Abstract
As we enter a new year, we are hopeful, anticipatory, and optimistic about the future—as all starts to new years should begin. For a special and seemingly fleeting moment at the start of the year, we forget the encumbrances of the past and push ourselves to explore new possibilities, potentials, and partnerships. It is exactly in this spirit and this new space that we launch the new journal Educational Neuroscience. Our explicit intention is to keep this hope and optimism alive throughout the year in bringing this journal to life. To do so, it is important to know how we as editors have come to this place.
If you have spent any time in the academy, it is evident that despite much rhetoric and insistence we all too often remain siloed within our own domains. This is not surprising as we are incentivized and encouraged to become “masters of our own domain,” and doing so takes effort, energy, and concentrated focus on our topic of study. That effort is tremendously worthwhile and critical in the development of knowledge, and we think the time is right for a new conception of collaboration and interchange that will hopefully come to life in the bits and bytes of this new open-access journal.
Typically, educational institutions have not viewed themselves, either as organizations or as individuals, as part of a larger interdependent and interconnected system or network. This failure to recognize and embrace the idea that our decisions, actions, and inactions are mutually influential and consequential has perhaps inhibited our collective ability to better integrate pressing issues in education and cognitive neuroscience that have been present for a number of years. As educational systems and agencies often operate in mind-sets of independence and scarcity, these systems often fail to recognize and embrace the connectedness and abundance in their context, thus in effect creating another type of poverty, a poverty of possibilities.
Our educational institutions are complex systems situated in networks of interactions and interdependence. The question to be asked as we move further into the next decade of this century and beyond is how to create, nurture, and sustain these knowledge networks in support of generating new innovations that will have a profound impact on both education and cognitive neuroscientific research. This will necessitate systems to redefine what is valued, perhaps requiring fundamental shifts from the lone individual to leveraging connected networks of experimentation, reflection, and refinement, moving from the idea that the generation of knowledge is the purview of the sole investigator (or discipline) to embracing collaborative research that reflects thoughtful interactions among research, practice, and policy. We want to challenge the notion that information and knowledge are the possessions of traditional forms of publication, which all too often limit access by those who could most use the knowledge. Further we want to acknowledge the need for more open-sourced materials available to wider audiences beyond the halls of the academy in order to promote and encourage dialogue across multiple sectors. These shifts suggest that we need to redefine what is recognized and rewarded in educational systems and move to new dynamic conceptions that incentivize the formation and spread of collaborative networks comprising the muscle of individual knowledge and the connective tissue of social relationships. It is in this manner that we intend to move forward with Educational Neuroscience and our efforts to bridge learning, cognition, and the brain.
In answer to long-present challenges in all of the fields relevant to fostering educational neuroscience (education, psychology, child development, neuroscience, and medicine), we will need to move beyond vestiges of an industrial mechanistic past to become more design based, dynamic, and networked. This approach will blur and eventually erode the lines between researchers and “subjects,” proprietary and public, creators and consumers, experts and novices, and most importantly researcher and practitioner. We believe these shifts also suggest additional important considerations for addressing a poverty of possibilities of our own making. Although we have spent a good deal of energy in developing and enacting rigorous approaches to research, which are critical, we have not made as much progress integrating research with improving practice and outcomes. Moving forward will require both rigor and relevance in the praxis of research, practice, and policy, and we intend this journal to do just that—to better link the potential that lies within our multiple interconnected fields to fundamentally transform how we think about and create educational neuroscience. We recognize the high bar we are setting for ourselves and our contributors, but it is the biggest dreams that allow for the greatest payoff.
The good news is that some of what we describe above exists across the globe in islands and outlets of excellence. Many of the readers of this introductory editorial are at the forefront of this work and engaged in charting new directions and building on the best of our past. You hold the spirit of the new year throughout your work, and it is both the new and the experienced voices we call to this journal.
Within the broad fields of cognitive neuroscience and education, there is mutual enthusiasm about the promise of applying what we learn from basic research on the growing mind and brain toward improved learning and better academic outcomes, with the possibility of generating more scientifically informed educational policies. In general, we think this enthusiasm is well placed. Within cognitive neuroscience research, great progress has been made in characterizing and advancing our understanding of the developing brain mechanisms that support learning and academic skill development. And institutionally, the disciplines of child development, education, cognitive neuroscience, pedagogy, psychology of learning, and a host of other fields have increased their awareness of and active contact with one another.
The promise of applied psychological and cognitive research within educational settings is particularly clear and has been bearing fruit for quite some time. Information-processing models of reading development, for example, have thrived for several decades, have impacted school practices and policies, and are still undergoing rigorous testing and modification. However, there are undeniable additional complexities with applying blossoming scientific knowledge about the brain in particular to the questions and needs of education. Behavior will remain the primary measure of outcome, and the cognitive level of analysis will continue to be the primary interface bridging neuroscience and education even as brain measures hopefully come to increasingly inform our models of learning. Rather than applying knowledge handed down from scientific research, improvements and solutions will instead need to be gleaned from a different kind of enterprise that relies on interaction at all levels. In this way, new and unimagined measures, metrics, and methods will enable us to bridge these fields and produce even better outcomes for youth across the globe.
To fully deliver on the goal of providing an education that is truly informed by cognitive neuroscience will require moving beyond platitudes and an acknowledgment of specific difficulties and failures. Critically, there must be open and active dialogue among people conducting developmental, educational, and cognitive neuroscientific research and teachers and policy makers so that the best, most powerful scientific tools and paradigms, are being matched to the questions and issues that have the most relevance to everyday educational issues for youth and adult students. In Educational Neuroscience, our primary goal is to provide a unique forum for exactly this kind of communication to occur. Our hope is to welcome the participation and promote meaningful interaction among all of the involved perspectives—those conducting psychological and neuroscientific research on children, adolescents, and adults, teachers and school administrators; educational researchers and policy experts; and clinicians caring for individuals with developmental and cognitive disorders—to bring a high level of rigor to this important, inherently interdisciplinary endeavor. To us, this opportunity represents an exciting, rewarding, and entirely attainable undertaking.
Along with our enthusiasm, we undertake this work with a realistic awareness of how difficult this task has been, despite widespread interest and enthusiasm. As John Bruer’s fascinating and innovative cocitation analysis shows in this issue (“Where is Educational Neuroscience?”), the research literature dubbed “educational neuroscience,” as it currently stands, appears still to be somewhat lacking as a thriving body of fundamental research, knowledge, and practice. Although it is heartening in some sense that his analysis suggests that educational neuroscience is flourishing as a “meta-area” of active dialogue and commentary, Bruer’s results lend empirical support to what some of us have suspected might still be the case—that educational neuroscience as a scientific discipline needs continued work to become established as a bona fide area of experimental and applied research. This sense has been one of the key factors in our decision to launch this new journal at this particular moment in time, and we hope this will begin to change at least in part due to the founding of Educational Neuroscience. As Bruer states so aptly in his article, “If bridges are built, there will be no need to argue about whether they can be built.”
So let’s get building!