Anchor & Sail Quarterly Musings
Safety, Story, and Belonging: Teaching to the Ancient Brain
An article co-authored with Dr. Julia VanderMolen, first appearing in The Teaching Professor
In modern classrooms, where students have diminishing attention spans, some freeze when called upon, and others seem to unravel at the slightest sign of critical feedback, old methods of teaching are caving under the weight of a new, trending reality. Across higher education, faculty are meeting a generation of students coming of age amid increasing social disintegration and rapid societal change, who are experiencing emotional dysregulation and declining resilience, among a myriad of other unintended effects.
Despite ubiquitous access to others and an equally endless supply of information, largely thanks to smartphones, incoming college students are more anxious, depressed, isolated, and disconnected than ever (Haidt, 2024). Despite our (mostly digital) ease of access to friends, family, and communities, the US Surgeon General (2023) declared loneliness and isolation a public health epidemic, evidenced by a panoply of negative health outcomes. Of course, teachers, professors, and college administrators cannot cure societal malaise with another tweak to the syllabus, nor with the best of all citation-rich lectures. Nevertheless, they can provide a different classroom environment that speaks first to how our nervous systems evolved to learn.
Naming this shift and understanding its sources and mechanisms are the first steps educators can take to develop pedagogical methods that facilitate learning in this hyper-digital landscape. Why we have found ourselves here, and what educators can do to shift the tide, first requires a look back, way back, well beyond last semester and into our ancestral past.
An evolutionary mismatch
Our brains and connected nervous systems did not evolve in crowded lecture halls filled with stressed strangers, with the cognitive demands of sustained, silent, movement-free focus in mind. Rather, we evolved over millennia in small, familiar, multigenerational learning communities characterized by relational attunement, apprenticeship, storytelling, and play. Building on the concept of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness popularized by John Bowlby of attachment theory fame, evolutionary and moral psychologist Darcia Narvaez advocates for a return to our naturally evolved developmental environment in academic settings through what she calls the evolved developmental niche, or evolved nest (Narvaez & Bradshaw, 2023).
From a developmental perspective, the evolved nest consists of an early childhood environment characterized by responsive caregiving, social embeddedness, positive touch, and, critically, ample opportunity for free play, unencumbered by the strictures and directives of hovering adults. This was not a luxury for 99 percent of our human ancestors, but a necessary precondition for adequate social-emotional development upon which our brain and nervous system architecture were built. Unfortunately, many college students were not blessed with this ideal upbringing. In fact, our modern environments, especially those characteristic of the bustling cities and college towns many universities inhabit, may rightly be considered antithetical to the conditions for optimal learning, imagination, and exploration.
Today’s students received fewer of Narvaez’s nested caregiving conditions than ever before. In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt documents the decline in what he calls the play-based childhood, replaced instead by a phone- and technology-mediated childhood enriched by bright lights, cheap dopamine hits, and endless (and often meaningless) distractions but impoverished of normative developmental necessities like outdoor play, face-to-face engagement with friends, and unburdened social connections. Despite the relative wealth of our collective pockets and the technological advancements poised to accelerate economic and societal change in the wake of the AI revolution, the coming generations of young people are being raised in an environment of relative social poverty, with dire consequences for nervous system development and downstream learning.
The brain and nervous system: Threat, engagement, and imagination
Our brains and nervous systems, much like those of our mammalian ancestors, are organized from the bottom up, first for safety and sustenance, then for social and emotional engagement. The uniquely human layer—the prefrontal cortex and related cortical structures responsible for academic activities such as learning, reasoning, imagination, and creativity—is both the primary target in education and the area most sensitive to stress, dysregulation, and social disconnection. Barrett (2017) describes the brain as a sort of prediction machine, one that bases perceptions first on safety and security signals in the environment. Environments that induce feelings of social exposure, judgment, or undue pressure without providing a trusting relationship risk shifting a student’s brain state into safety mode, reducing our cognitive abilities to remember, reason, regulate, and imagine in ways necessary for academic success.
Alternatively, when students feel safe and socially connected, another mode becomes available: one of engagement, intellect, and imagination. When students judge their learning environment as safe, they find permission to take intellectual risks, grapple with ambiguity, demonstrate psychological flexibility, and, yes, receive constructive feedback in stride. This combination of social engagement and imagination ethics, as outlined by Narvaez, promotes what she calls wellness-informed classrooms, made possible by prosocial, sustainable environments that nurture communal engagement, support learners’ learning, and facilitate care among classmates.
What you can do
Despite the obvious mismatch between our modern environment and our evolved needs, there are changes that you can make right now to optimize your classroom for student engagement and academic thriving:
- Build safety before content. First impressions, as the saying goes, leave a lasting effect, especially in students’ minds and in their unconscious perceptions of safety. How you organize your classroom and course, and how you present yourself on day one, offer your greatest opportunity to make a safe connection with your students. Consistency in your feedback, warmth in your interactions, and clear, predictable communication and standards speak to the learner’s nervous system safety. A safe brain can think; an anxious brain cannot.
- Anchor abstract ideas in story and relationships. Content that is emotionally salient and relationally relevant encodes more fully into long-term memory (Barrett). This is crucial given the bland and affectively neutral learning spaces typical of college classrooms. Personal disclosure, case studies, and opportunities for students to relate course content to their own lives improve cognitive efficiency and promote classroom-wide engagement. Frame major concepts through narrative and story, activating multiple states of the nervous system and lateralizing interactions between brain hemispheres.
- Treat belonging as a prerequisite. The evolved nest is, above all, communal. Human development and evolution occurred within deeply embedded familial and social relationships, and lifelong learning requires an age-appropriate analog rather than an unquestioning expert imparting knowledge to a passive recipient. Creative teaching measures, such as team-based learning, group activities, brain breaks, and icebreakers, facilitate whole-classroom learning in ways few lectures can match. Movement is crucial, and playful activities foster a sense of belonging and connectedness.
What you are already doing
Your classroom is already a developmental environment. How you nurture the students that pass through your halls is ultimately up to you. Those ancient brains, invariably stressed, often tired, and seemingly dysregulated, are sitting across from you, waiting for signals of safety, connection, and community, and an encouraging invitation to think. Enhancing the learning environment does not require psychological training or a complete overhaul of your syllabus. But the hour or two you spend with your students each week could be a refreshingly rare experience that engages, attunes, and transforms their still-developing minds in ways that facilitate the creative intellect toward communal binding and prosocial engagement. The promise of higher education has long been one of personal transformation. Our story of evolution provides a developmental roadmap toward what could be a transformative, wellness-oriented learning experience for your next cohort of incoming students.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Narvaez, D. (2023). Wellness-informed classrooms with sustaining climates foster compassionate morality. In T. Lovat (Ed.), International handbook of values education and student wellbeing (2nd ed., pp. 129–146). Routledge.
Narvaez, D., & Bradshaw, G. A. (2023). The evolved nest: Nature’s way of raising children and creating connected communities. North Atlantic Books.
Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. US Department of Health and Human Services.
Christopher G. Jones is a licensed marriage and family therapist, clinical professional counselor, and state-approved clinical supervisor. Currently, Chris is a doctoral candidate at the University of the Pacific School of Health Sciences and owns and operates Anchor & Sail Psychotherapy in Las Vegas. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working across developmental trauma, affective neuroscience, moral psychology, and clinical supervision. Reach him at c_jones36@u.pacific.edu.
Julia VanderMolen is a professor for the public health program at Grand Valley State University and a visiting assistant clinical professor with the University of the Pacific’s School of Health Sciences. Her research examines the benefits of assistive technology for individuals with disabilities in the context of public health. She is an active member of the Disability Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Her current research focuses on exploring the health and medical services available to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
