One of the grand delusions of traditional safety is that learning is all in the brain. When you look at the ideology of traditional safety such as HOP, all the semiotics is brain-centric.

Anyone with any expertise and intelligence in Education and Learning knows that human development is about the whole person and not the brain. Anyone with any research basis in neuroscience knows that the whole person learns and that learning is embodied (https://safetyrisk.net/embodied-enactivity-in-safety/). As an absolute minimum we learn through our head, heart and gut. This is why in SPoR we start our journey in learning about risk with One Brain and Three Minds semiotic (https://safetyrisk.net/evidence-for-one-brian-three-minds-in-spor/ ). The scientific evidence for this is overwhelming (https://safetyrisk.net/embodied-learning-in-risk/). Many call the heart and gut a second and third ‘brain’:

The research on embodied being in learning is extensive.

Hey, but let’s not let research and science get in the way of traditional safety mythology. Let’s not consult experts in the field when an organisational behaviourist will do.

We even have groups with no expertise in Learning or Neuropsychology advocating brain-based safety (https://sentis.com.au/resources/safety-and-the-brain/). Just look at the iconography of so called ‘learning teams’ and it’s all brain-centric. This is all pure myth. But this is what mono-disciplinary Safety does best. It gets people with no expertise in a discipline to ‘lead’ the way in what they don’t know. You only need expertise in Safety and Engineering to lecture people in ethics (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-the-expert-in-everything-and-the-art-of-learning-nothing/).

Unless a theory of learning has a focus on embodied learning, then it’s not about learning. Most of the stuff that gets named as ‘learning’ in traditional safety is about training and ‘schooling’ people in safety performance.

Learning is not about performance and performance should not drive learning.

Learning is not about safety and Safety should NOT drive learning.

When we look at some of the great educators like Ken Robinson (Out of Our Minds, https://archive.org/details/outofourmindslea0000robi), Guy Claxton (Intelligence in the Flesh) or experts like Lakoff and Johnson (Intelligence in the Flesh, The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought ) we need to be able to answer some basic questions:

1. How is learning defined?
2. What is the human body for?
3. What is the nature of personhood contained in the presentation?
4. Is the presentation brain- centric or collective brain-centric?
5. Is the piece focused on content transfer or content knowledge?
6. Is epistemology (theory of knowing) discussed?
7. (BTW, there is no such discussion in the AIHS BoK on Epistemology)
8. Are theories of learning discussed and positioned?
9. Is the use of the word ‘mind’ translated as ‘brain’?
10. Does the piece speak of personhood or the educated person?
11. Is there any discussion of the e-motions?
12. Is there any discussion of the unconscious in learning?
13. Is there any discussion of the language, semiotics, semantics of learning?
14. Or Triple Loop learning (https://safetyrisk.net/culture-silences-in-safety-language/)?
15. Is there any discussion of embodiment, the meaning of the body?

None of this is of any interest to traditional safety. Indeed, Safety turns to itself whenever it wants to be schooled in something. So, in traditional safety like HOP there are just slogans and brains that comprise so-called learning. Frieire (https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf ) calls such a model of schooling ‘banking’, deposits of data in and out. A typical behaviourist approach of traditional safety even though we know that behaviourism was smashed 50 years ago.

Schooling is NOT learning.

One of the first things we make sure we never speak when we approach learning is the use of the word ‘dumb’. Yet this is the language of HOP. Indeed, such language as ‘dumb’ is simply blaming and we know from HOP that ‘blame fixes nothing’.

No-one learns when this is the language one is anchored to. Similarly, if one is anchored to the language of ‘performance’.

Claxton wisely noted in his book: ‘the brain doesn’t issue commands, it hosts conversations’. So, we need to move away from behaviourist notions of learning as proposed by traditional safety (https://www.learningteamscommunity.com/introduction-to-hop). We don’t need semiotics of Jenga blocks that imagine learning as ‘building’ and crashing down. Learning is not about data in and data out. Learning is about: persons, ethical interaction, personhood, holistic and ecological engagement, embodied being and not objects. Traditional safety so loves its semiotics of objects. Safety even perceives the brain as an object.

If you want to understand learning in a positive, constructive and holistic way, then you can start here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/tackling-risk/

When you really understand what learning is, you will learn that unless learning is embodied, there will be no learning.