Interesting comment over at Creating Passionate Users, where guest blogger Dan Russell has been doing some blogs on “sensemaking.” I’m just tuning in, but this bit from reader Julien Couvreur caught my eye:
I find that this model fits my own learning model. For example, when I learn some new computer code or library, I build a representation in my head as I go. Many of the gaps are filled by intuition, because things that are designed for a purpose usually make sense.
That last clause is a corker: “things that are designed for a purpose usually make sense.” Stands to reason, yes? Trouble is, many students begin with an assumption, reinforced in many instances by the casual skepticism that can pass for insight in academic communities, that “purpose” is either absent or unknowable, and “design” is either hopelessly idiosyncratic or functionally irrelevant. In other words, many students believe (or act as if they believe) that there is little agency or deliberate craft in our academic pursuits. Instead, it’s iteration iteration iteration, turtles all the way down.
Probably that’s too pessimistic, but the larger point still resonates: if one believes (and it really is an article of faith, sometimes) that elements of human culture are meaningful in terms of individual agency, i.e., designed with a purpose, sensemaking becomes much easier.
HA
It seems to be that the “faith†in this scenario, coming from dealing with technophobia from an instructor’s standpoint, is as much faith in one’s self as it is faith in the sense of the design. An individual with too little faith in themselves, who misses the immediate sense of the design, may conclude the skill set requirement for understanding is too high. An individual with too much faith in their self, may do the opposite. If they fail to see the immediate sense of the design, they may decide it is poorly designed and refuse to look further.
I think one could add a very meaningful aspect: being humble. Sometimes faith also includes a belief that you might not be ready to understand the sense of the design AT THAT MOMENT. But, a revisit at a later time, after more classes or studying, may prove that you have since developed the skills to flourish.
Taking it a bit more multi-dimensional, you could even replace the measure of ‘emotional arousal’ with ‘faith (arousal?)’ in the Inverted-U Hypothesis (http://www.exrx.net/Psychology/InvertedU.html) to get an understanding of how faith in one’s self (ego vs. lack of ego?) requires a careful balance.
That doesn’t remind me very much of things students have implied in my presence.
I would have thought that a fair number of students say something like this to themselves instead: “Sure, there’s a pattern here, but nobody’s going to let me at the controls anytime soon, so they probably won’t explain how it really works just yet either. Just like so many other things … I’d be fooling myself if I thought this was worth my time and energy right now, or maybe ever.”
That’s my hunch about academic knowledge as well as social power. Needless to say, but I’m not working at the sort of posh school where a sense of entitlement usually comes with the dorm key (I hear).
Well, I’m not working at that sort of a posh school, either. 🙂
But your point is interesting. Do students believe we have knowledge (deeper organizational, structural, power-ful knowledge) that we’re withholding? That we aren’t telling them “how it really works,” whatever “it” may be? That could be, in some cases, especially for students who’ve somehow imbibed or intuited a Foucaultian notion that discourse is nothing more than the circulation of power.
In my own experience, though, the students who are disengaged typically believe that education is a ritual of initiation that has little meaning for them, not that we’re not sharing that meaning with them. And my hunch is that they believe the ritual has little meaning because of soulless scaling, and because of certain corrosive kinds of academic skepticism. But the matter bears further thought, certainly.
I like your idea about the corrosive skepticism and would be interested in thinking more about it. When you talk about soulless scaling I think we may be circling around the same kinds of experience. We’re trying to put a name to some of the alienation that is so easy to witness in schools, yes?
Perhaps you’ve had the same experience as I have — when I occasionally ask students why school is so often / too often mediocre or worse, they perk up wonderfully, though sometimes cautiously, as if it might be some sort of trick to spend time talking about what they’ve really experienced.
These interludes make me wonder whether students would call much of their school experience an exercise in delayed gratification. As if educators endlessly say to students, “Oh, the good stuff? No, we won’t be getting to that anytime soon. Maybe in graduate school…”
“Putting a name to some of the alienation”–yes, that’s a great way to describe our shared project here. And I have had *exactly* the experience you’ve had when I’ve asked students to think about their schooling: the energy and the guardedness. Some educators wonder if students want us in “their” social spaces (e.g., Facebook), and it’s a legitimate concern, but often I sense that students want more contact with the teachers they like and respect, not less, in part because their experience of school lacks genuine intellectual intimacy.
What you say about graduate school is interesting, as I’ve often thought that to be precisely the place where the corrosive skepticism is perpetuated. On the other hand, there’s also something to the “now we’re doing it for real” that you’re describing, and I wonder what it would be like to make undergraduate school less like high school on steroids and more like graduate studies–but then I think about all the economic reasons behind the soulless scaling and I wonder again….
Your comment about making undergraduate school more like graduate school reminds me of a startling fact I ran across on the web site of Vanderbilt University. It’s contained in this photo caption from the university’s online Viewbook:
“Vanderbilt undergraduates coauthor 25 percent of the research papers published by our faculty and share in presenting their work at professional conferences. For example, Centennial Professor Arthur A. Demarest involved students in one of the world’s largest excavations, the Petexbatun Regional Archeological Project in Guatemala, right.”
Hardly any American college or university can make a claim like that one about collaborative research, I suspect, but they could all achieve a 25% rate if they cared to. My quick conclusion from facts like that is: we generally offer plodding, condescending undergraduate educations that don’t link the real excitement and exploratory, explanatory power of our fields to the world students know. We don’t invite them to hang around where the new work is being done in our fields because we don’t think they’re up to the task. We lose contact with them and they lose their faith in the ability of the university to connect to people’s lives.
But on good days it’s easy for teachers to see that students want more meaning, more connection, more community, more agency, in their lives. Pushing aside the institution’s bad habits of alienation and delayed gratification, internalized by teachers and students alike, is the hard part.
(Source: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/viewbook/faculty.html )
Whoosh. I’m still not sure about the delayed gratification part–part of me wants to say that the elephant in the room here is the developmental part of education, which means that certain kinds of affirmation have to wait on the “sitzen und schwitzen” part of acquiring knowledge (Daryl makes an excellent point about humility, above, which reminds me of Clifford D. Simak’s “Immigrant”–but maybe we’re talking about different kinds of gratification…. Maybe the real problem is that the plodding stuff scales well and the exciting explorations doesn’t, or at least not with the current models and means of scaling.
So maybe we need to change the paradigms. Wikipedia scales well, after all, and the Web is the Great Big Engine That Does, even with all the junk and destructive stuff it also enables.
I forgot to say: that’s a great response, Ken, and I’m learning a ton. Thank you.
You keep using different terms than I’m used to, and that’s making me think. This thread has been a pleasure for me too.
I found an inspiring quotation from Sam Wineburg that tries to nudge educators into imagining that our students are more capable than we had thought they were — an idea that could challenge our notions about developmental courses, among others. He’s talking about teaching history:
“It is not enough to expose students to alternate visions of the past, already digested and interpreted by others. The only way we can come to understand the past’s multiplicity is by the direct experience of having to tell it, or having to sort through the welter of the past’s conflicting visions and produce a story written by our own hand. We have in mind here a vision of history classrooms where students learn the subject by writing it. Students come to develop a sensitivity to multiple stories because they have wrestled with them, not as arbiters of others’ accounts but as authors of their own. This vision of history instruction transforms a school subject from a fixed story, with questions of significance and importance sewn up, to an array of stories that invites students to consider the fullness of human experience. By questioning the past, students illuminate their present.”
I have more links to Wineburg’s dynamic work in a new blog entry:
http://www.mchron.net/site/edublog_comments.php?id=P3428_0_13_0
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