Education - From Evidence to the Classroom Floor

Scientific evidence can tell us that a given strategy increases the probability of learning.

It can compare methods.

Measure attention.

Assess memory.

Investigate executive functions.

Produce averages, confidence intervals, and recommendations.

But there is a moment when all that knowledge must cross a doorway.

The classroom door.

And once it crosses that threshold, evidence stops encountering a statistical population and begins encountering real Body-Territories, repeatedly gathered together during a particular period of their lives.

Perhaps this is where education becomes most interesting.

Because the teacher may plan the path.

But the encounter itself can never be repeated.

The annual plan is the map — not the experience

A teacher has an annual plan.

There are contents, objectives, competencies, assessments, and a planned sequence.

There is, therefore, a route.

But a planned route and a lived experience are not the same thing.

We can imagine a class as a small group crossing the Atlantic Forest.

There is a trail.

We know approximately where we are going.

But that day, it rained.

A tree fell.

A bird appeared where nobody had seen it before.

One child noticed a footprint.

Another felt a change in temperature.

Someone heard a sound first.

Another recognized a plant.

Everyone is crossing the same forest.

No one perceives exactly the same forest.

At BrainLatam, we have already proposed thinking about the Atlantic Forest not merely as scenery, but as a kind of bodily grammar: soil, temperature, sound, smell, movement, and balance participate in what a Body-Territory is able to perceive.

Something similar happens in the classroom.

The curriculum may indicate the direction.

The annual plan organizes the trail.

But each stretch will be encountered by different people — including a teacher who is also continuously changing.

A lesson never happens twice

Imagine a teacher using exactly the same slides the following year.

Same content.

Same exercise.

Same sequence.

Even so, that lesson has not been repeated.

The class is different.

The questions are different.

The silences are different.

Family histories are different.

Prior knowledge is different.

And, most importantly, the teacher is also different, because the previous class has already changed them.

We can represent this as:

Teacher₁ + Class₁ → Teacher₂

and then:

Teacher₂ + Class₂ → Teacher₃.

Likewise:

Student₁ + encounter → Student₂

and the next encounter no longer meets Student₁.

This may be one of the aspects least considered when we speak about “applying” educational evidence.

The evidence may be replicable.

The existential encounter is not.

Latin American research on teacher education has emphasized precisely the importance of reflection on practice in the production of pedagogical knowledge. Chilean studies, for example, highlight supervised practice and reflective processes as dimensions through which pedagogical knowledge is constructed rather than merely transmitted.

The classroom can build a Jiwasa

There is another particular feature.

A class is not a single encounter.

For months, a relatively stable group of Body-Territories meets again and again.

During the first week, there may simply be twenty or thirty people administratively placed in the same room.

Then recurrence begins.

One student discovers who usually helps.

Another realizes who needs more time.

Someone notices when the teacher is tired.

The teacher learns who answers immediately and who first needs to observe.

A student who did not understand listens to another student's explanation.

An unexpected question changes the way the teacher presents the subject.

Gradually, each Body-Territory becomes part of the perceptual territory of the others.

This is where we can think of the classroom as the construction of a Jiwasa.

In BrainLatam's formulation, Jiwasa does not mean that everyone becomes the same.

The collective begins precisely when different ways of feeling, understanding, and occupying positions can remain together without one having to erase the others.

A class can therefore produce:

Class₁ → encounters → Class₂ → encounters → Class₃...

In December, the names may be the same as in February.

The class is no longer the same.

The one who perceives first does not always have to be the teacher

None of this removes the teacher's responsibility.

The teacher remains responsible for planning, pedagogical knowledge, care, assessment, and guidance throughout the journey.

But the teacher does not need to occupy every possible perceptual position.

As in the group crossing the forest, someone may perceive first what others have not yet seen.

One student notices an ambiguity.

Another sees a mathematical regularity.

Another connects the content to something experienced at home.

Another asks the question that reorganizes the understanding of the whole class.

For a few minutes, the functional position changes.

This does not turn the student into the teacher.

Nor does it remove the responsibility of the person teaching.

It simply means that knowledge relevant to the collective does not always have to emerge from the same position.

Brazilian literature on neuroscience and learning also emphasizes interaction, conversation, classroom heterogeneity, and peer exchange as potentially rich dimensions of knowledge construction.

Perhaps a classroom becomes more intelligent when it can temporarily change where the center is without losing the responsibility of the person guiding the path.

What if the mistake is showing us another part of the forest?

This perspective also changes our relationship with error.

Twenty-nine students answer A.

One answers C.

Perhaps C is simply wrong.

But there is a question that should come before correction:

what did this student perceive in order to arrive at C?

Perhaps the instruction was misunderstood.

Perhaps a necessary concept has not yet been built.

But perhaps the student noticed an ambiguity that everyone else passed over without seeing.

Difference is also data.

Brazilian work connecting neuroscience and education points out that errors can participate productively in learning when followed by correction, reflection, and reorganization. It also emphasizes different learning rhythms, prior knowledge, and momentary cognitive limits within a highly dynamic process.

The goal of education is not to romanticize error.

It is to investigate it before turning it into an identity.

Because there is a major difference between:

“you got this answer wrong”

and

“you are the one who gets things wrong.”

From state A to state B

This is where we can speak of the transcendence of learning.

Not in a supernatural sense.

But as a concrete change in the possibilities available to a Body-Territory.

Before:

A — I do not know, I do not understand, I do not recognize, I do not see.

Then the encounter happens.

An explanation.

An experience.

A question.

An attempt.

An error.

Another explanation.

A conversation.

And then:

B — now I know, now I understand, now I can recognize.

B is not merely A with more information stored inside it.

B can detect something A could not detect.

A child who learns to read begins to perceive words where there may previously have been only graphic forms.

A student who understands a mathematical relation begins to see a regularity that had already been physically present before it was perceived as a relation.

The world did not need to change.

What changed was the one capable of encountering it.

At BrainLatam, we have used the formulation:

“The Being does not change; the being that changed perceives what has been changed.”

Here, “Being” is not a metaphysical entity separate from the Body. It refers to continuity in the perception of Being through transformation. The organism changes, but there is enough continuity to say: “before, I did not understand; now I understand.”

Perhaps learning is precisely this:

acquiring a new possibility of perception and becoming able to recognize that, before, this possibility was not yet available.

Evidence is not a recipe

None of this diminishes science.

Quite the opposite.

Neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of plasticity, attention, memory, emotions, and executive functions, but its contribution must meet pedagogy and the concrete conditions of schooling. Brazilian scholarship on neuroscience and learning argues precisely for articulation — not substitution — between neuroscientific knowledge and pedagogical practice.

In the same way, educational evidence should not reach the teacher in the form:

“science has shown this; execute it.”

Between an article and a classroom there are many translations:

evidence → synthesis → pedagogical principle → planning → teacher → class → response → assessment → adjustment.

The teacher is not the passive final link.

The teacher is part of the interpreting system.

Latin American work on reflective teaching practice similarly shows that theory and experience must continually feed back into one another.

Thus:

evidence ⇄ teacher ⇄ students ⇄ relationships ⇄ territory.

A decolonial education also asks who produces knowledge

There is an epistemological issue here.

If every piece of evidence arrives ready-made from somewhere else and the school simply executes it, the classroom becomes only a site of application.

But teachers and students also produce questions.

They produce observations.

They discover the limits of methods.

They create adaptations.

They reveal what an average did not see.

Brazilian research on decolonial pedagogies has argued precisely for expanding the places from which educational knowledge is produced, including re-readings of popular education and concepts developed from Latin American experiences.

The school, then, should not be the end of the scientific route.

It can also become its return:

research → school → encounter → observation → new question → research.

From the classroom floor, another floor emerges

Perhaps this is what it means to bring evidence to the classroom floor.

Not to turn science into a recipe.

Not to turn teaching experience into absolute truth.

But to build a circuit.

The annual plan provides direction.

The best available evidence helps choose paths.

The teacher guides.

The class responds.

The Jiwasa transforms.

And each encounter produces different conditions for the next encounter.

At the end of the year, perhaps we should ask much more than:

“how much content was transmitted?”

We can ask:

what can these Body-Territories now perceive that they could not perceive when they began?

Because teaching may be the creation of conditions for someone to cross a stretch of the forest and, at some point, say:

“this was always here — but now I can see it.”

And perhaps this is the everyday transcendence of learning:

the world remains before us, but the being who has learned now possesses new possibilities for encountering it.

References

Costa, R. L. S. (2023). Neurociência e aprendizagem. Revista Brasileira de Educação, 28. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1413-24782023280010
Brazilian scholarship connecting neuroplasticity, attention, memory, emotion, and executive functions with pedagogical practice, while valuing peer interaction, heterogeneity, and reflection on error.

Flores-Lueg, C. (2022). Reflective Processes Promoted in the Practicum Tutoring and Pedagogical Knowledge Obtained by Teachers in Initial Training. Education Sciences, 12, 583. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12090583
Chilean research highlighting reflective processes and lived practice in the construction of pedagogical knowledge during teacher education.

Parra-Urrea, Y. E., & Pino-Fan, L. R. (2022). Proposal to Systematize the Reflection and Assessment of the Teacher’s Practice on the Teaching of Functions. Mathematics, 10, 3330. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10183330
Work developed in Chile proposing systematic reflection on teaching practice as part of improving teaching and learning processes.

Dias, A. S., & Abreu, W. F. (2022). Contribuições da pós-graduação brasileira em Educação às pedagogias decoloniais. Revista Teias. https://doi.org/10.12957/teias.2022.69360
Maps Brazilian contributions to decolonial pedagogies and highlights educational concepts produced from Latin American experiences and epistemologies.

Bravo, R., Granda, S., & Narváez, A. M. (Eds.). (2022). Prácticas educativas, pedagogía e interculturalidad. Editorial Abya-Yala.
A Latin American collection addressing teaching knowledge, interculturality, territory, and reflective educational practice.

BrainLatam (2025). The Atlantic Forest Is a Place to Be Preserved and a Bodily Grammar to Be Relearned.
Uses the Atlantic Forest as Body-Territory and perceptual grammar, here serving as an analogy for an educational path in which different positions reveal different possibilities of perception.

BrainLatam (2026). True Jiwasa.
Proposes that the collective begins not when everyone feels or perceives in the same way, but when differences can remain together without erasing individual Being.

BrainLatam (2026). Homeostasis Is Not Standing Still — Changing in Order to Continue Existing; Latent Heat — When Transformation Happens Without Appearing in the Most Obvious Variable.
Develop the formulation “The Being does not change; the being that changed perceives what has been changed,” used here as a conceptual bridge for thinking of learning as transformation with continuity in the perception of Being.