Page 51 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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Our Inner & Outer Voice76
We make hundreds of predictions every day, and to do that we need to be conscious of the world we live in as well as be aware of our thinking and the processes that underpin that thinking. Our unique capacity to be able to talk to ourselves and use our ‘inner voice’ to question and interrogate our world, is essential to our learning. It is easy to underestimate the potential of using our inner voice to guide how we apply our four+1 learning systems to develop new knowledge, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks.
Pre-schoolers say their thoughts out loud, and then between four to seven years old children ‘privatise’ that thinking by talking silently to themselves. While no sound is created in these private conversations, we appear to be able to ‘hear’ ourselves talking to our self. So how does that work? This process is not magic, but rather, we become aware of our thinking via the use of language, even when we make no audible sound. When we have those private conversations with our self, we say we ‘imagine’ our one-sided conversations. Our imagination is a complex concept as it enables us to ‘think,’ whether we choose to utter our thoughts orally, or not. Talking out loud to others or self, can be explained as taking our thinking and expressing it ‘on the fly’ using words and feelings.
What integrates these capacities is our ability to interrogate each of our four learning systems and construct new conceptual frameworks of understanding. This draws on unique combinations from some, or all, of our learning systems. Learning is based on our ability to use our inner voice to interrogate our thinking metacognitively, by asking clever questions of our self and having internal conversations with our self.
Our self-talk, which we refer to as thinking, underpins all our learning. To engage in deep conversations with our self and others, we need to practice our self-talk, as well as develop an increasing vocabulary and ask deep and wide ranging questions.
Critical to self-talk is being able to make it conscious. Taking our self-talk from a non-conscious state to a conscious one, is achieved by associating our sensory data with our self-talk, such as talking to our self audibly, writing, drawing, conversing with others or feeling a range of emotions. For the brain to form memories, it requires some sensory data or emotion to attach the memory to. It is, for this reason, we rarely remember silent conversations we have with our self. We need sensory data to ‘attach’ the memory to, if we are to recall that memory later.
Can you imagine what it was like to be deaf 200 years ago before sign language was developed? We can now start to understand how critical our inner voice is; as how can we talk to our self without having a language? We cannot think deeply unless we have a language that we can apply to our thinking. A speech on this topic to a conference of people who work with those who have hearing and visual impairments, opened a wide range of discussions. It was revealed that in today’s world, when deaf people talk to themselves, they use sign language in the same way we or others use their ‘inner voice’ of words. The greater our vocabulary, the more deeply we can think using either inner-sign language, inner-braille or inner voice.
Interestingly, our inner voice applies our literacy in a far more efficient manner than when we apply it using spoken language. We can have ‘conversations’ using the actual knowledge, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks without necessarily converting them into individual words. Now that is something to think about!
76 The chapter 7 summary video can be found here - https://youtu.be/xMViOz1IR6I if you are reading the book, otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
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