CC Students, Faculty Work Side by Side
By ANDREA LUCAS and MALCOLM HOWARD
t's possible that learning begins with the first breath. But exactly when and how the infant mind begins to collect and process information is one of pedagogy's great mysteries.
If we can understand why some learn faster than others, we might be able to improve learning skills right from the cradle. No wonder why hundreds of studies, doctoral theses and reports are authored each year on infant learning.
Students of psychology professor Catherine Weir are also looking for answers. Every Friday morning for the past year, students such as Kindle Rising visit a well baby clinic at a military hospital.
The students' mission: To perform non-invasive experiments to find out if ear and upper respiratory tract infections hamper the learning of language among six to 12 month olds.
With parental consent, the student-researchers place the babies before a back-lit screen. The students then project images and patterns onto the screen and document the child's response.
Armed with a stopwatch and an instrument that can pinpoint a child's gaze, the students time how long an infant gazes at particular images. They repeat the experiment for different babies with some variations, including audio accompaniment.
"The hands-on experience is incredible," says Rising, a junior psychology major who spent much of last summer at the clinic. "I couldn't have learned about research by studying about research. You discover you have so many questions to ask when you're in the middle of it."
Colorado College prides itself in being a teaching institution, and Rising is just one of dozens of students engaged in research that is making very real contributions in their respective fields. Just as important as bona fide results, however, is what students are learning from the process.
Rising says she is discovering how scientists learn, how experiments are set up and how to discard tainted data. "I read other studies more critically now," she adds.
And Rising has learned that research is not always glamorous. For every hour she spends with children, she spends several more back at the Palmer Hall lab, pouring over a massive green loose-leaf binder jam-packed with research results.
The fruit of her tabulations is an 18-page paper that she and Weir have submitted to the International Society for Infant Studies. More than an academic exercise, the paper ("The Effects of Otitis Media and Upper Respiratory Tract Infection on Cognitive Development of 6- and 12-Month Olds") offers insight into the links between infant health and learning.
While earlier studies have measured how hearing loss among infants affects learning later in childhood, "few studies assess the cognitive effects of these variables prior to 12 months of age," the authors note. "This is probably primarily due to the focus on language production, which is most easily assessed after the first or second year of life."Some studies show that children can pick up differences in vowel sounds as early as four months. But Rising's paper adds the discovery that babies who have had ear and upper respiratory tract infections may have different strategies for learning.
For example, infants with a history of illness looked longer at the repeating stimuli than infants with no history of illness. One possible explanation is that children who have suffered temporary hearing loss due to infections are learning to compensate by relying more on visual cues.
The findings have several implications: First, other researchers can now better scrutinize their data by understanding the variable of infant illness. Perhaps more importantly, the study could prompt parents to take action. For example, children who have suffered hearing loss due to infections might pick up language more quickly if the parents use other cues, such as touching, to get the child's attention before speaking.
It also gives society one more reason to be mindful of infant health. After all, ear infections affect 30 percent of all children on a given day, and several youngsters suffer some kind of hearing loss to illness by the time they reach 11.
Learning Takes Time
ut learning is not only important for the young. One flight of stairs up from Weir's lab, Kelly Courns spent much of her summer holed away in a classroom proving that learning is just as important for the elderly.
While many of her friends floated Frisbees at the quad, the junior pre-med major spent hours studying extremely thin slices of human brains at the Laboratory of Quantitative Neuromorphology. Why?
"It just has to be done," Courns nonchalantly says of her diligence.
"The ball and chain helps," quips Bob Jacobs, the psychology professor who directs the lab.
In fact, no restraining devices were needed. Courns is driven by the same incentives that attract students like Rising: All those hours of tedious research means something, both for their own development and to the world at large.
"I think one reason is it is exciting, not just busy work," Jacobs says. "We're not doing research just for the sake of teaching a lesson. This is important quantitative research and it is the first of its kind."
Courns and other psychology students are continuing on the ground breaking research that Jacobs began at UCLA before coming to Colorado. In essence, the UCLA team found that during periods of intense learning, microscopic brain cells actually grow, somewhat like trees.
Now, Colorado College undergrads such as Courns are looking at the same kind of cells in older brains, which are donated by El Paso County's coroner's office and Penrose Hospital.
Their findings are significant. "If you continue to stay mentally active, then you're more likely to forego the kinds of changes that often occur when a brain gets older," says 21-year-old Courns.
How do they know? Using a microscope and a computer software program called Neurolucida for Windows, the students capture greatly enlarged images of brain cells and load them directly onto the hard drive.
Once the cells are on the screen, Courns moves the cursor along each branch of the tree-like cell (called dendrites) and traces its length. The neurolucida program automatically totals the combined lengths.
What Courns found was a decline in the length of dendrites over time. She also discovered as much as a 50 percent loss in the number of dendritic spines when compared to younger brains.
Courns' dendrites got a workout in the process. In addition to learning about the research process, she also learned a lot about the process of rewriting.
"[Jacobs] gave it back to me about 10 times," Courns says of her senior paper, "Age Related Dendritic Changes in Human Occipital and Prefrontal Cortices: A Quantitative Golgi Study."
Jacobs is not apologetic. "It's more than just picking on writing," he says. "Students should take pride in what they're doing because their work is important."
Courns agrees those brutal critiques were worth it. In the end, she not only understood the attributes of an impeccable research paper, but also the process to produce one.
When she is not writing and rewriting, Courns is a lab assistant for one of Jacobs' introductory courses. This reinforces her lessons and gives her a chance to practice expressing these ideas in simple terms.
As part of an outreach program, Courns brings posters, slides and real brains to elementary school classrooms. "We show them what a brain looks and feels like," she explains, "and we tell them that they have to care for their brains. We teach about what drugs do to your brain, and that they need to continue reading and learning."
Learning, Life and Action
cross town, senior Saskia Nilsen is bringing the message of physical fitness to a very different gathering: a group of elderly at a local nursing home. Along with dance professor Yunyu Wang, Nilsen is developing a dance curriculum for the older physique.
The idea, she says, is to make dance accessible to nursing home patients, who often have few opportunities to go dancing. "It's a challenge because you're working with people who are not physically fit or even interested in ideas about dance," says Saskia, who intends to pursue a master's degree in elementary education.
Nilsen did not start her project in the studio. Rather she scoured the library for sources on physiology of the aged and preventive health care. After brushing up on international folk dances, as well as getting aerobics certification, she began knocking on the doors of nearby nursing homes.
Nilsen's professor worked on a similar program for the elderly while teaching at the University of Georgia. Now, Wang and Nilsen hope to publish their findings in "Dance Research Journal" as a way to encourage similar efforts.
"Most dancers are trained to perform or join dance troupes, but there's a lot more to dance than that," says Nilsen, who studied ballet before coming to CC.
Like Courns and her work with elementary students, the cycle of learning for Nilsen is not complete unless she shares what she learns. In response to cutbacks in elementary school art programs, for example, Nilsen helped create a student volunteer program in local schools.
Though Nilsen is not a dance major, she has continued taking classes and participating in many experiences normally reserved for majors. Last year, she performed during the American College Dance Festival in Boulder, Colo., as well as attended an arts conference in New York City. She was also one of several students Wang took to her native Taiwan to live and study with local dancers. Now Nilsen teaches traditional Chinese dance to children enrolled in the Colorado Springs Chinese language school.
Despite best efforts, learning often happens very slowly. Knowledge sometimes accumulates like a stalactite ... drip by drip by drip.
But learning can also occur in great waves. It may rattle the heart and mind like an earthquake. Nancy Hernandez recalls being hit by one such tsunami in a class of philosophy professor John Riker when seemingly disparate elements of book learning and life experience suddenly connected in a whirlwind of emotion and revelation.
For weeks, Hernandez had been patiently struggling with her texts, adding volumes of abstract terms to her vocabulary, but feeling little revelation. Then one day came epiphany.
The subject at hand was Karl Marx's "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," which posits that capitalism disassociates labor from its product. As workers respond to larger market forces, humans and their unique skills become increasingly expendable. In short, they become machines that get no satisfaction from their toils.
The essay hit Hernandez where she lives. "I just started crying," says the 21-year-old senior. "I was overwhelmed that Marx could understand so many things about how my parents live."
Hernandez did not become a card-carrying Marxist. Rather, the experience instilled in her a newfound passion for philosophy: Connecting abstract ideas with her Chicana experience became a near obsession as she poured over the words of Descartes, Socrates, Aristotle and Nietzsche.
"These philosophers validated my experience," says Hernandez. "Where I'm from, people are generally very poor. My family really lives the life that some of these philosophers write about. For example, money itself is not so important, but it's how you live your life that counts. I thought, 'Why is this in this book? This is us. This is the way we live.'"
As Mexican-Americans struggle to pursue the American dream, they often leave behind basic values. Swept up in the larger materialistic culture, they begin to judge their own self-worth by its standards, she says. In the process, the old ideas and values are often denigrated as backward or old-fashioned, she says.
While Hernandez understands the need for economic power and material stability, she's now driven to bring the words and ideas of philosophy's great thinkers to young Mexican-Americans.
In her thesis, "Philosophy and the Emancipatory Project for Mexican-Americans," she compares some essential tracts of Western thought (Plato's "Euthyphro," Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" and Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals") with real-life predicaments. Juxtaposed to citations from Plato are verses from Chicana poets, such as Cherrie Moraga and Pat Mora. An autobiographical narrative, jokes and indigenous proverbs also appear in her paper.
"There's a tendency in higher education to validate the subjects being taught, not validate the experiences of those doing the learning ... at least until the students have learned a little respect for the theory and the text. The idea is that the answers are in the texts, not in experience," says Riker, adding that Hernandez has, in many ways, reaffirmed his belief that teaching philosophy must validate both theory and experience. This is particularly true as the experiences and backgrounds of students in the classroom become increasingly diverse.
Riker is known for his democratic teaching style. His students say he is a master of providing time in class to listen, learn and speak.
Learning About the Past
o many, that kind of open dialogue defines the Colorado College classroom experience. When asked about learning at CC, students and alumni often cite specific relationships they had with individual professors. Indeed, you don't have to be Aristotle or Plato to know that the best learning comes when the student has unfettered access to the teacher.
Over the years, the College has sought to nurture such relationships with faculty-student research grants, long-term student advisorships and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest's minority scholars program, which teams minority students with professors.
For anthropology major Curtis Wright, the ACM program let him delve into a largely uncharted part of local history and explore aspects of his own heritage.
Last year, Wright won an ACM grant to begin an unprecedented oral history of Trinity Baptist Church, located at 617 E. Fountain. In 1992, a controversy split the church over whether the elder pastor should retire. Some felt the pastor was abusing his power and giving preferential treatment to women. The disagreement was fierce: one church member loyal to the pastor even holed himself inside the church with a gun.
Ultimately, Trinity Baptist divided into four or five churches, a process that Wright is documenting. He is also honing his skills as an observer, taping interviews, snapping photographs of the congregation and church architecture, and documenting church music.
"The church is a window into the black culture and history of this town," says Wright, who grew up spending most Sunday mornings in church pews with his family.
The experience is also paying off for his faculty teammate. "I've driven past a lot of these churches but I've never really seen them," says anthropology professor Mario Montaño. "Curtis is really opening my eyes to a whole new world right here in my backyard."
Andrea Lucas and Malcolm Howard are freelance writers who live in Colorado Springs.