Teaching and Learning in the Pleistocene: A Biocultural Account of Human Pedagogy and Its Implications for AIED
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Teaching and Learning in the Pleistocene: A Biocultural Account of Human Pedagogy and Its Implications for AIED Donald M. Morrison 1
& Kenneth
B. Miller 2
# International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society 2017
Introduction During the past two decades or so, work across a number of disciplines has begun to converge on what may be seen as a new, interdisciplinary account of the nature and evolution of teaching in humans. Contributions come from researchers studying differences in methods of cultural transmission in humans and other animals (e.g. Csibra and Gergely 2009, 2011; Franks and Richardson 2006; Hoppitt et al. 2008; Thornton and Raihani 2008; Tomasello 1999); coevolution of language and the human brain (e.g., Deacon 1997); neurobiology (Schaafsma et al. 2015; Stout et al. 2008); archeology (Morgan et al. 2015; Tehrani and Collard 2002; Tehrani and Riede 2008); cultural anthropology (MacDonald 2007; Maynard 2002); evolutionary cultural anthropology (Hewlett 2016; Hewlett and Roulette 2016); peer teaching in children (Strauss et al. 2002; Strauss and Ziv 2012); evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al. 1995; Pinker 1997, 2003); niche construction (DeVore and Tooby 1987; Pinker 2003; Sinha 2015); and evolutionary relationships among traits such as human life history, language, and culture (Bogin 1990; Fogarty et al. 2011; Kaplan et al. 2000; Laland 2016; Locke and Bogin 2006; Schwartz 2012). A central claim of this emerging account is that human pedagogy is at once a cultural and biological behavior, fundamentally enabled by language, and resulting from millions of years of the coevolution of genes and culture. As such, the capacity and inclination to teach and learn through language, are best understood, and can only
* Donald M. Morrison [email protected] Kenneth B. Miller [email protected]
1
Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA
2
AANeX, LLC, 55 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10005, USA
Int J Artif Intell Educ
be fully understood, as deeply embedded components of the full human package. Somehow, in a highly complex, little understood, and by no means inevitable sequence of genetic and environmental events, our hominin ancestors came to rely on a new system of communication— involving conventionalized combinations of vocalization and gesture (including facial expression, hand gestures, and postures)—to accomplish a broad range of purposes, including the transmission of hard-won knowledge and skill from experts to novices, and from one generation to the next. Considered in this way, teaching is not just a special kind of social behavior, which some individuals in modern times are paid to engage in and may be more or less good at. Rather, our capacity and instinct for teaching, through our species-unique medium of symbolic, syntactic language, is no less a part of what makes us human than our oversized brains, nimble fingers, and risk of falling in love with strangers. The question we pose in this paper is what, if anything, this new acco
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