Jim Tanaka

Presenter: Jim Tanaka

Title: Grounded cognitions: A curriculum on the mind and brain for living in a neurodiverse society

Abstract:
Imagine you are a young science teacher who is stepping into their first job at the local middle school. Two weeks before school starts, your principal gives you a surprise and daunting assignment … you are asked to design and teach a new STEM course on human cognition for the Grade 6 and 7 students! If you were in the teacher’s shoes, how would you go about developing and launching this course? What topics and concepts would you cover? What innovative teaching methods and techniques would you introduce to spark the curiosity and imaginations of your students?

This Friday’s Cognition and Brain Sciences (CABS) seminar will be a collective brainstorming session where we discuss and debate how we might design a course in cognitive neuroscience for school-age children. Ideally, the proposed course will cover the fundamental concepts and scientific principles that connect brain science and human cognition. The teachings should be inspired by cutting-edge discoveries, technologies and theories in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, computational and artificial sciences. To engage students, course material should be drawn from their everyday experiences and observations of cognitive and brain processes. The course will consider the variations and diversity of human cognition as reflected in culture, gender, clinical diagnoses, and neurological conditions. The goal of this new cognitive neuroscience course will be to teach students how to think about the human mind and brain while living in a post-information age of artificial intelligence.