Learning brains: educational neuroscience, neurotechnology and neuropedagogy

Abstract

Educational neuroscience seeks to conceptualise the neural underpinings of learning and other educational outcomes, as a route to proposing brain-based pedagogic interventions. As educational neuroscience has begun deploying new neurotechnologies, it has generated diverse data-driven conceptualisations of the ‘learning brain’. The data-intensive technological and methodological apparatuses used in educational neuroscience support the configuration of multiple ‘learning brains’ as the basis for neuropedagogic interventions: (1) a ‘plastic’ brain, (2) a ‘synchronized’ brain, (3) an ‘engaged’ brain, and (4) a ‘computational’ brain. Various sociotechnical arrangements of instrumentation, information, incubation, imagination and implementation that constitute contemporary neurotechnological instantiations of educational neuroscience are analysed. The core argument is that the neuro-informational malleability of the datafied learning brain is being mobilised to strengthen educational neuroscience as a source of expertise in brain-based pedagogies. This has novel implications for determining what education scientifically is and normatively should be, and for proposed ‘neurogovernance’ interventions.