Can the power of community transform our educational systems for the better? This neuroscientist says absolutely. 

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is a neuroscientist and USC professor, and she has spent her career studying education and the ways we can enhance it. Her findings claim that diversity has a huge impact on brain growth and even life experience. Just like how fabric can range from silk scarves to fishing nets depending on resources and needs, our educational systems need the active coordination of many people and skills, making them stronger together.

Immordino-Yang stresses the importance of this strong social fabric, explaining that spending time around those who differ from us can help us become adaptable and truly deepen our understanding of the world around us. This idea calls for a new approach to education, where teachers and students work together to create systems of learning that help us grow alongside one another, instead of on confined and isolated paths.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Our education system is built on what Adichie called a "single story," that there is one way through. The standardized system of education incorrectly teaches young people that someone else's judgment of your output is what matters and does not capture the richness of the potential that young people are showing because it doesn't capture the processes that they're engaging with developmentally. What we really need to do is engage in a kind of a Copernican shift, where we change what the center of the enterprise is.

The center of the educational solar system, so to speak, is the experience of the people in the system thinking: What kinds of thinking happen in this community? What kinds of relationships are built around that thinking? What kinds of agency are afforded young people and their teachers to engage in meaningful thinking? And then pulling all this together in a new understanding of the nature of learning and what that would mean for the design of schools.

Human beings are ecological systems of life. What we mean there is that we are dynamically adjusting and adapting ourselves to stay alive; where we're feeling and we're reacting and we're building a sense of self in real-time. Our biological growth and development are shaped by the kinds of social worlds that we've lived in and the kinds of meaning that we've made. And they in turn enable us to engage with the world in particular ways.

We are not individuals just independently moving through space and time, learning and bumping into one another, we are actually co-creating each other's social fabric—it's really like a cloth. And by living together in the same space, we become each other's environments. And that powerfully speaks to the deep communal orientation of an effective learning environment.

When we think about human beings' development in that dynamic situated way, it helps us understand, in a new way, what education is for, what it's meant to enable. And to repair our education systems, to repair our communities, what we need is everyone in the community to come together and contribute as a whole that functions, that's useful, that actually generates a better society for everyone.

When we ask kids to just produce what we have given them, what we're basically having them do is isolate the skill and the knowledge from the reason why you need it, from the usefulness it brings to you in the world. And in so doing, you deny the person that fundamental, core sense of agency that is the reason why we come to think hard about things in the first place.

Our education system punishes that kind of agency. It has no space for young people who, when those dispositions of mind are cultivated, become the essence of what makes the schooling experience one that doesn't just lead to learning outcomes, but leverages that learning in the service of something much bigger: human development. So it's really about reframing the educational process so that we center the feeling of thinking and we build our curriculum around that, where teachers and students have the agency to build out opportunities for themselves around the content, around the curriculum, and around each other, and the relationships that they're forming.