Covid-19 and the Epigenetics of Learning
- PDF / 378,476 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 89 Downloads / 145 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
Covid-19 and the Epigenetics of Learning Mark William Johnson 1
& Elizabeth
Maitland 1 & John Torday 2
Accepted: 3 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Covid-19 is a natural phenomenon that has rapidly upended much of the cultural infrastructure of societies across the globe. Education, which in recent years increasingly tied itself to notions of global culture and markets, is deeply threatened by these changes to the natural environment. This paper makes the case that the relationship between nature and culture in education requires a deep level analysis of the biological and physical substrate of human learning. Only with a sufficiently fundamental level of analysis can society reorganise its systems of learning and scientific inquiry to this rapidly changing environment. Drawing on evolutionary biology, we argue that institutional and individual structures and processes are recapitulations of evolutionary cellular development. Understanding the impact of Covid-19 on cells presents an invitation to consider the larger-scale cultural recapitulations of similar mechanisms and structures, and this has implications for the ways education might most effectively deploy technology. Whilst universities seek to maintain their existing structures, practices and business models, a cellular evolutionary approach points to the necessity for fundamental rethinking of intellectual life and learning. We consider the parameters of effective educational organisation in a post-Covid-19 world. As the richness and variety of the physical campus is removed, viable educational relationships will necessitate deeper intellectual connections and personal inquiries than are currently permitted in the transactional processes of education. Keywords Covid-19 . Epigenetics . Evolutionary biology . Intellectual depth . Institutional
organisation
* Mark William Johnson [email protected]
1
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
2
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Postdigital Science and Education
Introduction: Learning, Cells and Technology Learning begins with cells and leads to minds, ideas and universities. As Simon Conway Morris noted, ‘[f]irst there were bacteria, now there is New York’ (Morris 2011). A fundamental question is, what is the connection between cellular mechanisms, social structures and human behaviour? The Covid-19 virus has created an opportunity for revisiting the project first addressed by Piaget (1970), and later by Papert (1991) that asked about the connection between the environment and biological, psychological and behaviourial processes of learning, and how the social organisation of education might address this. What light can be shed on this by understanding the effects of Covid-19 on biological, psychological and sociological phenomena? In addressing these questions, this paper explores the possibilities for research opened-up by recent advances in biology, and particularly the science of epigenetics (Moore 2015; Torday 2020). We argue that a renewed focus on biol
Data Loading...
