1.3 Learning Lives in the Nervous System, Not the Curriculum
Session Description: Learning doesn’ t begin with curriculum; it begins with the nervous system. This session reframes student success through a healing-centered, neuroscience-informed lens, showing how safety, predictability, belonging, and cultural affirmation shape engagement long before instruction occurs. Participants will examine how institutional routines and instructional practices can unintentionally dysregulate learners, and how shifting conditions, not fixing students, create real pathways to equity. Through guided reflection and a brief collaborative activity, attendees will learn to identify threat and safety cues in their environments and design learning conditions where all students can regulate, connect, and thrive.
Session Objectives: 1. Analyze how environmental cues activate or inhibit learners’ nervous system readiness for engagement and academic success.
2. Evaluate existing institutional or instructional practices to determine whether they regulate or dysregulate learners, particularly those disproportionately impacted by trauma, marginalization, or systemic inequities.
3. Design learning conditions, policies, or routines that signal safety, belonging, and trust, shifting the focus from attempting to“ fix students” to transforming the systems and environments students must navigate.
4. Reconstruct common narratives about student behavior, motivation, and trauma by locating challenges not within students’ bodies, but within unhealed systems that undermine nervoussystem regulation and learning.
Themes:
• Institutional and instructional strategies for supporting learner success
• Co-curricular strategies for supporting learner success
• Strategies for addressing challenges to supporting learner success
Audience:
• PK12 teachers, staff, and administrators
• Higher education faculty, staff, and administrators
Presenter: Kenneth L. Bourne Jr., LSW( he / him), Founder & CEO, Bourne Anew Faculty, Widener University Center for Social Work Education Faculty, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Presenter Biography: Kenneth L. Bourne Jr. is a TEDx speaker, award-winning social worker, educator, and systems-change advocate committed to advancing equity and well-being for Black boys and men. Named the 2024 Social Worker of the Year by the NASW Pennsylvania Chapter, he authored Anger Management for Black Male Teens. He founded Bourne Anew, a national platform building trauma-competent, neuroscience-informed systems. Blending brain science, lived experience, and cultural responsiveness, he equips professionals to design environments where youth thrive. A faculty member at Widener University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he prepares practitioners to see beyond pathology and transform unjust systems nationwide. Intentionally.