2019/07/03 by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen Immordino‐Yang, Linda Darling-Hammond +3 · 4 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Early Childhood Education and Development #Child and Animal Learning Development #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00461520.2019.1633924
New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional functioning, cognition, motivation, and learning. Brain development is also impacted by health-related and physical developmental factors, such as sleep, toxin exposure, and puberty, which in turn influence social-emotional functioning and cognition. An appreciation of the dynamic interdependencies of social-emotional experience, health-related factors, brain development and learning underscores the importance of a "whole child" approach to education reform and leads to important insights for research on social-emotional learning. To facilitate these interdisciplinary conversations, here we conceptualize within a developmental framework current evidence on the fundamental and ubiquitous biological constraints and affordances undergirding social-emotional learning–related constructs and learning more broadly. Learning indeed depends on how nature is nurtured.