Brain fitness, “Tête bien faite”, enaction. From pedagogy of content to pedagogy of the container

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose a pedagogy of the container to integrate to a pedagogy of the content and information. A new framework is provided concerning with the fitness of the child brain in his relationship with the caregiver within a more aware and strategic interaction which triggers
important developments and structural-anatomical modifications of the brain in order to achieve a more explicit learning in the future ages of life. This pedagogy uses the species-specific processing of the human organism following the Middle Age statement: Omnis recipitur per modum recipientis, everything receives to the extent of its capacity of receiving. We support this claim adding the idea of a dynamic perceptual and cognitive receiving in which the container tends to
modify its capacity according to the amount and quality of motor and cognitive learnings and stimulations to which it is exposed during childhood.
This kind of pedagogy have to be integrated with a most representational and cognitive perspective, but maintining a strong senory-motor and enactive bodily-grounded perspective. The contemporary development of neurosciences allow us to rethink the mind not only like a container for contents, but as container able to structural modifications and with a complex management of the neurophysiological processing that will support the parallel functional information processing. Thus mind is not only a container in which one can pass down knowledge, but a dynamical organ with an its own particular fitness and plasticity. The hebbian plasticity and the new framework of homeostatic
synaptic plasticity (Turrigiano 2012) help us to provide a consistent account of a new kind of education of the erlier childhood and of all periods of the life. A paradigm that can be integrate with the Edgar Morin (1999) theory of the Tête bien faite, in which the neuro-biological perspective opens to the a bio-anthropological and socio-cultural complexity framework.