By Gregoire Borst | July 31, 2018

Our societies are changing at an unprecedented pace due to the emergence of new technologies driven in part by the digital revolution and the social media. The social, cognitive and emotional competencies needed in the future to adapt in the society or in the workplace will dramatically change and education needs to be completely reinvented to help children face the future ahead. Paradoxically we still teach the way we were teaching 100 years ago manipulating the entry (i.e., the curricula) and examine the effect on the output (i.e., national or international evaluation such as PISA) considering the brain of the students as a black box.

This is even more surprising in light of the growing number of data available in science on how the brain develops, how it is shaped by cultural learning (reading, counting, writing, and reasoning) and how learning can be improved by taking into account the way the brain works. Thus, nowadays, progresses in cognitive neuroscience, developmental and social psychology should help shape the education of the future by devising pedagogies that are tailored to the laws of the learning brain.

In the conference, I will first present the basic of brain maturation and explain how certain period of life especially early childhood and adolescence constitute sensitive periods for learning due to the high plasticity of the brain at the functional level (i.e., the networks of neurons activated during the resolution of a problem) but also at the structural level (i.e., the thickness of the external layer of the brain and the connections between the different brain areas). I will then show data on the way the brain deals with the acquisition of cultural tools at school and in the society (language, reading, mathematics, logical thinking and critical thinking) and how new technologies and digital media in particular can be used to help the acquisition of theses cultural tools by the brain of children and adolescents.

In the third part of the conference, I will take a different angle at the issue and show works of my lab on how individual differences in the shape of the brain determined early in life can explain individual differences in the acquisition of cultural tools. Finally, I will present some of the projects we develop in the lab to foster a dialog between the lab and the classroom which allows us (a) to disseminate knowledge regarding the learning brain to the teachers, the students and the parents (by using digital technologies and social media) and (b) to develop collaborative and participative research to promote innovative pedagogies and evaluate their effect at a large scale.

Join Gregoire Borst for his Keynote at #TECH2018

About TECH 2018

TECH 2018, UNESCO MGIEP's international conference, organised with the State Government of Andhra Pradesh, aims to showcase the role of games and digital learning in enabling a shift from “transmissive pedagogies” to “transformative pedagogies” to create peaceful and sustainable societies. TECH will be held from November 15 - 17, 2018 at the Novotel Varun Beach, Vizag City, State of Andhra Pradesh, India.

Click here for further details on TECH 2018 or write to us at tech2018.mgiep@unesco.org

View highlights from TECH 2017 here