Phil Long has just written a very thoughtful and challenging post at EdTechTrends. As I typed manically through my comment and watched it grow, I thought that instead of breaking the Blogger comment box I’d record a few thoughts here and further the distributed conversation.
Dear Phil,
Wow. I must read this book right away (Innovation, the Missing Dimension).
The more I talk about Web 2.0, the more I’m convinced that the heuristic points to habits of mind and heart with two primary characteristics: they seek, welcome, create network effects, and they trust in–shoot, they expect–emergent phenomena. “Play” is another name for these habits, but “play” sounds trivial–unless one reads Vygotsky (where he argues play is the gateway to facility with abstractions) or Huizinga (whose Homo Ludens rocks my world). The quotation you cite from Rosalind Williams is an extremely useful corollary. The focus on creativity is just right, in my view. People may resist the idea of playfulness, but it’s hard to naysay the idea of creativity.
Yet there are those who believe that creativity can be had without the mess of “odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming” and without the investments of “time and space to graze.” There are those who will not tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties out of which real innovation emerges. This kind of misguided “due diligence” has also shaped forced-march large-section courses that are little more than bucket brigades in which assessment becomes a crude pour-your-bucket-back-into-mine exercise in self-certification. This isn’t education and it isn’t working, but the human capacity for denial never fails to astonish me (in myself as well, I hasten to add). Oliver Sacks tells a dismal story in Awakenings of showing his colleagues films of Parkinson’s patients restored to mobility by L-Dopa, only to have those colleagues storm out of the conference room denying that any such thing had happened. When I first read that story, I was incredulous. Now, not so much.
I have long thought that we should assemble case studies of the education of innovators. Which teachers really helped? How did they help? What teachers furthered the thought of an Einstein, a Boulanger, a Curie, a Lennon? What was the secret sauce? I think we’d find some fascinating commonalities. And I think that what works for the high achievers will work for the less gifted as well. Find a version of “teach to the top” that isn’t merely “teach to the most capable” but “teach to the top of what each student is capable of.” A top that by definition cannot be clearly visible to either learner or teacher. A real learning summit–the place where learning and innovation join–is always just beyond the farthest resolvable detail. A spiral pedagogy to match Bruner’s spiral curriculum?
I remember the article I read many years ago in the Columbia U. alumni magazine in which alumni reminisced about Mark Van Doren and other famous CU profs. What they recalled most vividly were the digressions….
Your post is a vivid reminder for me of why social media and online affordances are such powerful learning opportunities: structured well, they maximize serendipity (it’s built-in to the Web) and make the odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming visible, persistent, and available for reflection and further serendipity. We can’t all have MIT’s endowment or prestige, but we all have access to the amazing affordances of the ‘Net. All it takes is imagination, innovation, a willingness to go beyond what’s given (again, quoting Bruner, on the nature of true learning). Faith in the power of “shared inquiry and transformative conversations,” to quote from the emerging mission statement of the Academy for Teaching and Learning.
Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has been crucial for me in this regard, as a student and as a teacher. Every single English Composition class I’ve taught since 1990 has begun with this essay. Now my “intro to college teaching” workshops do as well. I’ve long drawn on Percy’s vision of education for inspiration, guidance, disruption (it doesn’t resolve very neatly). At least one of my former students, now a colleague, is carrying on the tradition as well. So I’ll give Percy the last word here, gladly: a benediction, a valediction, a charge to the innovation banquet committee.
In truth, the biography of scientists and poets is usually the story of the discovery of the indirect approach, the circumvention of the educator’s presentation-the young man who was sent to the Technikum and on his way fell into the habit of loitering in book stores and reading poetry; or the young man dutifully attending law school who on the way became curious about the comings and goings of ants. One remembers the scene in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter where the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush?
However it may come about, we notice two traits of the second situation: (1) an openness of the thing before one-instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower-instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.
Thanks for the Pingback to my blog. I love using Percy in my classes. He tends to drive my students crazy for a while, but his ideas encourage them to think rather than to simply accept what’s put before them, and I find that a year or so later, they are still thinking about things that he wrote and still finding connections between Percy’s words and their lives. Of course, the same thing happened to me and likely happened to you, too, which is probably why we admire his writing. The best part comes when students, sometimes a year or more later, write to me out of the blue to say that his ideas are still pushing them. As a teacher, I find it most difficult to avoid packaging what I know and to find ways to encourage students’ innate curiousity so that they probe Percy’s ideas (all ideas) the way the great biologist in Percy’s essay probes the dogfish. “Now here is a curious business,” he says, ….” Happy
Gardner –
I will stick with the word “play.” Too frequently my forays go for naught. Creativity suggests something very good at the other end of the pipe.
Even Einstein, when he wrote the Special Relativity paper, had a day job. It was a positive influence on him, providing intellectual fodder. And, of course, there were many band before and contemporaneous with the Beatles who’ve we never heard of because the mark they left was only a momentary blur.
So while I believe I’m intellectually disposed to behave as you sketch in your post, I struggle with whether that should be a hobby or the full time employment. If society as a whole likewise struggles with this, what mixture will be determined?
I don’t know. Certainly there is an argument that school doesn’t do a very good job of preparation and that both the institution and the students are half-hearted about it all. But there also is the question, preparation for what?
Lanny
This is why I hope our new Academic Excellence Centers, become places where faculty come with their crazy ideas–where they feel safe to have and express crazy ideas.
Wonderful post, Gardner. And thanks for pointing me to Phillip Long’s blog. Wow. So much in both his writing and your response to think about (to graze!). First off – gotta tell you how much I love the metaphors. Large-leture-delivered courses being a “bucket brigade” (too right) and the impossiblity of creativity without messiness (amen). An aside on “play”, did you see Stuart Brown’s TED talk on serious play? I digress…I really think you’re onto something good with the idea of documenting cases of the best educators figuring it out – what IS the secret sauce? Only by scrutinizing the occasions where it works (making them transparent to all, as Will Richardson challenges us to do), can we gain insight.
Been thinking more about it, and specifically about your desire to find the educators or their “secret sauce” that helped spark the creators into creating, and I have to wonder, “what if educators didn’t help?” What if it was poor teaching that pushed those creative people to find their own or become their own resources? I’m just not sure that the search for the holy grail of teaching is going to be fruitful. Can you really teach to the top if the top is some “ungraspable phantom of being”?
Maybe we should focus on providing the open play space and the Legos and swings and puzzles and finger paints and let the children play. But I’ll keep thinking.
Grinn Pidgeon makes an interesting observation. Often I wonder if it’s my teaching that creates the sparks or my lack of good teaching. And it’s always difficult to know whether we reach students through our exchanges unless they somehow indicate that something we said is involved in their overall experience. It is a puzzle.
Such rich responses! I am grateful.
@Happy (x2): I think teachers matter. They always mattered to me. The teacher is the one best positioned to model the “now here’s a curious business” response to a new situation. The teacher understands something of the extent, nature, and purpose of curiosity that can save the learner a lot of time, if and only if that teacherly understanding is “humble and a little vague” (to use Percy’s words) and in a genuine “I-Thou” relationship with the learner. That’s my thought, anyway, based on my own experience as a student and as a teacher. I think Percy nails it when it says the highest role of the educator is the maiuetic role of Socrates. But the midwifery will vary on a case by case basis…. I think what I admire most about the essay is Percy’s persistent evasions united with an unshakable sense of purpose. Something mighty teacherly there.
@Grinn I have these thoughts as well, but as attractive as it is sometimes for me to imagine that poor teaching is the irritating grain of sand that produces the pearl, I don’t finally think that’s true. It certainly hasn’t been true in my case. Poor teaching always inspired cynicism, distrust, and even arrogance in me. That said, I hasten to add that good teaching in my own experience came from many different kinds of teachers and learning situations, and was not tied to any one methodology. I see that my phrase “secret sauce” might give the impression that I’m looking for the One True Teaching Method that will always work. I’m not looking for that, if that’s what “holy grail” suggests. But I do think that certain attitudes, certain habits of mind, a certain readiness-of-meeting does define the best teaching, from which many diverse methodologies may follow. I don’t think play alone will do the trick. I think Bruner is right when he says the teacher is uniquely positioned to encourage the learner by pointing out the larger significance of the learner’s efforts. Gee talks about “enticing” the learner, and while I want my students to learn to entice themselves into learning, I also know that it’s might enticing when a gardener begins to describe the garden of delights into which one has stumbled. Also, the stories I’ve read of great teachers and their influence (in Einstein’s case, in many others–Steiner’s book is very helpful in this regard) convinces me that great teachers exist, matter, and can be described (though perhaps not determined, if I can make that distinction).
@Robin I did see Stuart Brown’s TED talk and loved it. I find myself going back and forth between the inductive desire to collect stories of transformative teachers from the learners themselves and reason backward from those stories to general principles, and the deductive desire to take those general principles and help teachers, especially new teachers, be mindful of those general principles (again, Gee describes this process well–and calls it scientific, which gives me some solace!). Most of the time I think of teachers as being able to intervene usefully at certain key points in the learner’s efforts at self-education. But of course this leaves unanswered the questions of “how to intervene?” and “how to identify those key points?” and what is “useful?” As Lanny says, “preparation for what?” I’d answer “preparation to achieve one’s highest potential,” but I’m aware that that answer is not final or even satisfying for some folks (as I was forcibly reminded of at the SXSWi ‘edupunk’ panel). It’s true, I think, that all theories of education ultimately resolve into philosophies or theologies of what it means to be human. If one decides that the question of meaning is irrelevant or misleading in this context, then we’re really in trouble…. In my view of course!
@Lanny In many respects, your response gives me the greatest pause. Percy praises the indirect approach. Can we approach the indirect approach directly–or to use the jargon, “intentionally”? I think again (and again and again) of Frost’s “Two Tramps In Mudtime” and the vision of “work is play for mortal stakes” that unites “vocation and avocation.” I’ve found many ways to turn my hobbies into jobs and that’s been a continual source of blessing in my life. At the same time, there’s the sense that combining avocation with vocation may lead to the worst of both worlds–the daily grind of avocation?–and that prospect is truly horrifying and no doubt counterproductive. So I don’t know the answer to your question. Percy would say that the key is our readiness to undergo another dialectical movement, not to achieve synthesis in a Hegelian sense, but in a recursive folding-back that always seeks the next meta-level, the next enabling perspective. Like a football team with multiple plays in the playbook, teaching and learning and vocation and avocation must be agile enough to construct and undo methodologies on the fly. But that sounds awfully grand when it’s meant to evoke a kind of scrappy humility and, not pragmatism really (I’m not a Rorty follower), but the evasion and purposefulness I detect in Percy. Something ineffable, perhaps, in the end, but an ineffability we can point to and talk *about* even if we can’t finally articulate it.
And now my thoughts are “in wandering mazes lost”–a bug and not a feature, at least I think….
Gardner –
I don’t know if this helps on the intentionality question, but I could see it being more likely face to face over a beer or a coffee than in a classroom and electronically more likely after a course has concluded than during it, and even then more likely with the extrovert precocious kid. My experience is that these are very happenstance in the forming but once done, there can the type of intentionality you talk about. Also, I should say, this happened only with kids talking about stuff outside their major where the motive was curiosity, nothing at all career-wise.
Lanny
@Lanny,
Indeed. Most days I think that teachers are rarely the initial causes of learning, but that we play a vital role in recognizing the moment learning begins, the moment the learner begins to ascend, and encouraging that motion through the tough times that inevitably come in the struggle for mastery. Likewise, we can’t cause serendipity, but we can create circumstances–mostly by way of our own readiness–that encourage serendipity. Something like “chance favors the prepared mind.”
What a great discussion, and I take all points to heart. I would add about good and bad teaching this one example in my own history as a student. The teacher I learned the most from was one I might call a bad teacher, at least in those qualities of being engaging and motivational and passionate in class. He sat at the head of the table (grad seminar) and talked from his notes, never asking for discussion, although he would accept it. And yet we all knew that he was a prolific writer of both books and articles, and had moved to English from Physics–a second career at a relatively young age. So, his personal story was intriguing, even though his classroom lacked the very life that informed his scholarly work. On the other hand, he suggested that we all turn our course papers into articles, and he didn’t put any pressure on us, but just presented the case that we could do it. I felt that he offered me the freedom, the space to become whatever I wanted to be. I did submit that course paper and it was accepted and published, and that was a great professional lesson. I took several courses from him, and they were all the same–you got out of it what you put into it, which worked for me, because I didn’t want nurturing at the time. I guess I wanted some space to do my own thing. We should all be so lucky to find the right environment at the right time.
I think that a bad teacher can only stimulate learning if someone has first encouraged the student to believe that 1) the world is an interesting place worth learning about and 2) you can go learn about it all by yourself. I suspect that these seeds have to be planted early in life.
What a great conversation! @Grinn hmmm, maybe “secret sauce” was the wrong phrase. As Gardner says, there is no One True Teaching Method. But there is something valuable to be gained in examining the teachers/classrooms/moments where good work is happening and then deduce principles from there. I’m taken with Lanny’s recitals of moments…over a beer, electronically after a course has concluded..” as that begins to sound more like an apprenticeship model. How did the next generation of bakers learn their trade? By following along in the footsteps of the master baker, absorbing the daily lessons in context, in moments, as they happened. And, really, that is the way our university systems train researchers – graduate students as apprentices, post-docs as journeymen, Ph.D.’s as masters. Perhaps a similar system of mentoring for excellence in teaching?
@Grinn Pidgeon That’s a great story and a great cautionary tale about how we judge effective teaching. In my experience, context is crucial, and what works for one learner may not work so well for another. Yet I’m struck by your description of the way your professional horizons were stretched by the possibilities he presented you. I am especially moved by the way you felt he offered you freedom. What gave you that feeling? What made it clear to you that you were not simply being neglected, but that an offer had been made? Something in that experience must have framed itself as an I-Thou moment, to use Buber’s term. Something was motivational even if that thing was not explicit in his manner or method. (I think I’m more convinced than ever that these stories are vital to our understanding of the surprising varieties of effective teaching.)
@RovingLibrarian Those two beliefs are crucial indeed. I’d say they’re the foundation of all the hopefulness one must have to survive the topsy-turvy or even repellent moments in one’s schooling. Or one’s living, come to that. For me, the worst teachers are not simply the indifferent ones, but the ones that by their manner or methods attempt to squash one or both of the beliefs you describe. And I have known teachers whose fundamental lack of curiosity makes it clear that they do not believe the world is an interesting place worth learning about, let alone one that I can learn about all by myself. Such a teacher deadens my soul. Your comment follows interestingly on Barbara’s story, for that story is about someone who clearly does hold to both of those vital beliefs and somehow communicates that to his students.
@Robin I’ve always loved the phrase “cognitive apprenticeship” as a description of just the sort of mentoring you describe. I was very fortunate to have several three such mentors in graduate school (that’s three more than many Ph.D.’s ever have). Alas, much of the apprenticeship I see in graduate education looks more like indentured servitude, with the term of service fixed not by years but by time-to-acculturation. Not to be melodramatic about it, but submitting to the ways of the tribe seems to be at the heart of much of academic life. I just read a quite chilling essay along these lines, an excerpt from a forthcoming book titled “Deconstructing Princeton.” But that’s another story….