In my last entry I described the way we acquire a taste for something — a taste for coffee, or Shakespeare, or musical theater.
Today I’d like to outline the argument that I will be developing over the next several posts.
We can learn anything that we have a taste for / that we are brought to like and be interested in.
We like and are interested in subjects (whether hair metal or mathematics) that offer us desirable identities.
Therefore, if we want individuals to learn new things, we have to offer them desirable identities related to those subjects; having done so they will take care of the learning.
That said, we can ease their passage into these new identities by making the process of learning those subjects as “natural” as possible.
Learning and schooling are currently very colonial processes — learners are treated like colonial subjects, with whom we more enlightened educators can beneficently share the fruits of our knowledge and wisdom. In the past, we could offer colonial identities — ask learners to break with their culture, their past, their current selves, and create a new self modeled on those of the colonizers. Thankfully, we have begun moving past this model (though perhaps have moved less far past it as we might think). If we want those with whom we work to acquire a taste for learning whatever we hope to teach them, we must ourselves acquire a taste for learning what they have to share.
Over the next several posts I will expand on each of these points (and point 5 might require more than a single post, I fear…)
In addition, this final point will serve as a transition into my next topic — how we can help others acquire a taste for learning….
I’ve been thinking about taste lately. Several years ago I read a book that stuck with me, Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007), which is part of the 33⅓ series of books in which critics write about albums and songs. Some of the books in the series focus on how the songs were written and recorded, or on the artists involved, while others use their meditation on the music as a window into some larger subject. In Wilson’s case, he takes on Celine Dion’s 1997 album Let’s Talk About Love as a lens through which to examine the question of taste. Wilson starts by ruminating on the reality of Celine Dion’s popularity. How is it, he wonders, that millions of people around the world love her music, find it pleasurable and enjoy listening to it, while he strongly dislikes it? Do they have “bad” taste? Does he have “good” taste”? Do we get to judge the taste of others?
Wilson turns to the philosophy of taste to try and answer these questions — what is taste, and where does it come from? He leans heavily on Pierre Bourdieu and his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) as he seeks to answer this question. Bourdieu’s argument boils down to this: we form our taste out of our desire to belong to particular communities. In the past, this generally meant that taste was formed “upward,” as individuals aspired to higher social status, and brought themselves to enjoy the markers of that status as part of their aspiration.
I recognize that this might sound farfetched to you. I didn’t choose to like the things I like, you might say, I just like them! And certainly this thought has occurred to me too. But when I consider the various things for which I have a taste, the things I enjoy, and try to trace back where that enjoyment began, it gets harder and harder for me to resist Bourdieu’s argument.
Consider the cup of coffee sitting beside my computer. Why do I drink coffee? How did I come to enjoy it? I would guess that almost no one enjoys their first cup of coffee. I began drinking coffee when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. My friends and I would hang out together, and would spend mornings in Bangkok in cafes, eating breakfast and drinking coffees. I wanted to be like them, to fit in, and to be like the kind of people with whom I associated drinking coffee — to be the kind of adult who was capable both at work, drinking Nescafe with my colleagues, and socially, hanging out with the other volunteers.
I’d guess that most of us can trace our drinking of alcohol similarly — few enjoy wine or beer or liquor the first time around, it is the social setting, our social desires, that lead us to acquire a taste for it.
Taste in music, or books, or whatever other arts is similarly fashioned. This is probably easiest to see with the most rarefied arts, such as ballet or opera, which people commonly refer to as “acquired tastes.” As it turns out, all tastes are acquired, whether consciously or (more frequently) unconsciously.
I can’t stress this point enough. We enjoy things because we have developed a taste for them, and we develop a taste for things that offer us an identity as part of a desirable community. Even our first tastes — our earliest taste in music, for example, is formed by what we hear as small children, and our desire to be like our parents or caregivers.
What does this have to do with learning?
What does this have to do with learning?
Think of how I acquired my taste for coffee. I drank it out of a desire to be a particular kind of person, to fit into a particular social group (even if that group was more imagined than real — after all, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has shown us, all communities are imagined communities). And so I made myself drink something that I didn’t particularly enjoy until I began to enjoy drinking it. Of course, I tried to drink versions I would enjoy more, such as the heavily sweetened, creamy Thai iced coffees, or Nescafe with plenty of added sugar and powdered creamer. And here I am, years later, sipping on my dark-roast black coffee with pleasure as I write.
Copious research has shown us that pretty much anyone can learn pretty much anything. This leads us to ask: so why don’t we? All of us, myself included, are very good at not learning new things.
Why is this? Our schools, society, everyone implicitly tends to treat learning as a rational process. If every learner could just set aside their humanity — their drifting mind, their pesky feelings, their fears, anxieties, preoccupations — they could just be a good little learning robot. In this model our reality as thinking feeling animals is an impediment to learning.
What I’d like to do, over the course of several posts, is to argue that we need to rethink learning, and to embrace a model of learning which makes our messy human reality our strength as learners rather than our weakness. And at the heart of my argument will be the need to focus on feeling, and on helping learners develop a taste for learning.
What does the word smart mean? We toss it around a lot.
Here are a few possibilities.
1) Smart = knowing many things 2) Smart = quick to make connections between things 3) Smart = knowing how to do something
Let’s consider these one by one. #1: Knowing many things.
Google knows many things, much more than any person, but it isn’t intelligent. It possesses information. Is simply possessing information in and of itself a valuable quality? When we lived in an age of information scarcity it must have been, but we don’t live in that world anymore. Even fantasies about returning to a world like that (such as The Walking Dead, in which Eugene’s character is valued for the knowledge he possesses) simply skip over the fact that there are libraries all over the place full of books filled with the same information. Knowing a lot is useful at trivia night but less so beyond that.
At the same time, having a depth of knowledge within a field is undoubtably useful. Ed Janak, an educational historian with whom I have studied, has an amazing depth of knowledge about American educational history. Jenny Denyer, another professor with whom I have worked, possesses deep and layered knowledge about language arts instruction, about discourse, and about teacher education. These are very useful qualities, because in both cases it means that they are able to quickly assimilate new information and understand how it relates to the body of the field, and when asked a question can draw upon the depth of their resources, and provide thoughtful, concise, and complex answers.
What is important here isn’t simply what they know, however, but the depth of field that I’m describing. It seems like in our schools we too often value shallow knowing of a broad array of information, rather than this kind of depth. We could see this as a chicken / egg problem — schools often act as if by filling students with information, we are moving them toward this kind of deep knowledge. Why not see it the other way around, though — that the deeper an understanding of something we form, the more likely we are to begin assimilating the information in that field? What if we treated memorization as a positive side effect of knowing and understanding rather than as the necessary precursor?
What about definition #2: being quick?
Is being quick an important quality? How often does speed matter, in our daily lives? Again, maybe we’re putting the cart before the horse. Having a deep understanding can make one quick, but simply being a fast processor might give one the appearance of having a depth of understanding without it actually existing.
Or perhaps it is what being quick signifies, which ties into definition #3:
Knowing how to do something. Much of the time we call people smart when they already know how to do what we’re asking them to do. This ends up creating a weird dynamic, where many people end up feeling “stupid” because they don’t enter a new situation or class already knowing how to do what will be taught. And the “smart” person is just someone who probably shouldn’t be there.
If we could get people to think of being smart as a situational quality, rather than inherent one (or could drop our use of the word in the first place), we might all be better off – that is, we wouldn’t have to feel bad about not knowing how to do what we have not yet learned. Smart usually seems to mean “situationally competent.” I’m really “smart” in an English classroom, but much less “smart” in a physics classroom, although I might do a decent job of faking being smart, because I tend to be pretty quick and carry myself with confidence.
Perhaps it doesn’t even have to mean that, though? Maybe we can think of being smart in a very different way?
When I do improv, being a good improvisor doesn’t mean knowing something that other folks don’t know (there are maybe a handful of improv guidelines worth knowing, and even they aren’t hard-and-fast rules). Instead, being a good improvisor means trusting yourself and your partner, being responsive (that is, paying close attention and taking into account what you see and hear as a result), and being brave. Maybe this is a better way to think about what it means to be smart? Certainly, if we think about students who tend to learn the most in a particular class, those students pay close attention and act on what they see and hear, and they are brave. Consider a language class — students who have been trained by our educational system to only want to give the “right” answer simply speak up less often than other students, and consequently don’t learn as much. Bravery trumps any kind of traditional “smarts.”
The next time you call someone smart, or they call you smart, stop and think a moment about what the word means in that context. And if you want to go crazy, comment on this blog and tell a story of what “smart” means to you, and let’s see if we can pin this down further.
Sitting with my friend who is working on a project related
to flipped classrooms leads me to the subject of online learning versus face-to-face
learning, and my own experiences learning and teaching in both settings.
A couple of years back my perspective on the two changed
dramatically. I had always sensed that the two were almost entirely different,
but hadn’t been able to articulate clearly why this was the case. And then I
began to read a book about Playback Theatre and everything became much clearer
to me.
The first Playback Theatre company was created by Jonathan
Fox and Jo Salas in 1975. Playback theatre offers improvised theatrical
experiences; where typical improvised theater in the US is comedy-centric, Playback
Theatre focuses instead on shared experiences within a community, ones which
validate the experiences of the members of the community and can have a
therapeutic effect for both the individual and the group.
In Playback
Theatre, individuals are invited to share stories from their lives with the
group. The players then perform those stories, bringing them to life through
performance. There is significant interplay between the teller and the troupe,
and the experience is heightened through the ritual aspects of theater, which include
ceremonial aspects and music.
In his book describing how Playback Theatre works, Jonathan Fox (2003) contrasts the qualities of oral narratives (as performed by epic poets, for example), and the qualities of written narratives. To my mind, this contrast sums up perfectly the difference between face-to-face learning experiences and online learning experiences.
Qualities of Oral Culture
Qualities of Written Culture
Face-to-Face Experiences
Online Experiences
Repetitious / aggregative
Concise
Concrete and detailed
Abstract, objective, distant
Ritualistic – relying on repetition of formulaic phrases
Distaste for the dramatic
Oral experience
Silent and low-energy
Heard words “enter” the listener
Read words remain “empty” / external
Remembrance is essential for both teller and audience
Rereading is central
Improvised rather than scripted
Fully scripted – word choice important
Performed
Read
Communal & inclusive
Individual
Emphasis on relation as much as content
Emphasis on content
Attuned to the environment / responsive
Non-responsive
Fox (2003), pp. 12-48
When students (myself included) complain about online
classes, the qualities identified in this chart are precisely what they are
responding to. At its best, online learning can be self-directed and energizing
for learners exposed to new ideas. However, because face-to-face learning is
iterative, improvisational, and responsive, it tends to feel better to
students – it acknowledges them as individuals on a moment-to-moment level, and
it is simple to ask and receive answers to questions, whether asking the instructor
or turning to a classmate to ask a quick question about the syllabus or a
particular homework assignment.
Lining up the contrasting aspects of oral culture and
written culture / face-to-face learning and online learning in this way might
be a useful starting point for thinking about how to improve online learning
experiences. Because students typically appreciate the qualities of
face-to-face classes, but also find online classes convenient, both because
they can be accessed at times of the students’ choosing and because students
have greater control over the pacing of activities (we have all sat through painful
face-to-face learning experiences and had the thought that we wished we could
have that time back), we might also think about whether face-to-face classes
could gain something from this exploration as well.
At the same time, I think that this list is particularly
useful at articulating aspects of face-to-face learning that most educators
have sensed but few have been able to clearly articulate. It can help us make
the case for face-to-face learning and to explain the value of such experiences
to those who push for more and more online learning because of the lower costs
associated with such learning.
References
Fox, J. (2003). Acts
of service: Spontaneity, commitment, tradition in the nonscripted theatre. New
Paltz, NY: Tusitala.
I touched on the question of a knowledge base for
improvisation in my last post. The question of how much knowledge one needs to
have prior to improvising is a key one for me, because I am particularly
interested in how we bring people into new discourse communities. For example,
can a student who is just beginning to learn science or math improvise within
either domain? Can an undergraduate who is learning to become a teacher improvise
as they learn? Can a new employee hit the ground running, improvising their way
into their job?
When I taught a course on Discourse and Improvisation for local teachers, one common expression that came up regularly was “fake it ‘til you make it.” In large part this was because the course was organized around James Paul Gee’s (1989) work on Discourse. Gee sees learning as a process of entering into and gaining facility in a new Discourse.
For example, if I have never attended a rodeo before, and my friend says, “hey, let’s go to the rodeo!”, I will have no idea how to be, how to act, how to dress, what to do when I’m at the rodeo. In common terms we associate with intelligence (but which, as this example shows, are relatively useless terms), I will seem rodeo “stupid,” while my friend appears rodeo “smart.” (Here we can see that when we think of someone as smart, it usually just means that they already know how to do what we want them to be able to do!)
Nonetheless, the best way for me to become rodeo “smart” is
to improvise. I’ll ask my friend what to wear beforehand, let them adjust my
outfit when they pick me up, and pay close attention as we spend our time at the
rodeo. I’ll watch what people say, how they act, what they pay attention to,
and begin, hesitantly, to try and use the language, watch the activities,
become a “rodeo person.” Eventually, as I “fake it ‘til I make it,” my identity
will expand. I will have added a new facet to myself, and will now “know” the
Discourse of rodeo – I will be rodeo smart.
We learn by doing, by trying out, by playing around with new
language, new actions, a new Discourse and identity. By improvising. We do not
need to be experts. What we need is to have space to play.
The educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky described how this
works back in the 1920s. Vygotsky (1978, 1991, 2004) saw play and imagination
as central to learning, because play and imagination facilitate the trying on
of new identities by allowing children and adolescents to act beyond their
abilities. Through play we are able to try on identities that are beyond our
reach, and to be both who we currently are and another person, one whom we
aspire to become, or whose identity we wish to try on – so a child may play at
being a teacher, or a scientist, or a historian; by practicing enacting these
roles, we learn and develop as we move toward them.
Here is where we see the biggest disconnect with educational practices and how learning works. Too often, we do not give learners space to play. We give them tasks to complete, and we constantly assess them on their ability to complete those tasks successfully. Thus we reward those who already are science “smart” or writing “smart” or math “smart,” and exclude those who actually need to learn the new Discourse in which we are immersing them. We expect beginners to “fake it” perfectly, something which almost no one can do!
Here we can begin to understand the importance of failure as a central feature rather than as a bug in the learning process. There is no way to try and learn a new Discourse without failing over and over again! When I lived in Thailand, for example, cultural and linguistic differences meant that I spent two years making a fool out of myself on an almost-daily basis. And yet no one graded me on this effort, no one (other than myself) chastised me or made me feel bad about doing so, and most importantly, I was still able to work effectively, to get up each morning and do my job (primarily teaching English). I may have “failed” continually as I learned the language and culture, but I also succeeded at the same time, becoming more and more proficient at each. This is how learning works.
References
Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. Journal of Education, 171 (1), 5-17.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1991). Imagination
and creativity in the adolescent. Soviet
Psychology, 29 (1), 73-88.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination
and creativity in childhood. Journal of
Russian and East European Psychology, 42 (1), 7-97.
The Roman scholar Quintilian, master of rhetoric (public speaking), wrote that
although it is essential to bring with us into court a supply of eloquence which has been prepared in advance in the study and on which we can confidently rely, there is no greater folly than the rejection of the gifts of the moment.
Quintilian (1920)
In my work in education, as I study learning, improvisation, and teaching, I’ve been trying to articulate how we (teachers, learners, everyone) can best make use of these “gifts of the moment,” and how we should conceptualize the ability to do so.
There is a lot of writing in education about helping teachers become “reflective practitioners” (a term popularized by Donald Schon, 1983), ones who continually reflect on and thereby improve their teaching practice. I fully embrace this idea, and believe that no matter what we are learning, teaching, or doing, reflective practice helps us become better at these things. Thus toward the end of our improv classes, we reflect on what our goals were for the day, whether we met those goals, and what goals we will set for ourselves for the next class, all while considering what worked (and what didn’t) during the class that had just transpired.
In the moment of teaching, of learning, however, I would argue that while we bring to bear a range of thoughts and reflections (in the manner of Quintilian bringing “into court a supply of eloquence which has been prepared in advance in the study and on which we can confidently rely”), what happens in the moment isn’t a reflective practice. And yet, it is not a reflexive (or thoughtless) practice either. What lies between reflection and reaction?
The jazz scholar Tracy McMullen (2016) characterizes improvisation as “responsive” rather than reactive. She argues that in the moment of improvisation, we should think of what takes place in terms of “non-conceptual knowing,” a type of knowing which she links to the Buddhist idea of shunyata, “a state of non-conceptual knowing that understands “not arising; not ceasing; not arising and ceasing together” (p. 119). For McMullen, this term makes sense because when we focus on either “arising” or “ceasing” we focus either on what has come before or will come after the moment, but for her the essence of improvisation is a wholehearted embrace of the moment itself, on “abiding without deciding or anticipating” (p. 119).
When we improvise on stage as comedy performers (my milieu), we describe the goal as trying to avoid being “in your head.” When you are “in your head” you worry about what will come next, where the scene will go, where you might want it to arrive. When we avoid this, when we abide in the moment (to borrow McMullen’s phrasing), we trust ourselves and our partners, trust that working together we will find our way, that we know what to do and how to do it.
In contrast to many scholars of improvisation, though, my own belief is that this trust need not be earned. Many scholars argue that we need a strong knowledge base from which to improvise (an argument that makes sense to me in a jazz context). However, I am particularly interested in how learning works, how we move from being a beginner or a neophyte to competency or mastery. And from my own experience as both a teacher and a learner, and my own knowledge of learning as the mastery of discourse, which necessitates improvising with little expertise (see Gee, 1989), I have become convinced that even amateurs and beginners may improvise successfully, if we can teach them how to work in a responsive, improvisative mode, and to accept the “gifts of the moment.”
References
Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy,
discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. Journal
of Education, 171 (1), 5-17.
McMullen, T. (2016). The improvisative. In G. E. Lewis & B. Piekut (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol 1 (pp. 115-127 ). New York: Oxford University Press.
I’ve been exploring how to use role play and improvisation in teacher education as a way to free up and open up teachers, to help them be more adaptive and responsive to their students.
I’ve leaned on the phenomenal Matt Foss, who recently joined the University of Toledo as the professor in charge of teaching acting. When I sat down with him last week to discuss the course in which I’ll be trying out some of this work, he encouraged me to think about role-playing in terms of intentions. He explained that when you ask people to play a role, they often get too caught up in self-consciously playing a part. If instead you give them a goal or an intention, they will focus on that intention until they are distracted or the situation changes their intention — it will be much more organic.
For example, if we are role playing a classroom situation, instead of asking a participant to play the role of a student who only cares about her grade, if we ask the participant to act with the goal of wanting a clear idea about what she will be graded on. The first of those is a one-track role, the second is much more open and fluid (which are two of the traits we are encouraging, of course!).
While I consider myself a good teacher, I’ve been incredibly impressed by Matt in the classroom and in conversation. I audited his Acting II class in the spring, and was blown away by how he was able to support and challenge his students in a great balance, and also how good he was at individualizing instruction. I will post again soon to talk about some of the lessons I learned from watching him teach (I also acted in a campus production that semester, and I’ll post about the lessons that experience offered me at a later date as well).
Thinking about goals and objectives, he and I discussed the difference between a teacher having the objective of “teaching” versus having the objective of “students learning” — imagine if this was the objective of every teacher! He offered an outstanding analogy as well, which I’ll be sharing with the teachers with whom I’ll be working this semester. “Show them the video of a running back scoring a touch down,” he suggested (I’m paraphrasing here). “And then talk with them about how a football team achieves that goal. They don’t just run the ball, they don’t pass the ball on every play — they mix it up, they try out different strategies, all with that goal in mind.” Extending this metaphor, I also thought about how a team will study their opponents, to find the right strategies to use in any particular game, to account for the strengths and weaknesses of those with whom they are playing. There are teachers who do this, of course, who think deeply about the strengths, weaknesses, needs, abilities and challenges of their students, both in the aggregate and as individuals, but imagine if we thought of teaching more in this way — with a clear focus on the goal of student learning, and on deploying the right variety of strategies to make that learning happen (to the best of our ability)! (Although as educational historian Ed Janak — another UT professor — points out, isn’t it interesting that teachers are the only ones ever held accountable for student learning? More on this too at a later date…)
Welcome to my professional blog, where I’ll be publishing my reflections — some more polished, some less polished — on education.
Who am I? A teacher, a graduate student working on my PhD in education, with growing expertise in several facets of education. The areas of my expertise include: Transformative Learning. Teacher Education. Role / Playing and Improvisation as teaching tools. English / Language Arts education. Writing Instruction. English as a Second Language. Creativity in education. Educational Philosophy. Constructivism as an educational approach. Peace Studies. All of these are areas I have studied, taught in, or researched. I have learned a lot, and still have a lot to learn. I hope you’ll learn with me.
