Facilitating interoceptive awareness as a self-management and self-regulation tool to increase engagement in learning and education

Facilitating interoceptive awareness as a self-management and self-regulation tool to increase engagement in learning and education

Interoceptive awareness is the conscious perception or active noticing of one’s internal body signals, such as muscle tension, bladder state, heart rate, etc. This mixed methods thesis examined whether teaching students to actively notice their internal body signals would increase self-management and self-regulation within the school context, the consequence of which would be a reduction in behaviours that were affecting teaching and learning. In addition, this thesis examined if there was any impact on engagement in learning and education as students developed their interoceptive awareness. Data were drawn from a one-year pilot with one school, and then a one-year trial with 11 schools in regional South Australia. The findings demonstrated a reduction in reported behavioural consequences across the schools, with qualitative findings detailing the impacts of learning interoceptive techniques for individuals and their own perceptions of their behaviours. This thesis utilised Siegel’s (2010) hand model of the brain, in combination with a novel way of presenting the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, as a potential explanation for the findings that teaching interoceptive awareness increased engagement in learning and education, self-management, and self-regulation in the school context. The resultant model that was developed by the researcher is a clear visual that can support education staff to understand and respond to challenging behaviour more effectively and proactively across both high school and primary school contexts.