Engaging: the Science of Memory-making
2017 – with Kevin Mattingly
I am not at the centre of this story. I am an extra with a few lines. The perspective shift I am about to experience will forever change my mental model of how engagement works. I am transformed, even as I sit passively listening. We are a group of WonderLab design researchers sitting around a table with our PLUSSED+ partners. We have come together to critique a professional learning encounter we are designing for teachers. Analogous to a table read, this playtest is a place for rehearsing the design-led activities so we might see what needs to be iterated on further. However, instead of quickly running through the activities, our partner, Kevin Mattingly, invites us to grasp, in slow motion, the cognitive processes activated by our convivial methods. Passionately, yet humbly, Kevin draws on his science of learning expertise by getting curious about how the brain would navigate, in microseconds, the activities laid out before us.
Let me first introduce what we thought we had designed from a design perspective. Kevin was reviewing a ten-minute photo-elicitation activity designed to prime the teachers to see their practice as evolutionary and adaptive. This first task was for teachers to choose an image from 20-plus photos on a table that spoke to a time they had experienced intentionally changing the way they do things. In connecting to a personal lived experience, we hoped to empower the teachers to see themselves as agents of change in the politicised education environment. For us, this activity was designed to engage teachers in the more difficult work of considering how to motivate transitions in practice when it feels like change is being imposed on them, not driven by them. For us, this was the opening scene before the title sequence.
Kevin is now taking us inside the teachers’ heads. Offering his perspective as a learning scientist and educator, he shares how the prompt to choose a photo aligned with a memory of change will trigger a real-time recollection of a specific moment. Retrieving the memory – let’s say a teacher arranging furniture to facilitate more peer to peer discussion – will take no time at all. However, when the teacher scans for a photo of a classroom, there will be none. The photographs are of overgrown trails, misty mountains, bungee jumping and a bird in the sky. Kevin tells us that this dissonance will push the teacher to go back into his or her long-term memory and retrieve another moment they tried something new. Maybe this time they recall a curriculum change intended to customise student learning experiences. They scan the images and again no photo visually documents their memory. This cycle of retrieving, scanning, rejecting and retrieving again will happen, unconsciously, in a micro-second.
I am entranced. What Kevin is telling us about our pattern-seeking brains is not so much disorienting as captivating. I lean in closer as he tells us that the brain quickly assesses that meaning-making, with these metaphoric images, will not come from a descriptive representation of the memory. Flipping the retrieval source, the teacher would instead now start with the memories the evocative im- ages uncover. Now the sequence is playing out in reverse. If the bungee jumping evokes risk to the teacher, the teacher tries to recall a change-memory associated with risk. I scan the images and I slow down to consciously flip the process. What change-memory comes to mind when I look at the low fog and the overgrown path? I connect with the sense of apprehension. I remember the times I have chosen the path less travelled. Several memories surface. I sense how different it feels when the retrieval request is wrapped up in affective cues. My practice knowing already affirms this activity works. I had not been looking for scientific evidence to legitimate my practice evidence. And yet, the resonance of the scientific translation seems wonderous. Kevin is explaining why these multi-sensorial memories are easier to recall. He tells us that memories interlaced with emotion are what you might call ‘gold star’ memories. In my own reverie, I am hardly listening. I am wondering what the emotion is that is quickening my heart. How will I remember this luminous perspective shift?