Looking back on it, my career tells a much more cohesive story than it felt like at the time. We usually think about a career as a series of sequential decisions, each building logically and systematically towards an end goal. However, that narrative is more often created in retrospect than prospectively. My, like many, careers felt haphazard and disjointed at each step. As BRAIN SIG members will know, we are plastic individuals with gradually (and sometimes rapidly!) shifting identities, interests, desires, and goals.
Author: Brain Admin
Learning about TESOL and the Brain at the NUFS Language Workshops
I’ve been attending the monthly workshops at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies (NUFS) now for about five years. Originally, I went as a way to rehearse what I was learning in my TESOL MA, but now I go just because I get so much from it that… well, why wouldn’t I?
Mezirow Moments: The Value of Conferences for a Mother Returning to Study
It’s not easy to change career paths, but it is something that teachers often consider after working in one field for many years. This can mean a return to study, but as Adult Education experts have noted, older learners usually face some specific barriers in returning to school that younger learners do not, and sometimes these barriers prevent them from trying. And if you are a mother, like I am, even going to a conference can be difficult. This is my story of the challenges I faced in returning to study, and of the people who helped me to overcome them.
How I Study the Brain
Editors: We asked our authors and advocates how they learn more about the brain. You’ll be surprised at the wide range of ways they offer.
Educators Engaged in Adult Education
I was surprised at how quickly and joyfully the people we asked to write on this topic did so. Language teaching is not really a field like computer programming or medicine that needs constant retraining, and yet a large number of us seek professional development whenever we can. We go to workshops, participate in conferences, and even disrupt our lives to go back to school. I wonder why? Is it simply a bias towards learning because we are in the learning business?
Call for Contributions: Ideas & Articles
Become a Think Tank star! Here are some of the future issue topics we are thinking about. Would you, or anyone you know, like to write about any of these? Or is there another topic you’d like to recommend? Do you have any suggestions for lead-in, or just plain interesting, videos? How about writing a book review? Or sending us a story about your experiences? Contact us.
The Parable of the Gifted Winner and the Gritty Grower
As a young boy growing up in rural England, I was blessed with the somewhat unusual combination of truly terrible behavior and very high school grades. Every year my report card would have virtually the same comment from all of my teachers. It usually read something like this: “He is a gifted individual with a natural aptitude for learning. If only he would buckle down in class…”
Teaching Embodiment to the Language Learner: The Neurocognitive vs. the Cultural Anthropological Perspectives
A few years ago, after many years of living in Japan, I returned to my home country, Venezuela, and an elderly family friend gave me a welcome home present. When I started to thank her, I unconsciously also did something that incited in her the most puzzled look I have probably ever seen in my life: I was bowing. You see, we Latin Americans do not normally bow.
The Embodiment of Language and Conceptual Knowledge
A lot of people probably still believe that the computer remains the best metaphor we have for the brain, indeed some people may even think that the brain is quite literally computer-like. This notion can be linked to the computational theory of mind, often associated with the philosopher Jerry Fodor (see this Stanford article for a long review), and in linguistics, probably with Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. However, arguments against this theory have been building up since the late 1980s, in particular from theories of embodied or simulated cognition, also associated with extended or distributed cognition.
The Movements of Language: Learning from Embodied Semantics
The brain and computer are two everyday words for concepts that widely capture the imagination of so many people by their complexity and intelligent design and have been bed partners in an enduring metaphor since the 1940s. These two concepts are so intricately interconnected in language and thought that it is hard to imagine one without imagining the other. For instance, the electrical currents of a computer are similar to the action potentials of neurons firing in the brain.