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.
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.
