Education is in crisis. We are witnessing patterns of change across many domains. With internet usage at an all-time high and widespread consumption of information, our attention is "outside-in," meaning we look at ourselves from the viewpoint of others, often with judgement. This outside-in attention impacts our ability to feel what we feel and think what we think. According to an article in the Annual Review of Psychology, it's time to turn our attention inside out (Annual Review of Psychology, Turning Attention Inside Out: How Working Memory Serves Behavior, Freek van Ede and Anna C. Noble).
Effects of outside-in attention
The effects of outside-in attention and its immediacy are noticeable everywhere, particularly in schools. Reliance on social media for self-esteem, cancel culture, and social marginalization are just a few examples. We are losing the buffer needed to hold and manage tensions. These polarizing forces, common symptoms of fast-changing conditions, generate high levels of exclusion, anxiety, and depression, leading to emotionally based school avoidance. Outside-in attention deeply affects children and young people, with detrimental outcomes that can last a lifetime. The costs range from a loss in critical thinking to increased vulnerability to manipulation and a diminished adaptive response.
Challenging our adaptive response
Our adaptive response to change is either diminished or strengthened, depending on how well we understand the change:
When we share an appreciation of it, our adaptive response is strengthened.
When we are not fully aware of the change, our adaptive response is diminished.
When the rate of change in our environment exceeds our capacity to adapt, denial of the change prevails.
A missing relatedness
Young people, accustomed to the instant gratification and immediacy of the internet (a highly visual channel), increasingly lack tolerance for different perspectives. This outside-in focus creates a tendency towards one-sidedness. We lose much of the information needed for effective decision-making when we don't sufficiently consider the relational impacts of our actions. A lack of curiosity about others and one-sided interactions with computers breed intolerance and a missing relatedness, making us susceptible to manipulation and denial of our experiences. Many people now huddle in siloed communities and echo chambers, denying the experiences of other groups, which leaves individuals feeling isolated, lonely, and marginalized. Fragmented minds lack the capacity for wholeness. We need tools to help us become more whole. AI enters our inner world, tempting us to think less, whereas we need tools to help us think more, not less (see article IA.Net Turning the Tables on AI, June 13th, 2024).
Benefits of inside-out attention
By contrast, inside-out attention offers significant benefits. By noticing and amplifying deeper connections already experienced within ourselves, we gain access to a larger pool of information. Our internal states become available to guide behaviour, enabling us to be more future-focused.
Creating a universal visual language
There is no walking back from the changes we have initiated in our attention—it is primarily primed visually. However, we need to address the interconnectedness of the information we receive from one another. We can create a universal visual language that encapsulates unseen and intangible emotions and experiences, enabling their communication. One example is the Disney film Inside Out. We can restore and connect outside-in and inside-out feedback in ways that bring us back into relatedness with a resource-oriented tool comprised of Figures that externalize individual experiences—trauma response profiles and resource-oriented profiles. This fosters a greater sense of self-efficacy, safety, and hope.
Storytelling in schools
Storytelling is a way to communicate and share unspoken feelings and experiences. Perhaps such Figures might also offer a lexicon that aids in the creation of stories. Rewriting the past is important for healing and essential for creating alternative futures. Storytelling brings us back into relatedness, making feelings shared and relieving the individual.
Implementation within schools
Sharing a set of cards with visual representations of figures and exploring the stories that might be told through them is a powerful way for individuals to become unburdened by experiences that are often not shared or spoken. By placing a distance between themselves and the emotion, it becomes easier to speak about. I have witnessed this with young people in a drama and performing arts school in London, where they quickly created visual scenarios depicting their internal experiences.
What if
What if we could offer a glimpse of the figures that constellate when difficult things happen, calling them trauma response figures, and the figures we can invoke to become agents of our own lives, calling them resource-oriented figures? What if visual language could help us know where we are in a process and support each person's ability to choose how to act? What if young people could create and narrate their own stories, gathering all the figures in their stories and becoming their own storytellers? What if we could restore flexibility to hold and manage tensions, experiencing a greater ability to move fluidly from one side to the other?
A new model of education
Today's world points to the need for a new model of education where young people play a proactive part in deciding what to learn, while their teachers play a facilitative role, creating conducive containers for learning. In this new model, we need to strengthen self-knowledge and the ability to be fluid with the various elements of who we are. A universal visual language might enable learners to better understand themselves and discern power dynamics from the inside out. Learners could become self-directed, communicating more easily across different positions and experiences, holding the tension and fluidity of power dynamics in the various realities we live in.
Young people already understand that only they can define themselves. They increasingly guard against gaslighting and seek to articulate their own values. They might also become well-versed in coming together for specific objectives when they share common values, as described by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Liquid Modernity.
Transformative change can happen when:
The whole system around young people supports moving out of patterns of behaviour, action, and reaction that impact well-being and attainment, shares ownership, takes collective responsibility and distributes interventions more equitably across multiple points.
Young people are given the awareness tools to see the interconnections between themselves and the world, voice their own needs and experiences, shape solutions to their unique challenges, and are trusted to orient their actions toward making the world a better place.
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