The Harvard Graduate School of Education hosts a special program on Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE): a master (eventually doctoral program) on cognitive sciences (as a matter of fact not only neurosciences but rather a varied set of disciplines) and education.
The master’s program in Mind, Brain, and Education is designed for students interested in connecting cognition, neuroscience, and educational practice, especially involving learning, teaching, and cognitive and emotional development. This intersection of biology and cognitive science with pedagogy has become a new focus in education and public policy in the current Age of Biology. Linked to the Harvard Initiative on Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MBB), the program is strongly interdisciplinary, including not only psychology, pedagogy, and neuroscience, but also philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, and other relevant disciplines.
The idea: that mind, brain and education is a new field that can inform educational practice
The Mind, Brain, and Education Program’s (MBE) broadest mission is to create a new field of mind, brain, and education, with educators and researchers who expertly join biology, cognitive science, and education. The immediate mission is to train students in this new field both (a) to return to schools and other educational settings where they can use this new knowledge in educational practice and (b) to become researchers with deep knowledge of both biological/cognitive science and education who can therefore create a research base grounded in this new union of knowledge.
What’s behind this program?
The director of the Program is Kurt Fischer. Kurt Fischer is strongly commited to the idea of a double-way collaboration between education and neurosciences, and a proposer of a device called Research Schools
“The goal of this program is to build a new kind of school-university partnership that provides a solid, long-term foundation for meaningful connection of research and practice,” Fischer says. “In the same way that teaching hospitals ground biological research in medical practice, Research Schools will ground educational research in school practice.”
Here is one of his publications on the general theme of a match between neurosciences and education:
And here are some resources (texts and videos) available from the web site of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Usable knowledge page, a special section being devoted to Learning and the Brain: