Context Matters ANNE-MICHELLE ENGELSTAD ’12
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simple statement, “context matters,” and yet, sitting in one of my first classes as a Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, it was a wake-up call. Dr. Todd Rose, director of the MBE program, was discussing the importance of accounting for context when researching systems as complex as child development and learning.1 Research that takes place in the lab, even when utilizing a combination of methods, he argued, may not yield data that translate to the classroom at all when you consider the unique and abundant neurological demands that the classroom context presents. It was the first clue in answering one of the key questions I had come to Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to explore. My journey to HGSE had been rather linear. I knew from a young age that I wanted to teach, and thanks to a literature class at St. Andrew’s that assigned Mark Hadon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,”2 I became very interested in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A senior paper investigating the etiology of ASD and a stint in an autism support classroom for my senior project affirmed my desire to study development in children with ASD. I set my sights on Vanderbilt University’s acclaimed special education program, which gave me the chance, beginning in my freshman year, to spend ample time in classrooms around Nashville. Through a second major in child cognitive studies, I learned about early developmental constructs and the varying trajectories children follow. Instructors supplemented this with neuroscience research pointing to the underlying systems involved, and patterns of activation and connectivity that could be seen across development, due to emerging
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neuroimaging tools. The power of these tools to act as a window into the minds of children with complex learning needs excited me, and I dove in. I spent the next two years in labs that utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate learning differences in children with conditions such as specific language impairment, anxiety, and neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1).
Researchers often set out to add something novel to existing literature rather than build on established neuroscience principles to develop usable strategies. I had to shift the way I framed my own research questions. I learned a great deal about research procedure and methods in these labs. The results coming out of this research intrigued me as a special educator and gave me a deeper understanding of the profiles of students. I felt the more I understood about students’ brains, the better I could tailor my teaching to their learning patterns. However, the connection was not clear to teachers I was working with. When I told a mentor teacher that I wanted to add a neuroscience minor, she asked me “why?” For that teacher, neuroscience and education was too far of a leap. Another teacher felt that a neuroscience implication for teaching was faddish. “Wait five years,” she told
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