Human Genius Project

Project conceptualization by Michael Maser, PhD*, 2025 

The Human Genome Project, spanning 1990 – 2003, is acknowledged as one of the great scientific achievements in human history. Bringing together hundreds of international researchers, the project led to numerous discoveries in biology and profound advances in medicine and health research. 

The Human Genius Project is conceptualized around a core contention that genius is a universal and emergent characteristic of human living and being. This project will provide insights on genius and stimulate efforts to nurture its development for the benefit of human societies, worldwide and biospheric health.  

The Human Genius Project is envisioned as as an international collaboration holding similar potential as the Human Genome Project for sowing benefits to humanity. Please read on to learn more. 

• • • •

Scientific and social indicators consistently trumpet a message that human activities, worldwide, are stretching the bounds of all life on earth and impeding the future viability of biogeoclimatic and social systems that sustain life. 

With little exception, human societies are dominated by systems rooted in an empiricism that emerged following the Enlightenment hundreds of years ago. This has shaped modern economics, education, nation-states and political systems that reify narrow, self-serving and expedient agendas that continue to foment conflict, competition and exploitation. 

The result is a world beset by climate change, shrinking biodiversity and ethno-diversity, unbalanced prosperity and precarious stability across societies. Many people are working to address and offset complex vulnerabilities and threats and the results they are achieving are inspiring. That said, field experts addressing the issues listed above agree the future may well be unpredictable, unstable and potentially calamitous. 

We can’t wait to on the sidelines to see how this turns out, the precarity of human existence swings in the balance. We must devise something richer and the solution is staring us in the face. 

Scientists have categorized various ‘life-forces’ among the world’s life-forms according to perceived ‘drives’ serving species survival and reproduction. Myriad species have thrived and also gone extinct in response to changing planetary and local circumstance, a trait proposed by Darwin as reflective of ‘adaptability’ and ‘natural selection’ that favoured species’ ‘fitness.’  

Darwinism has helped to explain many bio-evolutionary processes but it’s not the whole story about species survival. 

Seldom discussed is a proclivity or disposition towards ‘genius’ as an emergent, dynamic characteristic shared among all living organisms extant in the ‘tree of all life’ since the explosive-emergence of life-forms beginning in the Cambrian Era. Genius drives innovation, adaptation, evolution, and physio-psychological re-configurations of life-forms and living systems, and may be seen in photosynthesis, reproduction, niche-habitation, species mobility, envenomation, camouflage and colouration, and countless other examples. 

In the last few hundred thousand years, the proclivity of genius is also found in the emergent characteristics of the mammalian genus Homo which designates our own humanity. 

In truth, our existence today has leveraged a proclivity for ‘genius’ in myriad ways.  

One of the earliest artifacts researchers point to as an indicator of our existence and self-consciousness are the cave paintings of Europe and Indonesia, now back-dated to 60,000 years ago. These depict life outside the bounds of cave-dwelling but they also reflect a human disposition for representation and story-telling that profoundly shaped human consciousness and sensibility. The same can be said of so many other artifacts and entire systems now linked through academic studies to the roots of modern humanity: tool-making, development of language, agriculture, artistry, transportation, energy harnessing and production, celestial and biotic study. And, and, and. 

Each development was triggered by an impulse rooted in neurobiology, socio-ecology, circumstance and an innate imperative rooted in a proclivity for genius. 

The development of the wheel, the smelting of metals to create bronze, or the introduction of crop rotations thousands of years ago reflect an emergent proclivity for genius as much as a spider’s proclivity to create a silken web to trap food or a flower’s proclivity to innovate a system of pollination. 

Genius is an emergent characteristic of all living organisms

Genius, then, is reflected in life on earth, including humans, whose unique genius may be seen in a thousand-thousand facts, trial-and-error developments and astute observations. 

A study of human genius surely merits much closer examination. To this point, various pronouncements and categorizations of human genius have been declared and assigned by an earlier generation of researchers but these have been short-sighted and linked to a vested-interest scientism that reinforced racism and colonialism. Earlier pronouncements about genius also reified an ideal of genius as an individual who displayed exceptional intellectual and artistic talents. The chosen exemplars of this form of genius included Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Beethoven, Darwin, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Martha Graham, Stephen Jobs, and others.  

To recognize a new, more expansive form of human genius is not to deny that these individuals have made exceptional contributions to human societies – they surely have – but it is to broaden a notion of genius that sees genius and genius-potential in all people and peoples. 

This new notion recognizes and honours ways of knowing and being in the world that extend beyond previously constrained notions of genius. This project will note how genius can and does emerge from all races and cultures, neurodivergent people, children and youth, elders and marginalized individuals, as well as a group or team of people.

This project recognizes a proclivity for emergent genius in all peoples and cultures and not just a few individuals deemed as highly talented.

 Our existence, and a quality of life we hope to be available to future generations, depends on leveraging our proclivity for genius. The time is now to enact a Human Genius Project that affirms a broader notion of genius and seeks to nurture genius across all human societies in the service of benefitting humanity. 

The Human Genius Project will re-conceptualize the very human proclivity towards genius as our birthright, as a reflection of our very being, our ontology. It will expand our understanding of genius to embrace those individuals and groups that have been excluded or marginalized from earlier conceptions of genius. And it will identify how and where human genius is taking root and flourishing, and also offer educational guidance on how genius may be best nurtured in all human communities. 

Some focus subjects of the Human Genius Project

Specifically, the Human Genius Project will profile: 

– An expanded version of human genius beyond an outmoded, modern conceptualization that has been preoccupied with defining ‘genius’ as an individual of exceptional intellectual capacities. This has ignored the contributions of countless indigenous cultures. The modern definition has also fortified an ideal that excludes and potentially harms many people of all ages, and also groups whose capacities and contributions transcend beyond the narrow criteria of  ‘exceptional intellect.’  

– A consideration that genius is a biological attribute of all living organisms, noted in humans (Homo sapiens)  and non-human species through myriad aspects of species evolution, adaptation, behaviour, reproduction and survival. 

– Emphasizing how human genius in its broadest forms has contributed positively across countless civilizations to enhancing quality of life, survival and longevity, and continue to do so. 

– Emphasizing how nurturing human genius may be viewed as critical to mitigating the most significant, existential threats to human welfare now and in the future. Such threats include climate change, conflict, inequity, pollution, loss of biodiversity and habitat, etc. 

– Identifying and emphasizing how genius may be effectively nurtured through educational, social, technological and political gestures to help mitigate against the threats listed above. 

– Individuals who have explored and commented on Genius, including historical figures (Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, James, Jung), and more recently EP Torrance, Einstein, Howard Gardner, Edith Cobb, Joanna Field, Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, Robert Sternberg, Robert Root-Bernstein, Adele Diamond, Scott Kaufman, Wade Davis, Dean Simonton, and others. 

– People who have illuminated a path or guided others to enhance their capabilities for genius or potential, including the pioneers of Human Potential Movement (e.g. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May); and educators like Leo Tolstoy, Charlotte Mason, AS Neale, JD Krishnamurti, Paolo Freire, Thomas Armstrong, John Holt, Maxine Greene, Maurice Gibbons, Brent Cameron, Temple Grandin, and others. 

– Other author-researchers of significance, especially critiquing modernity and suggesting new and/or more expansive-inclusive ways of human engagement and genius: Timothy Ingold, Arturo Escobar, Wade Davis, Chellis Glendinning, Michael Yellow Bird, Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Suzanne Simard, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Dr. David Suzuki, Eduardo Galeano, and others. 

A few reference books and authors shaping this project

• • • •

Michael is an award-winning, innovative educator and writer based in BC Canada. He has been a lifelong student of human learning and genius, and has led numerous workshops and courses on both subjects. In 2023, Michael completed his PhD (Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education), focusing his research on the nature of human learning. His dissertation was selected as runner-up for an SFU Convocation medal. Presently, Michael serves as faculty for the Individualized Masters (IMA) program offered by Antioch University (online) in which he teaches Neurobiology and Learning and Introductory Research. From 1993 – 2017 Michael helped lead and provide educator services in two award-winning, innovative learning programs he helped pioneer in BC, Canada: Virtual High Learning Community and SelfDesign Learning Community. In 2007 he shared a Prime Ministers award and Award of Merit (BC Ministry of Education) for his role in co-founding these programs. Michael previously published a ‘Profiles of Genius’ series for youth and he has led ‘Genius Hour’ workshops in SelfDesign and ‘Outschool.’

Banner ad for ‘Genius Hour’ workshop offered through Outschool.com

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• • • •

Learn Your – Project Overview)

I wish to extend my PhD research through developing this project, Learn Your Way, to build out my dissertation into a reader-friendly, website-format including focused database development, as noted below. This format will help to optimize navigational efficiency and ensure this project benefits:

  • Educators & Administrators
  • Learners (of all ages and backgrounds)
  • Families
  • Organizations
  • Professionals involved in Curriculum Development, Learning Platform Development
  • Educational counsellors
  • Health care practitioners
  • Professional and personal coaches
  • Human resources personnel

Why this project, now? Significant forces are currently intersecting and influencing education paths for children, youth, young adults and adults. These include new insights from the learning sciences, including neuroscience, education and sociology, about how to optimize learning experiences for students of all ages and backgrounds. Additional factors include rising incidence of mental health issues and neurodiversity across student populations adding increased challenge to already-burdened educators. With the rise of AI-based education platforms educators must also discern how they might use AI in support of helping students achieve educational goals, at the same time they critically distinguish the nature of human learning from machine-based learning. This project will address these intersecting factors.

Education is the institutionalization of learning but learning is individual. Learning is broader than education. … learning is fundamental to human being and to life itself.

Peter Jarvis, Paradoxes of Learning

  

I am seeking additional funding (winter 2024) and I will provide updates here as the project is developed.

Michael Maser 

In this outline I provide some signposts and content to better define this project.

Background

My PhD research into the nature of human learning blended my lifetime interest in the subject with professional experiences and observations enriched by the studies I completed, starting with a literature review of western conceptualizations of learning from the 1800s to the present. Since the mid-1800s, especially, positivist science, based in the belief that reality is best determined objectively, has dominated the development of psychology, education and sociology.

The first scientific pronouncements on human learning ironically reflected crude lab experiments focused on measuring responses to stimuli by birds, rodents and other animals. Despite their crude simplicity, the foundational precepts of these experiments proved enduring in shaping beliefs that human learning arises from a kind of inanimate conditioning without considering the human subject or self. These precepts reflected a limited and often misguided perception about how humans experience the world, uniquely, and how each person’s learning is shaped through these experiences.

Behaviourist psychology, often based on crude and simple animal experimentation, shaped narrow beliefs about human learning for decades.
Phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl

Phenomenology is the primary source of knowledge, the source that cannot be doubted. … Phenomenology is concerned with wholeness, with examining entities from many sides, angles, and perspectives until a unified vision of the essences of a phenomenon or experience is achieved.

Phenomenological researcher Clark Moustakas

My PhD research confirmed this.

Below, I frame this project through identifying three Key Elements: The Nature of Learning, The Subjectivity of Learning, and Personalizing Learning to Nurture Human Flourishing and Healing. Each of these will be elaborated with many additional details in the final work including database development of all elements to aid reference research.

By way of introduction, consider this personal learning experience (excerpted from my dissertation):

Pond/ering – A Childhood Learning Experience

“It’s getting dark, Michael, five more minutes and we have to go. Look at you, you’re filthy. And put all the frogs you caught back in the pond. They’re not coming home with us.”

This pond, a swamp really, five to six kilometers from my home, is my prized ‘go- to-place.’ I am four or five years old, and I beg my mother to bring me here, after school, on weekends, anytime in spring, summer or fall. There, aided by a dip net and magnifying glass, I pull off my boots and jacket and commune with the life of the pond. As my feet sink into the mud and I dip my arm in water up to the elbow, my senses are engulfed as I observe, hear, smell and feel. I experience a pondering in which I am extended in all sensory ways. I have no preferential trajectory except that which calls me most strongly in-the-moment. There’s a wriggling tadpole. There’s a water beetle swimming upside down. There’s a painted turtle! Uh-oh, there’s another leech on my leg. Mom! Hour after hour, the pond enthralls me as I wade about, poking here and there in my quest to learn its secrets and make sense of it all. I feel so good, so buzzing with life that I don’t notice time whizzing by, pangs of hunger or the mosquitos and deerflies using me as a pincushion.

To this day, I recollect with much fondness and in vivid detail my Pond/ering as a young boy. This experience tested my resolve in countless ways, catalyzed cascading emotions and helped propel me in numerous ways into a lifelong love of the outdoors, swimming, hiking, camping, an early career in geology and a 30+ year career as an outdoor and science educator. The experience exposed the core of my being to the raw plasma of life. In both cases, what I was learning engaged all aspects of my living-being – my perception of myself, imagination, intellect as well as my corporeal senses and sensibilities. In a nutshell, this description affords insight into the very character or nature of life-wide and lifelong learning as it appeared and arose for me.

My excerpt above points to how the nature of learning reflects essential characteristics unique to each of us. Of course, you need not take my word for this but participate in a personal reflection important to you: in deeply associating with a learning experience you hold in your memory, re-construct not the what of his experience but carefully unscroll the how of this learning experience as it appeared and arose for you, as I did above. Permit yourself to remember and note sensory details, your unfolding response, and the meaning of this experience in your life in-the-moment and later.

Our learning lives are suffused with myriad experiences, shaped by the how of our somatic, relational and intellectual beingness. I will unpack this further when I detail some of the insights I gleaned from my autobiography study and also my fieldwork research.

It’s been exciting for me to follow and unspool learning, as an educator of course but also one who has had a lifetime interest in the nature of human learning. From these perspectives, I had long perceived a mismatch between formal-schooling pronouncements about learning and my own experiences, including observing my students’ learning. In my literature study I traced the conventional roots of learning to the mid-late 1800s when the first pronouncements about learning were linked to laboratory-controlled experiments involving pigeons and rats and very rudimentary human studies. These experiments were valorized in the language of the emerging field of empirical psychology which was establishing itself as a field of objectivist science. What ‘mattered’ in this nascent field was what could be measured and quantified and repeated in controlled experiments.

Missing from early literature about learning, or discredited, was recognition of the personal – the subjective qualities that help define human learning. To help me better understand the basis of subjective learning, I investigated works of field-leading researchers and writers from psychology, education, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, special education and indigenous studies. This field included John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Edith Cobb, John Holt, Maxine Greene, John (Jack) Miller, Loris Malaguzzi, Howard Gardner, Caine & Caine, Adele Diamond, Joseph LeDoux, Daniel Stern, Gregory Cajete and others.

An exciting avenue of research linking subjectivity to learning has recently emerged in neuroscience. This is seen, especially, in insights synthesized by eminent scientist and author Dr. Joseph LeDoux who hypothesizes (2020, 2019) the existence of idiosyncratic cognitive-neurological ‘self-schema’ reflecting each person’s unique history and character and prefiguring responsiveness to stimuli. LeDoux’s assertions align with those of Dr. Antonio Damasio (2010, 2000) about ‘the autobiographical self’, and other researchers like Dr. Adele Diamond (2012, 2018) who assert the neurobiological basis of social-emotional learning reflects idiosyncratic accretion of subjective experiences.

An image of activated brain cells (neurons). Scientists now hypothesize a neuronal cluster like this to reflect personal experiences, including learning.

A critical aspect of investigating subjectivity I drew on was the philosophy and research methodology of phenomenology, mentioned above. From its inception in the early 1900s, phenomenology has been elaborated to comprise a sophisticated scientific basis that, Husserl insisted, included objectivist science as a subset. Numerous, subsequent researchers and authors have broadened the reach of phenomenology to include psychology, health care, education and pedagogy, sociology and other domains. In my investigation of phenomenology I drew on the works of Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Buber, Michel Henry, Max van Manen, Stephen J. Smith (PhD supervisor), Don Beith, and others. Phenomenology, as a recognized research methodology, also provided the guidance for my autobiography study and fieldwork investigation into subjective learning.

Because of obvious overlap, considerations of learning intersect with notions of education and schooling; indeed, to some the terms are practically interchangeable. This makes a certain sense: people go to school to learn and educational institutions oversee approaches to schooling, managing everything from architecture to scheduling to curriculum design, testing and student control. Yet, as educator-author Peter Jarvis writes (1992), “learning is wider than education,” and, further,

all the social institutions together cannot contain learning, since learning is fundamental to human being and to life itself.

– Jarvis, P.; Paradoxes of Learning; p. 10

Understood in this way, learning is distinct from education. Education, on the other hand, generally overlooks or ignores how learning emerges subjectively or idiosyncratically for each and every student, favouring empirical-objectivist theories of learning. To this point, conventional education adopted tenets of industrialization to resemble assembly line standardization and efficiency in its practices starting early in the 20th century. This may be recognized through the processes of standardized curricula and administration, teacher training, mass testing, streaming and other processes. Sidney Pressey’s ‘Teaching Machine’ (ca. 1926), shown in the figure below, exemplifies the adoption of such processes and was the forerunner to the ‘Scantron’ era of multiple choice testing that continues to this day, reifying objectivist learning principles. Pressey’s machine, manufactured and distributed to thousands of schools, relied on crude, semi-automated processing of multiple-choice test answers selected by students pressing levers and turning a scrolling question drum.

A ‘Teaching Machine’ designed by American psychologist Sidney Pressey, ca 1926. (Smithsonian Institution display). The machine dispensed candy pellets when students correctly answered multiple choice questions.

Conventional psychology continues to frame learning in terms of prediction and measurement and abstract cognitive schemata, i.e. the language of objectivism. My research, drawing from less well-known domains of psychology, holistic education, neuroscience and phenomenology, challenges this objectivist framing to offer a new frame of learning oriented to personal subjectivity. I will further elaborate this foundation in this project and identify how the thrust of ‘Personalized Learning’ is making important inroads into K-12 and post-secondary education, adult education, career re-training, special education and indigenous education. In its nascent reach, personalized learning is being recognized as having potential nurture greater student learning than its conventional predecessor.

Project build-out will include narrative description and database categorization of learning typologies and domain milestones per my PhD review (e.g. psychologistic learning [late 1800s], cognition and learning (ref: Jerome Bruner), multiple intelligences theory (ref: Howard Gardner), neurobiological learning (ref: Caine and Caine, Adele Diamond, Joseph LeDoux), holistic, personalized learning (ref: numerous practitioners), neurodiverse learning (ref: Thomas Armstrong, Dr. Barry Prizant), etc.

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Subjectivity refers to the personal quality of self-experience denoted through self-presencing gestures and acts. A subjective act, such as self-reflecting, exists in a personal or idiosyncratic manner, and is distinguished from an objective act that is denoted or described via parameters external to the subject. Human learning has conventionally been studied objectively and categorized as an act lacking personal qualities. This reflects the roots of analyzing learning via empirical-analytical psychology traceable to the mid-1800s when the first studies of learning centred on measuring responses by pigeons and rats to crude prompts in lab-controlled situations. This led to the first categorizations of human learning as behaviourally objective n character and lacking in anything resembling self-agency or subjectivity.

But, if as Jarvis says, learning is fundamental to being and life itself, then learning must be re-cognized as a subjective act, and in this it is observed in humans as commensurate with living itself from birth or earlier and extending lifelong. With the help of bodily senses and tissues, our learning guides us into mobility, first crawling, then walking, and coming to embrace the surrounding world with animated determination. As perceiving and linguistic bodies, we touch and explore, listen and mimic, ponder and discover the character of the world and of our place within it through these manifold modes of engagement. The trajectory of this ‘learning journey’, within and without, extends to a horizon of being and knowing, that, itself, seems boundless whether people are consciously aware of learning or not.

New insights about subjective learning are noted in neuroscience in which learning is perceived as innate disposition that can be correlated to evolutionary traits but also distinct neurobiological correlates that indicate subjective presencing. An important correlate posited by researcher-author Antonio Damasio (1999, 2019) are lifelong, accumulated “autobiographical memories”; another posited by researcher-author Joseph LeDoux (2018) are idiosyncratic “mental schema,” reflecting personal experiences and cultural dispositions. Other researchers have also elaborated to this subject.

These are important scientific insights that contribute to knowledge about subjective learning. But there’s a rich realm of information illuminating personal insights into learning in a domain of knowledge that I tapped in my PhD research: that which exists through auto/biography. My study, inspired by sociologist Edith Cobb who had compiled an extensive library of these in completing her pioneering work into children’s lives, included excerpts I had retained for years and new profiles I studied. Like a complex puzzle that comes into focus, rich autobiography illuminates poignant, personal insights and intersections with contextual forces shaping and influencing one’s existence and guiding the evolution of a self. My study, including 15 separate excerpts including first-person experiences and reflections and first-person pedagogical observations, contributes to denoting a phenomenal gestalt of subjective sensible and meaning-laden nature of learning. (helped denote qualities of subjective learning that I further confirmed in my fieldwork study.)  

To this end the following sample of autobiography excerpts from my study help the reader grasp these qualities:

Unfolding Learning – childhood learning experiences described by author-disability rights activist Helen Keller: 

As the cool stream gushed over one hand (my teacher) spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. 

Helen Keller; 1905; The Story of My Life; loc. 263-264
Depiction of Helen Keller learning about water, from the film ‘The Miracle Worker’ (1962)

Unfolding Learning – young adult learning experiences described by Academy Award-winning documentary film-maker Michael Moore: 

looooooved the movies. I always did. … At seventeen, I saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and then I saw everything else by Kubrick, and after that there was no looking back. I was hooked on the potential and the power of cinema … Two years later I opened my own “art haus” in Flint where, for just two nights a week, I would show everything by Truffaut, Bergman, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Herzog, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Buñuel, Fellini, Kubrick, and the masters of cinema. Each film would get four showings, and I would spend my Friday and Saturday evenings watching all four shows. On the first viewing [,] I would sit close and enjoy the experience. On the following three screenings, I would sit in the back and study them, sometimes taking notes. This became my one-room, one-student film school. (2011, pp. 398-399)

Michael Moore; 2011; Here Comes Trouble: Stories from my life; pp. 398-399
Filmmaker Michael Moore receiving Academy Award for his film ‘Bowling for Columbine’ (2003)

Unfolding Learning – observation of learning by author-educator John Holt: 

On days when I have a lesson, I bring my cello to school, take it to a classroom, and give the children a turn at “playing” it. … They start off by working the bow vigorously back and forth across one of the strings. They keep this up for a long time. Just the feel and sound of it are exciting. Then they begin to vary their bowing a bit, trying different rhythms. After a while, they begin to move the bow so that it touches more than one string, or they move to another string. But it is important to note that the first few times they do this, they do not seem to be doing it in the spirit of an experiment, to find out what will happen. They do it for the sake of doing it. They have been bowing one way, making one kind of noise; now they want to bow another way and make another kind of noise. Only after some time does it seem to occur to them that there was a relation between the way they bowed and the kind of noise they got. Then there is quite a change in their way of doing things…They have to pile up quite a mass of raw sensory data before they begin trying to sort it out and make sense of it. … (a child) is used to getting his answers out of the noise. He has, after all, grown up in a strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make sense of a tiny part of what he experiences. His way of attacking the cello problem is to produce the maximum amount of data possible, to do as many things as he can, to use his hands and the bow in as many ways as possible. Then, as he goes along, he begins to notice regularities and patterns. He begins to ask questions—that is, to make deliberate experiments. 

John Holt, 1967; How Children Learn; loc. 1064-1120
Educator John Holt with young student; flanked by two of his best-selling texts

Overall, the qualities I denoted in this study, likewise confirmed in my fieldwork study, comprised the following:

  • learning is fused with a sense of emerging selfhood, arising idiosyncratically and often linked to deep, vital interests and personal meaning, or questing to create meaning.  
  • arising as an animated and embodied dynamic act of the sensing (affective) body and life-infused body.
  • arising through aspects of relationality (intersubjectivity, pedagogy) arising in some fusion with the surrounding environment, the “lifeworld”, including non-human living things. 
  • arising as an event of some sustained duration and temporality.  

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Sampling of recent reference texts illuminating new insights into learning

“It’s time for a new definition of human intelligence that … emphasizes the value of an individual’s personal journey. That extends the time course of intelligence from a two-hour testing session of decontextualized problem solving to a lifetime of deeply meaningful engagement.”

Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013); by Scott Barry Kauffman, psychologist

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, we need an educational system built on the understanding that all learning is personal and with the flexibility to engage learners where they are rather than where the lesson, curriculum, or pacing chart assumes they should be.

Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning (2016); by Dr. James Rickabaugh, Idaho Superintendent of Schools

Project Benefits

The conclusions arising from my PhD research – to be expanded upon in this project – help confirm the primacy of subjectivity or personal dynamic forces shaping each person’s learning. To learn is to experience learning arising with “a basis in life” (Michel Henry, 2003) influenced by personal biography, background, previous experiences, interests (attractive forces), dis-interests (repellent forces), sensibilities, dispositions, and biological characteristics (behavioral, neurological). Learning arises relationally and intentionally, motivating any and all students to attend to the “things” held in consciousness that create the context for the most significant learning to arise.

These insights provide a vital counterpoint to how most people have been conditioned to consider learning, formally, informally and lifelong. As noted above, society and the dominant culture of schooling have introduced practices for many decades oriented to impersonal, objectivist learning. These practices continue to dominate educational praxis and inform educator and caregiver training. This is unfortunate because holistic, personalized learning holds the promise of priming new generations to flourish and achieve learning breakthroughs that exceed conventional parameters. As supported by my research, countless stories of human genius and healing unfolding reflect this reality. Now, education is afforded the opportunity to support this as never before. The insights denoted in this project will also be complemented by numerous examples that will extend to internet-based approaches supporting personalized learning (e.g. YouTube, online courseware, Maker-DIY-Gaming communities, and countless others) and emerging AI developments.

Accordingly, this project will benefit:

  • Educators & Administrators
  • Learners (of all ages and backgrounds)
  • Families
  • Organizations
  • Professionals involved in Curriculum Development, Learning Platform Development
  • Educational counsellors
  • Health care practitioners
  • Professional and personal coaches
  • Human resources personnel

Learn Your Way Deliverables

Learn Your Way will contribute to nurturing human learning and flourishing as detailed below. 

Through an engaging website it will:   

• identify the key components of subjective learning arising phenomenologically, neuro-biologically, holistically and psychologically

• identify how and where personalized learning / personalizing learning is flourishing* 

• identify how personalized learning/personalizing learning is positively addressing the noted youth mental health crisis*

• annotate autobiographical examples of subjective learning*

• identify how and where recent developments in AI are effectively contributing to personalized / personalizing learning across all educational strata.* 

(* will be co-presented in database form)
(** all will directly reference Michael’s PhD dissertation where pertinent)  

Coda

The first steps in venturing in this new educational promise of holistic personalized learning lies in educators being curious about the lifeworlds of their students – no matter their students’ background. As Dr. Barry Prizant says (2015) about his interactions with autistic children, helping an autistic child does not begin with seeking to identify a problem and determining to “fix it.” Rather, he says, help begins by listening and paying close attention to what a child is trying to relate. “We need to work to understand them, and then change what we do.” Prizant’s assertion helps sound a fundamental chord of this project, namely, that through pedagogically sensitive encounters and inquiries, educators may deepen their understandings of who their students truly are, observe how and where authentic student learning is striving to emerge, and more richly enable its arising. The genius embedded in human learning asks nothing more of us.

The future of learning …. is personalized!

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