Lessons for Building Community from Social Neuroscience

A sense of community in the classroom contributes to effective learning, likely through benefits to student motivation. While traditional pedagogical literature speaks to methods of building community within the classroom, we can also look outside our intellectual silos to other academic disciplines researching how human beings form and maintain effective collaborative groups. In this interactive session, we’ll consider powerful research investigating team dynamics in simulated space missions, the social neuroscience of how the brain embeds our social others in our very sense of self, and even how honeybees make collective decisions together. We will work together to understand and apply these lessons to the work of the higher education classroom.