One Good Question with Marcelo Knobel: General Studies Reform for Brazil's Universities.

Prof. Marcelo Knobel

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Sometimes there is an investment but the priorities are completely wrong.  In Brazil we have significant investments--- the government pays for K-12 and university education for all students -- , but the priorities are not leading us to strong education outcomes. Our system and needs are really complex, but there are two existing investments that could be better leveraged for change : value of the teacher as professional and scalability of non-governmental education organizations.  Our teachers are underpaid and not well-prepared for the work, and society provides no incentive to be a professor, or positive value of the profession.  To change that, for the next generation, it’s necessary to have a really smart and fast plan to change this situation. This is where scalability of non-governmental organizations matters.  There are philanthropic and social investment efforts here, but they aren’t as well developed as in the US.  It’s difficult to keep an ONG runnning.  There are a few ONGs run by the civil society or wealthy families, but their impact is very small in comparison to the need.  Fundaçao Lemann is making some interesting programs, but the number of people that these programs can impact is small.  Brazil should have 1,000 organizations like this, but we maybe have only 10. Scaling the impact of our ONGs would reach a much broader population than we can do currently.

ProFIS image

“In your upcoming book, you posit that Brazilian higher education would benefit from offering general Liberal Arts Colleges among existing post-secondary institutions. What void will Liberal Arts Colleges fill and how will they transform access and success for the greater population?”

My main concern is to advocate for the cause of General Education in university.  In Brazil 43% of the population completes high school, but only 12% has a post-secondary degree[1], so we’re already dealing with an elite population.  The benefits for these elite is very clear—better salaries, better jobs.  In our university system, we currently have no general education or liberal arts course requirements.  When a student tests to enter university, they are only applying to a specific career strand : medicine, education, chemistry, accounting, etc.  It may seem like a minor detail but it’s not.  Some careers are extremely difficult to access. At UNICAMP for example, less than 1% of applicants are accepted into the medical program.  If you are accepted and after one month you don’t like this course of study, you have to drop-out of university and start all over for the next year. A general studies or liberal arts base would allow students to experiment and learn more about specific industries before making a commitment to one of them.In the real world when companies hire engineers, they provide a 6 months training period for the specific content in that position.  The ideal candidates are excellent learners and problem-solvers first, then content experts.  Ususally companies prefer to hire people who can think outside of the box and have certain soft skills that we don’t learn here in Brazil at all. General education has been in place in the US for years. In the global market, companies and countries like China, Singapore, and Hong Kong are in search of more well-rounded professionals who can deal with problems and learn how to solve them across multiple disciplines.  If you’re learning only content in university, within 10 years your content may be outdated.ProFIS created at UNICAMP is a hybrid of my general education vision. This is a pilot that I would like to see the entire university adopt.  We recruit the best students from the local public high school, who wouldn’t normally attend university. On average 80% of students are living in poverty and 90% are first generation in the university.  We’re automatically increasing social inclusion by making a space for these students in university.Even when these students are the best in their schools, they still have strong gaps in their basic education.  ProFIS anticipates and supports academic and socio-economic gaps with an army of staff and resources: the best professors in university volunteer to teach in ProFIS, Teaching Assistants provide extra tutoring, Social Workers help with problems at home—if students don’t show up for one week, we call the home to get them back, and we pay students a minimum wage to prevent them from dropping out because they need to earn money for their family.  Fifty percent of our students continue on to traditional university studies.The problem is that ProFIS is only a tiny drop in the bucket.  We can only admit 120 students per class (about 10% of applicants) but we have thousands who have this need.  If this program could be replicated in 100 universities, it could start making a difference.  We need advocacy with the university system, the legislature, and large employers.  If employers are clamoring for this particular employee profile with a well-rounded education, then our country will make changes.  Politicians need to advocate the change.  Universities need to replicate.  We also need to educate the general population to know that this can exist so that they can demand it.  My upcoming book will show how this is possible and trending all over the world.  Brazil is out of alignment with this trend and we should make a difference to catch up.Read more here about the ProFIS model and impact.

Marcelo's One Good Question: This is hard. My question.  Of course I have children, is it possible for them to have a better future ?  I am seeing here in Brazil we face immediate threats to global warming.  Strong period of economic depression.  Huge problem in education. Do they have a good future ? Thinking more globally, will they even have any place to go ?[1] from BRAZIL – Country Note – Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators 

Marcelo Knobel is Director of the Brazilian National Nanotechnology Laboratory (LNNano), of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas, UNICAMP). From 2002 to 2006 he coordinated de Núcleo de Desenvolvimento da Criatividade (Creativity Development Center, NUDECRI), of UNICAMP and from 2006 to 2008 he was the Executive Director of the Science Museum, also at UNICAMP. He was the Vice-President for Undergraduate Programs from 2009 to 2013.  He was a 2007 Eisenhower Fellow to the US taking a deeper look at scientific culture and the popularization of science via science museums.

Culture Makes People Understand Each Other Better.

“Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first hey have to understand that their neighbor is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.” - Paulo Coelho

Educação Básica.

Na Liberdade, São Paulo, Brazil

During this trip to São Paulo, we stayed in Vila Madalena because of its street arts profile and the famous Beco do Batman.  Vila Madelena feels like Williamsburg, cutely packaged local artisan boutiques, architects and graphic designers, amazing restaurants and bars at every turn.  One morning we ventured out to the Liberdade neighborhood, home to Brazil's 120-year old Japanese population.  Our print tourist map outlines Liberdade like it is the eastern coast of SP, like there is nowhere else to go on the other side of Liberdade.  Our time in Liberdade was overcast, but the neighborhood was more gritty than VM.  Interspersed with street market vendors were homeless and and tired people, knock-off merchandise on tarps for easy transport.  Our Paulistano friend explained that cost of living in the center of town was too expensive and that people moved farther and farther to the outskirts.  There were not many tourist attractions past Liberdade, which explained why our map abruptly ended there.This mural rose above us as we crossed a highway overpass and it was perfectly timed and placed.  We stood on this overpass to take pictures of the mural, talk about education access and notice that the city continued far east of the Liberdade neighborhood.   Of the many murals that we saw that week, this was the most overtly political (not counting the anti-Dilma graffitis).

Basic quality education for all will put an end to hunger and poverty.

Brazil h\as one of the largest education achievement and access gaps in the world, based on their PISA results.  Fundação Lemann has launched an Excelência com Equidade program to address the disparities in education for lower socio-economic communities.  I'm looking forward to learning more about their work and what it will really take to achieve basic quality education in Brazil.

We Must Teach Children to Learn: Language Lessons from Neuroscience.

Memory in silent neurons

Language educators and researchers are fascinated by neurological data.  We love to cite the latest research --Have you read Bialystok's work on the bilingual brain? -- and share documentaries like The Secret Life of the Brain.  Because we still subscribe to the notion that "hard science" is more respected than social science, we tout scientific research that validates our pedagogical framework. So when Dr. Elvira Souza Lima opened her keynote speech at this year’s Brazilian Immersion Conference, and declared that “Pedagogy is the most important change in education,” the room paused.  Did she really mean that pedagogy is more important than neurological function for teaching and learning?For the first half of her talk, Dr. Souza Lima paid homage to 2000 Nobel Prize recipient Eric Kandel's research on memory and neurology.  The auditorium full of international immersion school educators delighted to learn about synapses, Long-Term Potentiation (LTP), and plasticity.  How exactly do our brains convert short-term experiences to long-term memory to knowledge?  What we can do to keep our brains learning as long as possible? We watched researchers animate the precise moment of "learning" in the human brain and marveled at the density of learning in the child's brain vs. the adult's brain.Dr. Souza Lima’s talk quickly gave way to neurological implications for language learning.  First, she parsed out oracy (listening and speaking) from literacy (reading and writing).  Genetically, humans are programmed for oracy yet must learn literacy.  Singing, melody, and repetition of natural sounds developed in Neanderthals before speech.  Everyone can hum, cry, or sing (however poorly) without having explicitly learned to do so.  In the first three years of life, the brain's language function is focused on listening and singing.  During early childhood years, humans learn in the vocal area of our brain, which allows us to improve our brain’s plasticity. Prevalent recommendations to speak, read, and sing to your infant are not only the most important receptive functions that their brains are developing, but they expand their capacity to learn more later.From ages 3-6, the young brain develops twice as many synapses than an adult brain and this is the best time to begin forming long-term memories.  Long-term memories developed during preschool years provide children with background knowledge necessary to acquire literacy skills.  According to Dr. Souza Lima, the purpose of early language instruction (immersion or otherwise), in students ages 4-6, is to further oracy and build plasticity.  Plasticity is highest in children through age 7 and then is extinguished by age 10.  Daily exposure to music, arts, graphic arts, drawing, imaginative play all contribute to plasticity in the young brain.  These assertions reinforce play-based preschool and kindergarten curricular frameworks that focus on providing rich environments and new experiences for young learners to discover more about their world.

“It is not only what the child speaks, but what the child thinks.”

Dr. Souza Lima frequently quoted Vygotsky during her talk to remind us that our work is not simply getting students to produce speech and words, but that in forming language, we are curating thoughts as well.  Learning literacy, specific reading and writing skills, requires that your brain forms long-term memories. During the formative years of oracy we can train our brains to learn new information and store it for long-term access.  By age 7, at the peak of plasticity, the brain is ready to start learning discrete literacy skills. Can we begin learning literacy before the age of 7 ?  Absolutely, and our world is full of autodidacts who have mastered reading fluency before they begin formal education.  Developmentally, however, youth who begin reading at 4 do not significantly outperform youth who begin reading at 7.Enter significant dissonance between neurological research about literacy learning and current US curriculum expectations.  With little exception, American schools subscribe to earlier and more aggressive academic and literacy instruction in attempts to accelerate learning outcomes.  Not only is this practice counter to neurological productivity, but time spent “teaching reading” in early elementary years actually usurps the time that the brain could be developing plasticity.  Recent research demonstrates that, while they may initially outperform their peers, students who have been taught explicit literacy skills in grades K-2, tend to plateau their reading comprehension and language use after 3rd grade (Stefanou, Howlett, and Peck, 2012).  Early explicit literacy instruction may actually be limiting our youth at the peak plasticity, and access to deeper learning in later years.Dr. Souza Lima's message was subtle, yet insistent that rich, daily experiences in music, creativity, arts, and imagination contribute significantly to the brain's capacity to learn over time.  These activities are what teach the young brain to learn and provide ample opportunities to build capacity and plasticity.  Exposing young learners to a wide variety of life experiences allow them to create scaffolds to which they can attach new information as they grow.Dr. Elvira Souza Lima is a researcher in human development, with training in neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and music.  She works in applied research in education, media and culture.  Follow her blog at http://elvirasouzalima.blogspot.com