education should be profitable and consequently measurable. This entails individual learning and scientific expertise as superior to social and relational aspects and professional knowledge (Vandenbroeck et al., 2017).

As I pursue the first aim of this paper, I will discuss the problems repeatedly reported from within the field itself. Partly in contrast to the critique from the outside, this is rather about problems of the six following kinds: (a) application of neuro-findings in practice, difficulties of collaboration (e.g. Beauchamp and Beauchamp, 2012; Martin and Groff, 2011), (b) discrepancies between the neurosciences and education as a social science (e.g. Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015; Samuels, 2009), (c) asymmetric status-relationships between teachers and researchers (e.g. Edelenbosch et al., 2015; Pollack and Taevs, 2011), (d) translation impediments (e.g. Bowers, 2016; Kalra and O’Keeffe, 2010), (e) educational implementations of neuroscience research being perceived as a misuse of the science (e.g. Della Sala and Anderson, 2012; Pasquinelli, 2012), and (f) divergences in conceptualisation (Hruby, 2012). All of these partial problems or matters of concern within the field of educational neuroscience can, when taken together, be understood as forming what I have chosen to call an overarching ‘discourse of difficulty’ based on the discussions in the field (e.g. Ansari and Coch, 2006; Bruer, 2002, 2006; Fischer et al., 2007; Goswami, 2006; Pollack and Taevs, 2011; Ronstadt and Yellin, 2010; Samuels, 2009; Willingham, 2009). This ‘discourse of difficulty’ appears to be very dominating and strong in the light of the many reports about the strong desire to bring neuroscience and education together.

To understand the entangled problem and the desire to bridge the conceived gap between education (including educational research) and the neurosciences (including cognitive psychology), the difficulties arising in the disciplinary encounters – as well as the possibilities of thinking differently about them – I will rely on a methodology of tracing-and-mapping lines of thinking that constitute the discourses in the field. An essential part of this methodology, developed by Lenz Taguchi (2016a, 2016b), is the double movement of ‘critique and innovative creation’ (2016a: 39). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic principles (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), she combines critical tracing of theories and discourses with an intention to displace the tracings, from one territory on the imagined ‘map’ to another. This is done to produce new connections that might be productive of new ways of understanding and acting. In other words, the methodology aims to connect concepts and lines of thinking so that new narratives or realities can emerge (Lenz Taguchi, 2016a). Hence, this involves, on the one hand, tracing the philosophical problems underpinning various lines of thinking and deconstructing their dominant meaning-constructions, and, on the other hand, performing ‘affirmative micro-political resistance, aiming to be creative of yet unknown potentialities’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2016b: 214). The latter is achieved by experimenting with what might make a difference and basically employing what I will call a ‘what if’ strategy. The selection of studies included in this tracing and mapping is based on the aim of the research to connect, in some way or other, education to the neurosciences (cf. Beauchamp and Beauchamp, 2012).

What are they about, the divergences, asymmetries, ‘misuses’ and so on, which make up the ‘discourse of difficulty’? Why can they not be overcome or solved? And what underpins the strong desire to collaborate as an entangled part of this discourse of difficulty? These questions emanated from my examination of the educational neuroscience research field when I was designing a qualitative study in Swedish preschools. The study aimed to explore what emerged in the encounter between neuroscientific findings and the theories and practices of preschool. In line with the contemporary interest in ‘brain research’ (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013), the preschool teachers were curious about how neuroscience could contribute to their teaching practices. Taken as an invitation to me as a researcher, this was the starting point for this qualitative research project. In a participatory ethnographic fieldwork in three preschools, the teachers and I investigated their pedagogy and literacy practices with children aged 1–5 years in relation to neuroscience research on children’s learning and language development (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018).

The discourse of difficulty

To know more about why it is important and desirable to connect the fields of neuroscience and education, this section will look further into reported obstacles and difficulties, by tracing the problems underpinning the lines of thinking and articulations. In some cases, I will also experiment with possible new connections, in accordance with the double movement of tracing and mapping (Lenz Taguchi, 2016a; 2016b).

The discourse of the desired connection by bridging the gap

The desire for reciprocal connections between the fields of neuroscience and education usually evolves from a strongly perceived notion of a problematic gap between them. This notion takes for granted an idea that the gap needs a bridged relation. The metaphor of ‘bridge the gap’ that Samuels (2009) has used has also been expressed as ‘building bridges’ by Ansari and Coch (2006), ‘build the neuroscience and education bridge’ by Bruer as early as 1997 (see also Fischer et al., 2007; Szűcs and Goswami, 2007; Varma et al., 2008) and even ‘bridge the gulf’ by Goswami (2006). The metaphor thus becomes an almost unquestionable truism. But what constitutes the gap that needs to be bridged, the bridge and the practices of bridging?

Central to ‘bridge the gap’ arguments is the achievement of evidence-based education and the counteraction of oversimplifications and misunderstandings of neuroscience research findings (Dündar and Gündüz, 2016; Howard-Jones, 2014; Worden et al., 2011). The desire for evidence-based education has also resulted in ideas such as neuro-education (see, for example, Busso and Pollack, 2015; Hook and Farah, 2012), which, however, sometimes merely implicate the applications of the results from brain research in educational practices. To ‘bridge the gap' then becomes an issue about replacing, or complementing, the otherwise common applications of sociocultural or constructivist theories in educational practices (cf. Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018; Säljö, 2010; Vallberg Roth, 2014).

To base education foremost on theories and findings from the social sciences, or to consider basing it on findings from the natural sciences is a shift that merely applies to one dimension of the many possible connections that can be made between neuroscience and education; the one going from research to practice. However, there are other ways to make connections. When Bruer (2016) and Beauchamp and Beauchamp (2012) reviewed the field of educational neuroscience, they each presented a substantial number of research studies urging to, besides classroom applications, make interdisciplinary connections and reciprocal scientific collaborations. As follows, another dimension of the desire to connect the fields of science is epistemological and methodological, including the combination of the different types of theoretical reasoning and ways to conduct research (Della Chiesa et al., 2009). For such a dimension to appear, there is – I argue – a need to first deconstruct the metaphor of the bridge/bridging the gap.

The metaphor ‘bridge the gap’ focuses on the problem of overcoming divisions. The very idea of a bridge implies, firstly, that there is something that cannot be connected without assistance and secondly, that there are differences that produce one or several gaps. These gaps can be between theory and practice, between disciplines or even between different scientific paradigms. Thus, although there are several gaps that could be bridged, when the difficulties to integrate the fields are discussed, it is not clear what gap is referred to, or if they are seen as one and the same (e.g. Bowers, 2016; Della Chiesa et al., 2009; Hinton and Fischer, 2008). Maybe, the very establishing of a bridge is more sought after than solving the question of where there is, as Bruer wrote, ground that is firm enough to anchor these bridges (Bruer, 1997:4). To ‘bridge the gap' is a metaphor for connecting with focus on bringing together, yet the essential prerequisite is the very separation – the gap itself. Do bear this in mind, because, as we shall see, the notion of the bridge can actually be seen as what becomes productive of the gap in some of the discursive articulations about the aim of educational neuroscience.

The discourse of discrepancy

There seems to be a consensus that there is a gap and, consequently, that there is not only a problematic separating distance but also an implicit discrepancy between the neurosciences and the field of education (Ansari and Coch, 2006; Bowers, 2016; Hruby, 2012; Samuels, 2009). However, this can be understood and described in various ways. In this section, I will discuss different approaches to discrepancy showing four standpoints on the issue. These, in turn, depend on who, or from where, in the literature in this field the standpoint is expressed. The first example below is articulated from the view and position of social science researchers; the second from neuroscientists involved in collaboration with education; the third from the view of how educators and neuroscientists perceive each other’s fields; and the fourth from the aspirations of a better communication and a common language.

So, how are the discrepancies addressed in the literature from these different positionings? Social scientists Fitzgerald and Callard (2014) take a meta perspective on the issue. They show the social science engagements with neuroscience can be classified as either critique, ebullience or attempts to integrate the fields. Critique and ebullience could be seen as at opposite ends of interdisciplinary approaches, but nevertheless they share a view of sociocultural and neural knowledge as of distinctly different domains. From the critic’s perspective, the boundaries between the fields are what defines the differences and the problematic ‘others’. For the enthusiast, it defines what is to be embraced. However, none of the positions question the boundary, because ‘there are things, and ways of knowing things, that are sociocultural; and there are things, and ways of knowing things, that are not’ (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2014:15). The approach of integration argues instead for downplaying the boundary line by focusing on overlapping interests and questions. But even though the integration approach is advocating collaboration, it is also based on the idea of two different fields and thus a ‘hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neuro-biological architecture’ (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2014:3). Instead of either of these three approaches, Fitzgerald and Callard are proposing to see a shared methodology. This refers to something that could be creating a collaborative space, enabling ‘knowledge [as] a product of, and not a precursor to, disciplinary transaction’ (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2014:21). In this view, there is an ontological discrepancy between the social and natural sciences that could be overcome by a common methodology (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2014).

As neuroscientists collaborating with the education field, Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) address the discrepancy between the neurosciences and education, by pointing to a possible mutual knowledge production. However, they put their emphasis on the various contributions neuroscientific findings can have for educational practices, but they do not equally stress the importance of what educational practice can do for the neurosciences. For example, morality, creativity and culture, all of critical importance to education, also have neurobiological aspects that education, according to Immordino-Yang and Damasio, often fails to take into consideration. Outlining the relationships between emotion, cognition, decision-making and social functioning as entangled, they urge education to reconsider the role of emotions in learning (Immordino-Yang and Damasio, 2007). In other words, they describe an epistemological discrepancy as a result of inadequate or overlooked information on behalf of teachers.

What, then, do teachers and neuroscientists know about each other’s fields? According to Howard-Jones (2010), teachers consider the environment to have a more decisive influence than genetic conditions on children’s development. Even so, they have great faith in brain-based educational programmes. In contrast, neuroscientists’ views on education lack an understanding of the field’s ethical, political and social complexities, according to Howard-Jones (2010). Clearly, both have an overly superficial knowledge in each other's areas. Implicit to Howard-Jones’ description is that because the gap between the fields is due to a lack of transfer of information, it could easily be bridged with a better and more intense transfer. On the other hand, this might constitute a problem, as some of the complexities that Howard-Jones describe include a division, where ‘learning' is a science and ‘teaching' is an art (Howard-Jones, 2010:56). The field of education is thus internally divided, according to Howard-Jones. This leads me to ask how many bridges are needed and between which fields? I understand it as a discrepancy between neuroscientists’ and teachers’ imagined ideas of the other field and their respective professional experience, in turn causing prejudices or simplified ideas. But, as I will discuss further below, there is also an internal discrepancy, at least within education if you consider it a field of both academic research and teaching practices in preschools and schools, where learning and teaching might need their own bridges.

To bridge the discrepancies, the literacy researcher Hruby (2012) suggests the gap between the fields of sciences could be bridged by better communication and professional respect. The terms ‘neuro’ and ‘brain’ are overused, writes Hruby, to imply that the results of neuroscientific research have a higher value than those of educational research. The expertise that exists within educational science, concerning educational theories, scientific research and professional practices, might be overlooked by neuroscientists. By urging neuroscientists to become familiar with educational research, Hruby claims communication between the two scientific fields would be facilitated (Hruby, 2012:18). An example is the way the large body of educational research within the field of reading is most often ignored when neuroscientists describe the neural mechanisms of reading (Hruby, 2012:10). Hruby stresses that a field that claims to focus on educational neuroscience has to acknowledge both neuroscience and educational research.

From the positions of educational and cognitive psychology research, Hruby (2012) and Kalra and O’Keefe (2011; see also Della Chiesa et al., 2009) refer to a need for similar operationalizations enabling more of a common language. They point to the problems caused by divergent uses of scientific language in neuroscience and education. Hruby identifies ‘category error across disciplinary boundaries’ (2012:4), which means that taking research findings in one field to make claims in another leads to a credibility problem (for example, widespread commercialized brain-based learning products) but also a scientific problem. Different disciplines, with their respective methodologies, will study a phenomenon in partially different ways. When the results are moved from one domain to another – or overgeneralized – the theoretical and methodological conditions become invisible (Hruby, 2012).

Hence, the problem of discrepancies due to different language use and the attached meaning-making can be understood as a problem of different kinds and levels of analysis, depending on from which disciplinary position it is argued. Knowledge produced on one premises, or at a level of mechanism and detail, is wrongly connected to knowledge produced on very different premises or on a general level. A phenomenon will be methodologically studied, theoretically understood and differently described at levels ‘from overt behaviour, to covert information processing, to the neural implementation in the brain’ (Kalra and O’Keefe, 2011: 167). Concepts such as memory, learning and attention are used by neuroscientists, psychologists and teachers, but the difference between molecular, behavioural and pedagogical analysis means the terms may also refer to different phenomena (Bruer, 2006). This is reminiscent of the problem of moving findings between disciplines or different analytical levels, which is not just a matter of transferring between natural science and social science. As a subdiscipline of psychology, which is a social science discipline, cognitive psychology will be partly identified with the natural sciences. It is this mixture of knowledge on different levels and kinds that potentially becomes productive of misunderstandings, misinterpretations and an overall messiness according to, for instance, Bruer (2002, 2006), Dubinsky and colleagues (2013) and Hurby (2012). But who is assumed to cause this mess and why is it problematic? To look into these questions, I will trace the concept of myths and the discourse of scientific correctness.

The discourse of myths and (mis)interpretations

Educational neuroscience research aims to develop more evidence-based educational practices (Fischer et al., 2010). This implies actively counteracting the neuromyths emerging from false interpretations of scientific results, and which might thus result in the ‘misapplication’ of the neurosciences (Goswami, 2006; Lindell and Kidd, 2011; Worden et al., 2011). A neuromyth refers to the way neuroscientific concepts could be incorrectly understood, overgeneralized and/or inaccurately simplified when presented to the public. Beauchamp and Beauchamp’s (2012) comprehensive review of the educational neuroscience field shows that half of the 86 articles included raised the theme of ‘misapplication’ (Beauchamp and Beauchamp, 2012:17) in one way or another, referring to ‘neuromyths’.

Weisberg and colleagues (2008) show that neuroscientific explanations are seductive regardless of whether they are accurate, relevant or completely wrong. According to Pasquinelli (2012), myths will undermine the idea of scientifically based decisions. In addition, when neuroscience is transformed into educational quick fixes, the simplification enhances the risk for myth making. This makes the commercialized exploitation of myths even stronger. Goswami (2006) explains that neuromyths become established due to generalization of the results from a neuroscientific study, with recorded data from a limited population in a controlled laboratory setting, to a natural setting with a broader population group. Neuromyths are thus a result of the simplification and generalization of decontextualized facts. Conclusions to whole populations are drawn before it is scientifically proper to do so (Goswami, 2006).

An example of how a myth becomes established is the overuse of the concept of ‘critical periods’ of a child’s brain development. The critical period refers to a point in time when a certain stimulus must have been presented for the brain for a biological function to be activated or for the stimulus to be processed in the standard way (Gazzaniga et al., 2014). For example, if the brain of a child with hearing impairment or deafness is not fully exposed to auditory stimuli in infancy, the child’s sound processing in the brain will not develop to the extent and in the same fashion as that of a fully hearing child, even after hearing is established with cochlear implants or hearing aids (Sharma et al., 2009). In contrast, language acquisition does not seem to have a critical period but instead sensitive periods that differ for different aspects of language such as phonology, semantics and syntax (Worden et al., 2011). The didactic implications of confusing critical periods with sensitive periods would be to mix up ‘use it or lose it’ with ‘take the opportunity’. This results in an unfortunate, rigid social conclusion drawn from more complex neuroscientific findings (Bruer, 1997, 1999; Greenough et al., 1987; Pasquinelli 2012). Thus, neuromyths will arise as a result of social conclusions drawn from scientific results, when transferring knowledge from one epistemology into didactic action within another epistemology (Kalra and ÓKeeffe, 2011; Kuriloff et al., 2009; Samuels, 2009). However, this leads us back to the imbalance between the fields, assuming (educational) practice as the field where (neuro)science is to be implemented. The socio-cultural theories that education hitherto has most often relied on is an ignored part of the equation.

The idea of scientifically based education presupposes there is scientific knowledge that practitioners could acquire in correct or incorrect ways. Misunderstanding could, however, work both ways, if we instead take the premise that both the neurosciences and education are both theoretical and practical. Both fields are producing theories and both include research practices, besides the obvious educational practices. On that premise, ‘edumyths’ among neuroscientists, that is, myths regarding education and classroom practices, would be as likely to occur as neuromyths among teachers (Howard-Jones, 2012). Pasquinelli’s call to ‘get the science right’ (2012: 89, italics in original) as the most important step to counteract neuromyths could hence be both questioned and expanded. ‘Getting the science right’ presupposes stable and decontextualized facts, which is seldom the case in any science. More relevant would be to regard all scientific results – whether generated in educational research or neuroscientific research – as valid in relation to their specific circumstances. For neuroscientists or cognitive psychologists to ‘get the science right’ when addressing learning and teaching practices, familiarity with the societal, cultural and ethical commitments underpinning education is needed (Hruby, 2012).

The discourse of reciprocal and/or hierarchical collaborations

Despite gaps, discrepancies and misunderstandings between education and the neurosciences, there is an iterated articulated desire to come to reciprocity in collaborations in ways that are beneficial for both parties (e.g. Beauchamp and Beauchamp, 2012; Ronstadt and Yellin, 2010; Youdell and Lindley, 2018). From the point of view of educational research, reciprocal interaction needs to include the importance of contextual aspects to achieve learning. Theories within education emphasize social construction, learning within groups and the importance of context, values and meaning making, and educational theories are thus foremost socio-cultural, constructivist and addressing aspects ‘beyond the level of the individual’ (Howard-Jones, 2010: 84). The desired reciprocity between education and neuroscience then implies a connection between domains that are fundamentally different in whether to focus individual or contextual aspects of learning. Interdisciplinary reciprocity seems both to be about connecting researchers and practitioners and about academic interaction. Sometimes, however, the interdisciplinarity is embedded rather than explicit in what or who is connected. The ‘reciprocal relationships informing both research and practice’ that the educational neuroscience researchers Martin and Groff (2011: 115) terms inter- and transdisciplinary concern scientists implementing methods in educational settings. They provide case studies to overcome the ‘dearth of empirical evidence describing such collaborations’ (2011: 115). Martin and Groff claim the cases are ‘transdisciplinary in nature’ because the laboratory-created interventions draw on findings from developmental, educational, cognitive and neural sciences. Educational research is thus underpinning the current practices that the intervention is supposed to modify. Besides not being developmental, cognitive or neural, educational science will, as included in the social sciences, thus add the contextual aspects. However, it is unclear whether the interdisciplinary reciprocity concerns the educational practices or the educational theories – or both. Ultimately, the question is whether educational neuroscience aims to connect theories from different sciences or if the strive merely is to implement neuroscience in educational practices. Depending on the answer, the collaborative design will have to deal with issues of reciprocity and hierarchies in different ways.

Hierarchies, in terms of positioning of who is academic and who is practical, are also reflected in how educational neuroscience collaborations are sometimes described. Pasquinelli (2013: 120) argues that ‘behavioural, mind and brain sciences are a good match for education’ and establishes ‘a good marriage’. Scott and Curran (2010) use the metaphor of ‘brains in jars’ to illustrate how neuroscientific articles seem to remove the human element from scientific findings. Goswami (2006: 6) notes that ‘neuroscientists are not necessarily gifted at communicating with society at large’ when discussing effective ways to meet teachers’ interest in the brain. Teachers prefer to simply be told what methods work, whereas neuroscientists want to clarify their scientific claims by the rigour of their experiments (Goswami, 2006). Reciprocity in the desired meeting between the neurosciences and education is basically understood as establishing good relations. The obstacles and difficulties that has to be overcome to get to those good relations can then be discursively understood as a power hierarchy where the field of education, in one way or another, is treated as subordinate, more ignorant and less scientific.

The discourses converge around the psychologies

Differences, myths, collaborations and hierarchies have been mapped above as overlapping discourses, which in turn are entangled parts of the overarching ‘discourse of difficulty’. When I, in this section, continue to unfold the cluster of obstacles and difficulties, it will be in the direction of psychology(s), as academic discipline and research practice. Psychology has so far been an implicit line of thinking; sometimes as a bridge, sometimes as the behavioural level and sometimes as a mechanism of application. Sometimes there is not even a difference between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. ‘Of those [teachers] who reported that research had influenced their classroom practice, most did not distinguish between neuroscience and cognitive psychology’, write Hook and Farah (2012: 331), after interviewing teachers attending neuro-educational conferences.

Bruer (1997: 4) launched the idea of cognitive psychology as ‘the only firm ground we have to anchor these bridges’ that is able to mediate between neuroscience and education. Cognitive psychology is sometimes treated as overlapping with neuroscience when dealing with issues of development and learning (Coch and Ansari, 2012). Furthermore, cognitive and/or developmental psychologists are often the driving force in interdisciplinary studies of this kind (cf. Bruer, 2016). In contrast, teachers often refer to different forms of psychology: developmental, behaviourist, social and cognitive psychology, including therapeutic versions, but without necessarily making any of these distinctions (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). Bruer promoted cognitive psychology, referring to the distance between the fields as too large to be bridged without intermediation (Bruer, 1997; see also 2006, 2016). But cognitive psychology is the psychological sub-discipline that is most closely identified with natural science and therefore not one of the ‘psychologies’ that is more likely to be associated with social science. Bruer’s (1997, 2006, 2016) argument has repeatedly been that neither education nor neuroscience can, on their own, provide knowledge about cognition and mental functions in ways that connect or overlap. However, when cognitive psychology acts as a mediating discipline, it risks being perceived as both a natural science and a social science discipline, by being the discipline that works as a translational possibility ‘in between’. Hence cognitive psychology, as ‘the bridge’, will be the main producer of knowledge. According to Weisberg and colleagues (2008), is an argument from the natural sciences often ascribed a stronger and more valid impact, regardless of whether it adds to the general question. The fact that the natural science is associated with cognitive psychology might thus be problematic, in terms of increasing hierarchies.

My research context is Swedish early childhood education, where pedagogy historically has been seen as applied child psychology, with features of both Piagetan constructivism and psychodynamic theory (Hultqvist, 1990). This pedagogy based on the ‘psychology-pedagogy couple’ played a large part in forming the EduCare model starting as early as the 1930s (Lenz Taguchi and Munkhammar, 2003), and that characterizes the Nordic preschool (OECD, 2006). Developmental psychology and ideas of a predetermined stage development also form an orientation of the Western world's early childhood education (Dahlberg et al., 2014). Since the 1990s, however, the theoretical foundation of the Swedish preschool has moved towards critical psychology and socio-cultural theory (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018; Säljö, 2010; Vallberg Roth, 2014). The last decade or more, it also includes critical pedagogy, social constructionism, poststructuralism, and new materialism (e.g. Dahlberg, et al., 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Tallberg Broman et al., 2015).

The first Swedish preschool curriculum, launched in 1998, was perceived as a shift from an individualized normalizing and psychology-based pedagogy to socio-culturally context-sensitive and critically informed pedagogical practices. Early childhood education in Sweden, as oriented towards the child's relation to peers and to the social context, has disregarded practices of decontextualized and normalizing assessing associated with a developmentalist and ‘best practice’ approach to early years education associated with psychology (Burman, 2016; Dahlberg et al., 2014). Ever since the late 20th century there has been a strong resistance among teachers and researchers to an individual assessment of young children’s skills and development in regular preschool practices (e.g. Moss et al., 2016; Vanderbroeck et al., 2016). This resistance is part of a more general opposition to neoliberal and political ideas of measuring quality and educational outcome (Sousa et al., 2019). Concerning the study presented in the next section, the polarization of ‘good' and ‘bad' theories (which might have been particularly noticeable in Sweden) meant the didactic practices were also valued (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). The teachers' ideas about rejecting an assessment of individual children's learning – rather than assessing the contextual conditions for learning – exemplify this polarization. Some teachers in my study dismissed all forms of individualized assessment, whereas others regarded the rejection of psychology as ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’ (cf. Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018).

A different kind of reciprocity in the preschool study?

As described in the background section, my investigation of the educational neuroscience research field originated in preparations for a preschool study (Aronsson, forthcoming; Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). This study aimed to explore epistemological encounters between the neurosciences and preschool practices and theories. The objective was to gain knowledge about how new additional theories of children's learning and development from the neurosciences might contribute – or not – to preschool didactics. An aspect of the study that is of particular interest to this paper concerns methodology; that is, how I as a researcher and they as practicing teachers handled the various relationships between theory (from the neurosciences and educational research) and practice (their daily preschool practices and my current research practice).

The study’s fieldwork was organized in 3-week periods of participating observations in preschool practices and teacher meetings, in total 9 months (Aronsson, forthcoming). During the participative observations of the children’s daily activities, both the teachers and I produced documentations and field notes of different kinds. This material was used with examples of neuroscientific research in collaborative mapping practices in the weekly teacher meetings (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). These exercises were designed to collaboratively explore encounters between knowledge generated in the neurosciences and preschool educational practices, by constructing connections and ruptures between the documentations from the preschool activities, and excerpts from neuroscientific research, articles and books (e.g. Bruer, 1999; Dehaene, 2010; Klingberg, 2010; 2011; Kuhl, 2011). This also enabled explorations, where dominating lines of articulations were traced, and creative experimentations with unexpected and new connections (Lenz Taguchi, 2016a, 2016b). Significant questions were, for example, ‘what can this be…?’ or ‘but what if…?’ as a way of actively disrupting habitual and dominating thinking. When identifying such lines of thinking, new and diverging lines could emerge reconfiguring the concepts or phenomena that the exercise started with.

The study’s relational-material (Barad, 2007; Coole and Frost, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2013) and bio-social (Youdell and Lindley, 2018) theoretical and methodological framework constituted an engagement of practical material and discursive relations of ideas and notions (Aronsson, forthcoming). These theories of relational entanglements in the social and educational sciences actually correspond to and align with the way contemporary neuroscientific research outlines the nature-nurture interplay of brain plasticity (Klingberg, 2010; Pitts-Taylor, 2016; Will et al., 2008). These converging ideas allowed us to perceive theories and practices as collaborators in an interaction between human, discursive and material actors (Aronsson, forthcoming). More concretely, theories from different disciplines and scientific paradigms, as well as different sorts of texts and other materials, could be connected in ways that made us think about educational practices in new ways, which then would have consequences for the daily practices in the preschool.

So, what happened in the encounters between neuroscientific knowledge and educational practice in the performed preschool study? The neuroscience texts used in the mapping exercises often proved to have elements or authors of cognitive psychology (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). Like the teachers in Hook and Farah's (2012) study, we did not always perceive a difference between neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Several teachers, especially those educated before the theoretical displacements of psychology in the 90s, returned to their prior psychologically oriented knowledge, regarded as old fashioned and unwanted in the contemporary Swedish preschool cultural context (cf. Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). The previously identified hierarchical polarizations between the sciences and between theory and practice were challenged by the fact that cognitive psychology was here positioned as lesser, in terms of value. At the same time, its value was, in these encounters, regained by its connection to neuroscience, which was understood as new and higher valued by ways of its connections to the natural sciences.

The fact that the teachers were eager to explore the neurosciences with a researcher formed what can be understood as a joint matter of concern (Stengers, 2018). A shared matter of concern – shared by researchers and participants or by science and practice – is not necessarily the same matter of concern (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). Yet it emanates from related, although different, problems. Referring to Stengers' (2018) work on how research needs to be relevant to those who the research concerns, Lenz Taguchi (2017: 701) asks ‘To what or whom does it matter?', arguing for collaborations that take an interest in joint problems as its starting point.

As a researcher, I was interested in the ways in which the teachers used the texts and the other materials we traced and mapped, and what lines of thinking were identified, connected and challenged. The teachers' incentives to participate in the study were interest in ‘brain research' and how it could contribute to their work (Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi, 2018). Their curiosity can be understood as part of the contemporary interest in ‘the prefix neuro-’ (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013), and as providing new explanations to phenomena previously understood in other ways. To mutually appreciate and value each other's commitment is an issue of trust, but also a consequence of the theoretical assumption that different types of knowledge can be produced at the same time. Thus, the notion of reciprocity in collaborations could be reconceptualized as an entangled knowledge-production process that transgresses disciplinary and theory-practice boundaries (Aronsson, forthcoming).

The starting point of the preschool study in matters that are shared by the researcher and the teachers, but not necessarily the same, as pointed out above, implies a resistance to excluding certain questions, theories or assumptions. Several ideas, theories and practice needed, in our way of understanding preschool practice, to exist simultaneously to allow for different types of knowledge productions and ways of connecting to and teaching children. Thinking in terms of merely choosing one best practice, however, would have hindered teachers taking constructive decisions in relation to what was going on in the practices and in relation to the differences among individual children. Hence, by choosing one theory over another means polarizing best practice against a less good practice. This creates new gaps, in terms of having the discussion focus on how questions, theories and assumptions differ from each other concerning intrinsic higher or lesser value, in relation to practices for all children’s learning and development.

To reconnect to the earlier discussion: there are asymmetric power relations between theory and practice. This is most clearly manifested in the central argument of educational neuroscience claiming that education needs to build on evidence-based knowledge (Fischer et al., 2007). Assuming that research is also a practice may not change the asymmetries, but it allows both theories and practices to be obviously multiple. The underlying hierarchical relation between theory and practice, and correspondingly between academia and society, concerns the question of what knowledge should be granted value and seen as reliable, which is a matter of value and politics (Stengers, 2018). Hence, this does not only constitute a polarization between theory (scientific knowledge) and value-based societal and political practice, but it also extends to the relation between the natural science and the social and educational science. In the light of the previously discussed concerns about misconceptions and myths, this polarization can be understood as a means of activating mistrust of teachers: those not yet enlightened, those that have to ‘get the science right’ (cf. Pasquinelli, 2012), while teachers must also abide to a social and political value-based contract in their teaching practices. The above discussed interest in bridging the gap between the neurosciences and education can then be understood as an interest also in maintaining the distinction between different scientific paradigms, and hence to conflicts between academic research practices. The bridge metaphor will thus push practices apart rather than bind them together. Furthermore, cognitive psychology as the ‘bridge’ would not only become a mediator and translator in a successful bridging but would also be able to claim the status of being the main disciplinary knowledge producer. This will cause the divide to remain intact.

Reconsidering the concept of difference

The tracing and mapping of discourses in the above analysis shows that bridging the gap between the neurosciences and education, and achieving reciprocal collaborations, is a complex matter. It is complex both on an interdisciplinary level between academic subjects, and between scientific knowledge production and educational practices. The above-presented discourses that make up the entangled ‘discourse of difficulty’ have something important in common, which concerns how to understand the concept of difference in ontological terms (Lenz Taguchi, 2013; Smith, 2012). As the above discourses about ‘bridging the gap’, ‘discrepancy’, etc. are articulated in the literature of educational neuroscience, they all rely on a common understanding of difference that is always a difference from, as in constructing a contrast or an opposite and thus difference as a matter of something mutually exclusionary (Lenz Taguchi, 2013). In relation to the problems underlying educational neuroscience, ‘real’ science constitutes a difference from educational pragmatist science about the situated complexity of processes of learning; and evidence-based knowledge constitutes a difference from everyday messy learning practices; and generalizable truth constitutes a difference from distorted myths.

This concept of difference as mutually exclusionary sees the gap or division as a taken-for-granted precondition. Research thus needs to focus on overcoming what separates, without actually taking an interest in the parties' respective change processes in the encounter. Instead, it is possible to ask what happens within neuroscience and education when they have to make themselves understandable and relevant to each other. What happens within theories and practices when they overlap disciplinary boundaries? A relational-materialist theoretical approach makes it possible to experiment with thinking instead of looking at these problems in terms of differences within, and in themselves as effects of encounters (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), or in terms of a self-differentiating process as the effect of relations (Lenz Taguchi, 2013, 2017). Instead of producing a mutually excluding binary in the production of difference, difference can be understood as a mutual self-transformation, and process of change process in itself, which avoids producing a polarizing comparison or a hierarchical dichotomous relation. A non-binary understanding of difference is, as Lenz Taguchi (2013: 712) states, an ongoing practice of differentiation processes and metamorphosis rather than a way of defining separations.

This paper started by asking what the problems of educational neuroscience might be, and why it seems so difficult to succeed in achieving reciprocal collaboration. The mapping of discourses showed that the binary ideas of divergence, hierarchy and credibility have effects that create the gaps that needs bridging. It also positions disciplines, theories and practices as stable and predictable. Instead, using a concept of difference that focuses on the ongoing self-differentiation (Lenz Taguchi, 2013; 2017) and the difference in itself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) will allow neuroscience and education to change and transform in themselves and in relation to each other when we allow for their creative encounters. This means we need to extend the focus from the very connection or interdisciplinarity to include aspects of how the very connecting will affect the connected. For example, what kind of neuroscience will evolve in the encounter with socio-cultural preschool and school settings. As well as what kind of educational research will develop when natural science epistemologies and/or knowledge produced in the natural sciences and cognitive psychology are involved in the production of educational research. This will produce a need for more and several different kinds of knowledge production. Different types of knowledge production are, as already pointed out, central to research aimed at being relevant to those who are concerned by the research; such as stakeholders, children, teachers, etc. (Lenz Taguchi, 2017; Stengers, 2018).

Thinking differently about difference is a philosophical matter of concern. However, the problem of education is not philosophical but political, basically dealing with Stenger's question: who can talk of what? (Stengers, 2018: 148). A bridge that ensures that science is ‘perceived correctly’ and not producing ‘neuromyths’ means that a layman’s understanding is of lesser value (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013: 55–56), even in one's own practice. The call for cognitive psychology to mediate scientific knowledge into the field of education (Anderson and Della Sala, 2012; Bruer, 1997; 2016) is an expression of this hierarchical conflict. It concerns the definition of ‘true knowledge', but also of who is entitled to talk about what. It is problematic if curricula are written and schools are organized on the basis of misconceptions of research results, but it is equally problematic if research-based methods are developed on the basis of scientists’ incorrect notions of educational contexts. In addition to the hierarchical conflict between science and practice, there is also an inter-academic conflict inherent to the relationship between psychology and education, at least in the Swedish context. The preschool teachers who were reluctant to completely dismiss psychology were well aware of the negative associations with normalizing assessment and stage theory (Moss et al., 2016).

The idea of difference in itself is not a final solution to the problem of connecting the neurosciences and education. Rather, I propose seeing difference in itself as a way to investigate and problematize a binary thinking and the polarizations that in every value assignment always position something as of higher and thus something else as of lesser value. If the academy is seriously interested in developing the discipline of educational neuroscience and simultaneously interested in improving educational practices, we need to move away from the continuing production of polarizations and hierarchies between the natural sciences and the social and educational science, between theory and practice, between academia and everyday knowledge. Instead, we should invite each other to explore exchanges of knowledge and engage in mutual processes of self-transformation and self-differentiations.