tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61712505416122934212024-02-02T10:42:07.645-08:00DKDK ZoneDavidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-15044819943421012632020-06-08T16:13:00.000-07:002020-06-08T16:13:43.453-07:00Mind the Gap: Creating Experience-based Learning Remotely<br />
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Is it possible to re-design the kind of experience-based learning we created together at CITYterm and in the Teaching for Experience workshop in a remote medium?<br />
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I confess I do not know, but I am really eager to try. And that is what Mind The Gap is going to do this fall. Here is the link-<a href="https://mtgnow.org/">https://mtgnow.org/</a><br />
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We just went live today with the website. Please feel free to pass this link around to whomever you think might be interested.<br />
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Since you read this blog (well, maybe you read it sometimes), you have some idea of the kinds of things we have learned about how and why some moments in our lives become experiences. And transformative experiences in many cases.<br />
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So, the new challenge is this--can you design an online curriculum, pedagogy and a collective of human relationships that will allow everyone involved to create an experience? I have been very hopeful with some experiments lately, but it is such a different world to what I am used to whether I am working with students or teachers.<br />
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Here is one thing I think we have going for us from a learning theory point of view. <i>It took me years of teaching and coaching to realize that the following phrase is deeply true--"Transitions are a time of maximum creativity." </i>We will have to have a sophisticated understanding of the characteristics of transitions and why we sabotage that state of being so frequently, so unnecessarily. This venture is all about the time of TRANSITION. Let's see what we can create!<br />
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Thoughts and comments welcome. I will keep you posted as this progresses. Share the website with your friends and colleagues.<br />
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Keep the faith..<br />
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<a href="https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/103758118_117761879960794_2982473376154385872_o.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_oc=AQmCMD0ssPkiF7P3xkGcg_gkYaEz9qE96OxC8dfbzjDyvJq1D0ez9shtDi8Re0g5Eor0nAARiDC3fPvi28LhR-uj&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=0e7ac0dc641e5f8d333e4d0ed8cc9393&oe=5F052609" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Image may contain: text that says 'THIS IS NOT A TEST. It's not not college, it's not job, job, it's the important in between.'" border="0" height="320" src="https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/103758118_117761879960794_2982473376154385872_o.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_oc=AQmCMD0ssPkiF7P3xkGcg_gkYaEz9qE96OxC8dfbzjDyvJq1D0ez9shtDi8Re0g5Eor0nAARiDC3fPvi28LhR-uj&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=0e7ac0dc641e5f8d333e4d0ed8cc9393&oe=5F052609" width="231" /></a></div>
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<img alt="Image may contain: text that says 'LIFE READY, SET, GO. We fill the GAPS between education and LIFE! #lifeready MIND THE GAP'" height="320" src="https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/102972995_117761983294117_1727702427716532446_o.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_oc=AQm_vXLBnzW_zK4AdF33o8V9ZdIUReCGd5pRmRy8pgd2OOJwHPd56GSMqLwfuuDy1Coay10xhB-mrHHLE0w-qKWr&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=2c4a9f73caf8dbdc8a88ea0857490617&oe=5F02C906" width="230" />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-13362426905175943272020-02-05T08:54:00.000-08:002020-02-05T08:54:11.354-08:00The DKDK Project Goes to College!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Twenty-four years ago, CITYterm started experimenting with how early elementary school might be synthesized with college to create an educational experience that adolescents would actually be eager to <u><i>engage</i></u> in and would trigger an <i><u>intrinsic motivation</u> </i>for learning. To that end, we mined (<a href="https://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2012/09/mature-and-immature-teaching-self.html">and stole</a>) liberally from <a href="https://www.thecompassschool.com/blog/key-elements-reggio-emilia-approach/">Reggio Emilia</a>, <a href="https://www.tohigherground.com/">Montessori</a>, <a href="https://waldorfanswers.org/index.htm">Waldorf</a> and the <a href="https://www.bankstreet.edu/">Bank Street School of Education</a>. </div>
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The other major place we looked for engagement and intrinsic motivation was in the (tragically named) world of "extra" or "co-curriculars." My own expertise was in the world of athletics, but I soon found that theater, music, debate, outdoor education, service learning and countless other areas would yield great ideas for deciphering the mystery of engagement and motivation.</div>
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Why couldn't high school classrooms look more like those arenas? Could you make a student's learning experience become integrated and overcome the fragmented world they inhabit that is partially responsible for generating the crippling levels of anxiety that students feel today? What we found was that they could, but you had to be extraordinarily precise in the skills and psycho-emotional dispositions you had students practice. And you had to be very flexible and adaptive in the way you used time and space. In other words, where and how does learning take place? And what makes it transformative?</div>
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Well, colleges have been experimenting with these ideas for a number of years now. For example, Ken Bain and his colleagues (that includes us!) at <a href="http://www.bestteachersinstitute.org/who-we-are">The Best Teachers Institute</a> spend time designing what they call "Supercourses" that facilitate deep learning. </div>
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While the DKDK Project has already been working with elementary, middle and highs schools to design and implement this kind of learning, we are exceptionally pleased to be partnering with a number of offices, centers and museums at the University of Chicago to share what we have learned in the college setting with teachers of every age group.</div>
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The <a href="https://www.dkdkproject.org/">DKDK Project</a> goes to College in April 2020!</div>
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<strong style="background-color: white; color: rgba(8, 27, 51, 0.8); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">The DKDK Project, in partnership with The University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, the Center for Teaching and the Smart Museum, is thrilled to announce the</strong></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><strong style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"> </strong><span style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"><b><i><u> Learning Beyond the Classroom Workshop</u></i></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><strong style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">We invite educators from secondary, post-secondary and community-based settings to join us in Chicago for a two-day workshop focused on transformational teaching practices</strong>. </span></div>
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<span style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"><strong style="background-color: white; overflow-wrap: break-word;">What participants can expect</strong></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Designed in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, this workshop is an interactive seminar that asks participants to experience the benefit of deep learning, including place-based and experience-based pedagogical practices. Through hands-on sessions and seminar-style discussion, participants will explore ways to make the <em style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">content</em> of their course memorable, transferable and transformational for students. Participants in this workshop will experience model lessons which have been developed over several decades, as well as strategies for incorporating “guests” and other “experts” into classes as a way to deepen inquiry and engagement. This workshop will feature local community members connected to the Office of Civic Engagement and organizations working in Chicago. </span></div>
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<span style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"><strong style="background-color: white; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Registration</strong></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">The workshop will begin on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 1050 East 59th Street, 3rd Floor (9:00 am to 5:00 pm CST) and will conclude on Wednesday, April 22, 2020 (9:00 am to 3:00 pm CST) at 5737 South University Avenue.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">The cost of the workshop is $750. This fee includes breakfast and lunch each day, as well as all instructional materials and activities associated with the workshop. Housing and transportation are not included. CPDU offered for public school teachers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Apply via this <a href="https://forms.gle/m1dFaN2Hw3ZdBvmA9" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #e54a35; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">google form</a>. We will reach out to confirm your registration and share additional details. For more information, contact Erica Chapman at <a href="mailto:ericachapman@dkdkproject.org?subject=Inquiry%20for%20TfT%20Chicago" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #e54a35; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-decoration-line: none;">ericachapman@dkdkproject.org</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><strong style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">Download more information about this workshop </strong><a href="https://www.dkdkproject.org/s/TfT-Announcement_UofC-April-2020docx-1.pdf" style="color: #e54a35; overflow-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank"><strong style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">here</strong></a><strong style="overflow-wrap: break-word;">.</strong></span></div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-46587877496523713752020-01-06T13:14:00.001-08:002020-01-06T13:14:16.560-08:00<div class="page" title="Page 1">
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While I have been experimenting on transforming this blog into a book, there are still so many other things that are happening. Nice to know we made some correct observations about teaching and learning 25 years (or so) ago, and that people are still interested in what we have been discovering in the last quarter century.</div>
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But, one of the things I am most happy about is the workshop below.</div>
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Please spread the word and pass this on to whomever you think might enjoy it.</div>
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And I will let you know when this blog transforms into a book (in a very different form it appears--so far).<br />
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Keep the faith</div>
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 14.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">Announcing the Teaching for Transformation Workshop</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 12pt;">June 15 - 19, 2020</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">The DKDK Project and The Hewitt School are thrilled to offer the Teaching for Transformation
(TfT) Workshop. Designed for educators interested in deepening the learning experiences offered
in their classrooms and their schools, TfT is a five-day workshop that explores the principles of
transformational learning through active participation in a series of unique learning experience
and small group dialogues.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">The workshop will begin on Monday morning, June 15, 2020 and will end in the early afternoon on
Friday, June 19, 2020. Sessions will take place at The Hewitt School’s campus on the Upper East
Side of New York City.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">About the Teaching for Transformation Workshop:
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic;">The Teaching for Transformation Workshop explores the following questions:
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">What are the characteristics of deep learning (as opposed to surface and strategic
learning) and how can teachers facilitate deep learning?
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">How do skills and content work together to create transformational learning experiences?
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">What is the relationship between feedback and deep learning?
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">How can teachers effectively use transfer as a way of generating experience?
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">How does collaborative learning affect the depth of learning?
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">How can authentic, alternative assessment drive learning? </span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Programmatic Highlights:
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Session facilitators: </span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Erica Chapman</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">and </span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">D</span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">avid Dunbar</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">of the </span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">DKDK Project</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">and Maureen
Burgess, Assistant Head of School for Learning and Innovation, </span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">The Hewitt School
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Seminar with</span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Ken Bain</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">, renowned professor, educational researcher and author of </span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic;">What
the Best College Teachers Do,What the Best College Students Do </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">a</span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">nd</span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic;">Super Courses
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<span style="font-family: "arialmt"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">● </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Explore deep learning pedagogy first hand through place-based experiences that use New
York City as a text
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The TfT approach to adult learning:
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">In order to facilitate deep learning experiences for our students, we believe we must first
experience transformational pedagogy as learners. Therefore, TfT is designed not as a traditional
workshop, but as an immersive learning experience that supports workshop participants in
experiencing and articulating the principles of deep learning. To do this, we design TfT with the
following premises in mind:
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Learning is social.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Join a cohort of 15 to 18 educators from schools across the country. Consider your own beliefs
about teaching and learning by entering into a rich dialogue new colleagues working in a range of
disciplines and from a variety of schools.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Learning is active.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">TfT asks participants to engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary learning experiences on-campus
in in New York City and in seminar-style discussions. Over the course of the workshop, we move
from practice to theory and back again, all the while refining our understanding of
transformational learning.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: 700;">Learning sticks when it is connected to a “need.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Participants are selected because they are reflective practitioners interested in exploring specific
aspects of their practice. Because we bring together a dynamic cohort who are each pursuing
different lines of inquiry, no two TfT Workshops are the same; sessions are designed and
redesigned based participant interests.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">About the DKDK Project:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">After fifteen successful years co-leading the Teaching for Experience Workshop, based on the
work they did leading CITYterm (a semester program that served as a laboratory for
transformational learning with students), Erica Chapman founded the</span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">DKDK Project</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">alongside her
long-time collaborator, David Dunbar. The</span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">DKDK Project</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">is committed to refining our collective
understanding of transformational learning - what it is and how it happens - alongside like-minded
practitioners. Our goal is to support schools in creating the conditions necessary for both students
and teachers to experience transformational learning.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">About The Hewitt School:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Founded in 1920, The Hewitt School is a K-12 girls’ school located in New York City. Hewitt’s
</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">academic philosophy</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">is rooted in four pillars: presence, empathy, research, and purpose. These
pillars define Hewitt’s approach to educational innovation and effective learning.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">Application process:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">To apply for Teaching for Transformation, please complete an </span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">application</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">by March 1, 2020.
Applicants will be notified by April 1, 2020 if they have been accepted.
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<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Applicants who apply by March 1, 2020 will be notified of acceptance into the June 2020 cohort
by April 1, 2020. The cost of the workshop is $1875. Invoices will be sent out in April and are due
by May 1, 2020. The workshop fee includes breakfast and lunch each day and two group dinners,
as well as all instructional materials and activities associated with the workshop. Housing and
transportation are not included.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">For more information, contact Erica Chapman at </span><span style="font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">ericachapman@dkdkproject.org</span><span style="color: rgb(6.670000% , 33.330000% , 80.000000%); font-family: "gautami"; font-size: 11.000000pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "lato"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">.
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<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-30223252792836185382018-09-15T10:23:00.003-07:002018-09-15T10:23:56.302-07:00Static vs. Dynamic Paradigms <div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the last post, I was trying to make a case for the power of paradigms in shaping our world views, and how they might change and morph over time. When you are trying to design and execute transformation, and particularly when your goal is the cultivation of the ability to self-transform, then there are some paradigms that are more dynamic than others. What I want to explore in this post is what some of those effective paradigms might be, and which ones might not be as effective.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But first, remember what President Obama said in the last post, </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times";">"</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> He then went on to say, "I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone." </span>Obama is really picking up on one portion of the idea of American exceptionalism (see last blog post for a fuller explanation) that goes back to, among other people, Abraham Lincoln. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Probably the most eloquent and powerful exegesis of this part of the American mission in world history was Lincoln's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address">Gettysburg Address</a>. In it, Lincoln offered that America existed in world history for one major reason-- the nation had been "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln understood-- like few other people-- the continual paradoxical tension of a country devoted to both liberty and equality, but also thought that it was the American mission to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth." In other words, can a country exist as an ever-increasing democratic republic consisting of a common civic culture amongst free and equal citizens? That is a vital part of the American experiment.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In this theory, America is held together not by ancestry or geography but by ideas and shared beliefs that form a common civic culture. Lincoln remains the only President to ever pass a federal law, on July 4th 1864, encouraging immigration. While Lincoln's motive was avowedly to bring a much needed labor force to a country embroiled in a Civil War, he had long believed that the the <a href="http://objectofhistory.org/objects/extendedtour/desk/?order=12">"electric cord"</a> of the Declaration of Independence could link people from throughout the world. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Therefore, in theory, anyone can become an American, or even a hyphenated American, if they subscribe to those ideals. In my own case, after Cromwell sent my ancestors packing out of Scotland in 1650, I have a choice to be American--or even Scottish-American, if I want. But my son who lives in Scotland could never become American-Scottish because the concept doesn't exist. So it is with all immigrants to America--except it isn't. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">There is, I think, one other reason that America exists in world history and it too defines what the country's legacy will be. America's greatness, I think, will be something decided in the future--not in the past and not in the present. As we noted, the first reason for America's experiment in actually applying the political tenets put forth in the Declaration of Independence. But the other half of the American experiment is the ongoing fight to see if people from every nation, every race, every religion, every ethnicity, etc. can actually live together in a single commonwealth. Part of what I have loved about exploring the significance of New York City for the past two decades has been exactly that E.B. White wrote about in his iconic essay <i><a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/here-is-new-york">Here is New York</a></i> in 1948, "The collision and intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry." And New York's un official poet laureate, Walt Whitman, saw New York symbolizing this same tension when </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">he wrote in </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">Specimen Days</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> late in his life in 1882, “New York gives the directest proof yet of…the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate.” </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">New York City has been to the United States what America has been to the rest of the world, the great experiment in multicultural re-creation. It is, I would venture, the most important work that Americans will ever do. But the paradigms we choose to be the foundation of this work will be vital to its full success.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">For the past fifty years or so independent schools have been consciously becoming more heterogeneous. Most of those schools have been using a <u>diversity model </u>that tries to admit students that will be racially, ethnically, religiously, geographically, and economically different from one another. The commitment often takes the form of "celebrating diversity" through various affirmations of different people's cultures and differences.</span></span><br />
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But “celebrating diversity” is really only a step along the way to trying to inculcate a truly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">multi-cultural attitude</span></i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The difference between the two—a diversity model and a multi-cultural attitude—is significant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Diversity is a <u>static </u>concept that is actually just the description of a condition that exists to a greater or lesser extent.</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b> </b> The schools I have worked at have had varying degrees of diversity and various commitments to increasing it. </span>This commitment to diversity should not be an end in itself, however; it is only a foundation from which real learning can occur.<br />
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If diversity is like a noun, multiculturalism is like a verb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is dynamic, not static.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Multiculturalism depends on being willing to use higher order critical thinking skills—ferreting out premises and assumptions, imagining implications and monitoring inferences—in examining one’s own worldview as well as the worldview of people who are different than you are.</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b> </b> </span>In a multicultural world it is not enough to teach tolerance or respect (as valuable those attitudes are), you are called upon to use <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">empathy</span></i> as a critical thinking technique to try and enter someone else’s understanding.</div>
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In a way, adopting this attitude is like going to a foreign country not as a tourist, but as a traveler who is willing to go native.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this is precisely what the historian does when she visits the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To teach people to be historians is to give them the skills to empathically understand the psycho-emotional world of someone not like them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that sense, visiting the past and visiting a foreign country are very much the same. To be a good historian is to be a good traveler.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I remember one class in particular where I learned an enormous amount about how to try to use diversity as the jumping off point rather than the end game. In this particular United States History class eight of the students were from foreign countries (Turkey, Serbia, Korea, Taiwan, China, Thailand) another five were first generation immigrants (a combination of the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Israel, Puerto Rico, Germany, Rwanda, Montserrat) leaving only three students whose families have been in America for more than a generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the perfect crucible to be testing the inculcation of multiculturalism through the study of United States history.</div>
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One of our projects, for example, was to explore the conception of freedom as it has existed in different eras in American history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We used the techniques of the historian to explore “relics” from the 1770’s (the American <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Declaration of Independence</span></i> and the pamphlet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Common Sense</span></i>) and the 1960’s (the “I Have a Dream” speech and the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Easy Rider</span></i>) to see what we could discover about how Americans view freedom at different times in their history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then we each picked two “relics” that inform our own <u>personal</u> conceptions of freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> And while the three more "Americanized" students picked things that most of us would recognize, some of the other students were exploring their understandings of the writings of Ataturk, the Rwandan genocide and the "red shirt" protests in Bangkok. </span><br />
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What was learned was that each of us constructs our world differently and that we can use critical thinking skills to come to understand those constructions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>We discovered what every historian already knows—<i>that there are no such thing as facts, there are only inferences based on relics.</i></u><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><u> </u> And while creating </span>a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">window </span></i>into the American world of the 1770’s and the 1960’s, we also created a window into how other people from around the globe understand the concept of freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At that point, we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman italic"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">turned that window into a mirror</span></i> and used those same critical thinking skills to see our own premises through new lenses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> We were using diversity as a base to really explore the multicultural views that existed in the room. </span>This was not easy or comforting work necessarily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Celebrating diversity can mean holding hands in a circle singing “Kumbaya.” But practicing multiculturalism is more like attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with people who have decided to stop kidding themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We experienced some “expectation failure” where the mental models we had been using to explain our world to ourselves began to fail us. </b>For the American students many of those models involved seeing that the American conception of freedom might not be so easily exported as many of our past statesmen have desired. For the majority of the class--the international students--it was a chance to see where the American conception of freedom had come from and how it had changed over time, and think about how (or whether) they wanted to engage with those ideas.</div>
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In my career, independent schools have gone from creating positions for Diversity Coordinators to Deans of Multiculturalism to Directors of Equity and Inclusion. There are schools that are talking about adding the concept of "Justice" to that equation which would add yet another dimension. I know there is much talk all over the world about the <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-trump-immigration-race-blacks-whites-hispanics-muslims-perspec-0901-jm-20160831-column.html">failure of multiculturalism in America</a>, and even more so in Europe. <a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2016/06/29/multiculturalism-a-failed-concept-n2183873">Angela Merkel </a>declared it a failed concept as far back as 2010. But note that what she says is that the "multicultural concept" has failed. I wonder if what has happened is that we have made multiculturalism a noun, when it must always be a verb or lose its dynamism.<br />
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Different schools seem to be in different places in terms of trying to figure out which paradigm they want to have be most prominent at a given time. I can see virtues, obviously, in all of them but I guess my experience tells me that <b>I want to make sure we keep the transformational power of multicultural engagement as a process--with all the critical thinking (especially the ability to question assumptions), the use of texts as "windows and mirrors," the destruction and alteration of mental models, the practice of empathy and self-implication, <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2011/08/dialogue-and-paradox-of-experience.html">the mastery of dialogue</a> instead of debate or discussion as means of discourse, and the individual, personal engagement--as something that isn't lost.</b> The ability to affect one's own self-transformation seems to me to be one of the most valued objectives of learning, and a multicultural attitude--as a verb-- is a powerful paradigm for facilitating that growth.<br />
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Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-68015703227605993022018-09-12T06:18:00.005-07:002018-09-12T06:18:59.794-07:00The Power of Paradigms<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
In the early 1980's I was asked to write the 20th century chapters for a new edition of an American History textbook for <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Americans_A_brief_history_since_1865.html?id=4OIxiG1e9owC">Harcourt Brace</a>. The request came from one of my former high school history teachers (who gave me a D+ in his Russian History course--but that is another story) who did not have time to do the writing. My interest was piqued by two things--first, this was the book that was used by cadets at West Point and I would get the chance to write the Vietnam War chapters; in fact, my "audition essay" was about why 1968 would be seen as the pivotal year for a generation of Americans. Second, I had just discovered the concept of shifting paradigms. Thomas Kuhn in his landmark book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions </a>posited that it was the anomalies in science that triggered revolutions which took the form of the creation of entirely new paradigms or "maps" of our world view. One of his primary examples was the "Copernican Revolution" that overturned the previously held Ptolemaic idea that the earth was at the center of the solar system. But if you have any doubt about how powerful even discredited paradigms can hold on, consider that you probably often check the weather report to see what time the sun is going to "rise" or "set." And, while I confess that as I look out at the sky it does <i>appear </i>to my eyes that the sun is setting or rising, the science just doesn't seem to back up my visual experience.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjfKG00oy-EmIMY1YvdcFV_FGSbeUqWyUEtVfFGgIpqd0kEsYSyLrSc3czMEOCCJWLjzLNAIfmhAC2CcC0Y7B_KqkVcywq6Rd4zpGi7FKWFgLXZ-Zw_AE08DGboMJNZLIWxxGkmJH6ffsL/s1600/cpernican+.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjfKG00oy-EmIMY1YvdcFV_FGSbeUqWyUEtVfFGgIpqd0kEsYSyLrSc3czMEOCCJWLjzLNAIfmhAC2CcC0Y7B_KqkVcywq6Rd4zpGi7FKWFgLXZ-Zw_AE08DGboMJNZLIWxxGkmJH6ffsL/s640/cpernican+.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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This idea of a paradigm shift became the rage all over the academic world at this time, and my response to it was no exception. It was pretty clear to me what the "anomalies" were in the way American history was told then in any book: women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants (more on that in a bit). Clearly what was needed in order to have the necessary revolution in the telling of American history was a re-imagining of the narrative to overturn the present paradigm.<br />
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The reigning paradigm was one that had gained huge traction from Louis Hartz' award-winning book <i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/books/review/nobody-here-but-us-liberals.html">The Liberal Tradition in America</a> </i>(1955) -- <b><i>"</i></b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism">American exceptionalism</a>.<b><i>"</i></b> Hartz created a story that posited that America was unlike any other country before it, and it had a superior place in world history because it was a special blend of liberty, the frontier experience, democratic republicanism, political liberalism, laissez-faire capitalist economics, and individualism. As a testament to the lasting power of paradigms, this is precisely what we are fighting over every night in 2018 on FOX news and MSNBC. Remember Obama's comment in 2009 about American exceptionalism? In an interview in Europe he responded to a journalist's question, "<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> He then went on to say, "I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone." Outrage followed from many circles! </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">James Kirchick called him the Squanderer in Chief in the </span></span><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/28/opinion/oe-kirchick28" style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px;">New Republic.</a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Mitt Romney attacked full frontal in his tome, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=PDpBpo5CVB4C&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q&f=false">No Apology: The Case for American Greatness</a>, and you can tune into Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson almost any night and hear <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2010/08/the-new-battle-what-it-means-to-be-american-041273">Mike Huckabee</a> repeat what he said then, </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"He (Obama) grew up more as a globalist than an American," Huckabee said. "To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." Old paradigms are very powerful. Have you ever noticed that we are the <b><i>only</i></b> country in the world with the greatest number of "We're #1" foam fingers (often made in China) that we wave constantly for every possible reason? As I travel the world I fail to see other countries waving these ubiquitous fingers.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6MNsm1Nf7E5yXCjtB1r4MVwMvVVaLe4EmkWJYaW8gVSO21YC7BqgGFYZqHLYscELae2ffcK4PPRdNVswenl9DxxDoZ2IOsKZg8CV8DT8y9stjpnVHdLkaYTPIV5ehtBKOH4Y3I7yWCHY0/s1600/images-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6MNsm1Nf7E5yXCjtB1r4MVwMvVVaLe4EmkWJYaW8gVSO21YC7BqgGFYZqHLYscELae2ffcK4PPRdNVswenl9DxxDoZ2IOsKZg8CV8DT8y9stjpnVHdLkaYTPIV5ehtBKOH4Y3I7yWCHY0/s400/images-3.jpg" width="299" /></a></div>
<span style="text-align: center;">Given the civil rights revolution of the late 60's and early 70's, however, it was clear that this paradigm of American exceptionalism did not include large segments of the "anomalous" population in the story. In fact, it was hard to find them in the books at all. In my father's United States History book from the 1920's by renowned Columbia University Professor David Saville Muzzey, all of these people-- women, African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and many other groups--ar</span><span style="text-align: center;">e completely absent as the story is one of the relentless progress toward freedom and equality which ends with the American "making the world safe for democracy" in 1919. Muzzey's book (it should be noted that he was a Progressive for his time) </span><span style="text-align: center;">was the </span><a href="http://verbmall.blogspot.com/2007/12/coin-of-realm-redux.html" style="text-align: center;">coin of the realm</a><b style="font-style: italic; text-align: center;"> </b><span style="text-align: center;">from 1911 for the next fifty years. The best anyone was doing to change this narrative in the 1980's </span><span style="text-align: center;">was putting </span><span style="text-align: center;">a</span><span style="text-align: center;"> little added addendum </span><span style="text-align: center;">on such topics as</span><span style="text-align: center;"> the Trail of Tears at the end of chapters on Andrew Jackson and the Rise of American Democracy or about </span><a href="https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm" style="text-align: center;">Manzanar</a><span style="text-align: center;"> at the end of the World War II chapter about the vanquishing of Hitler and his racist policies. We could not figure out how to actually be Copernicus, we were just doing the equivalent of what Ptolemy did to further his theory by creating a "</span><a href="http://earthsky.org/space/what-is-retrograde-motion" style="text-align: center;">retrograde motion of Mars</a><span style="text-align: center;">" to cover the deep faults. We were essentially re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.</span><br />
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But this was not just a problem for historians. Sociologists used to say that American immigration could be summarized in a non-scatological version of the old bumper sticker that could read, "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/magazine/what-does-it-take-to-assimilate-in-america.html">Assimilation Happens</a>." The theory was that ALL groups will eventually <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/should-immigration-require-assimilation/406759/">assimilate</a>. Robert Park, a colleague of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute, developed a widely accepted paradigm for sociology (see illustration of his theory below) at the University of Chicago that paralleled Louis Hartz's consensus view of American political history. However, sociologists have recently been looking at the data and finding anomalies that have challenged Park, and led to concepts such as the "segmented assimilation" of second generation immigrants (especially in <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/651351?journalCode=ajs">New York City</a>) and even to the idea of people developing a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnationalism">transnational identity</a>" rather than assimilating. <b>New paradigms are just now being developed to explain new data and to question old assumptions. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPlOel9GBZKr0Sx7KpD2icS2OLK3FLqsfPicmwlT7xAsqA5nVa_l7WSzKs1MrFAO5mFXWfUWtafNYWT23EohMm33TnKzxj9rL0nhexsXs9dar6R91Zn15VgUU7fdHjOSprKmGL6e4bW31y/s1600/robert+Park.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPlOel9GBZKr0Sx7KpD2icS2OLK3FLqsfPicmwlT7xAsqA5nVa_l7WSzKs1MrFAO5mFXWfUWtafNYWT23EohMm33TnKzxj9rL0nhexsXs9dar6R91Zn15VgUU7fdHjOSprKmGL6e4bW31y/s400/robert+Park.png" width="400" /></a><br />
Obviously, my book did not pioneer the new paradigm either, but I did get the to explore some new metaphors that might replace the old one of the "melting pot" first created by <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in his </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Letters from an American Farmer </i>in1782. de Crevecoeur had seen the process of becoming American as the new immigrant </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Mater" style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0b0080; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Alma Mater">Alma Mater</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">. Here individuals of all nations are </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">melted</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." You can clearly see in his thinking part of what will eventually become American exceptionalism. </span><br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Neumann_Degler">Carl Degler</a> saw America as a "salad bowl," New York City mayor David Dinkins as "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/03/opinion/the-mosaic-thing.html">a grand mosaic</a>," and some people as a "<a href="http://www.startribune.com/analogies-for-america-beyond-the-melting-pot/213593491/">chocolate fondue </a>with various fruits for dipping." John F. Kennedy in his 1958 book <i>A Nation Of Immigrants</i> had also joined the food metaphor club when he wrote, <span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; letter-spacing: -0.3px;">“...a ‘typical American menu’ might include some of the following dishes: ‘Irish stew, chop suey, goulash, chile con carne, ravioli, knockwurst mit sauerkraut, Yorkshire pudding, Welsh rarebit, borscht, gefilte fish, Spanish omelette, caviar, mayonnaise, antipasto, baumkuchen, English muffins, gruyère cheese, Danish pastry, Canadian bacon, hot tamales, wienerschnitzel, petit fours, spumoni, bouillabaisse, mate, scones, Turkish coffee, minestrone, filet mignon.’ ”</span><br />
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Appetizing as many of these new paradigms might be, they do not capture the central paradox of the unofficial motto of the United States,<i> E Pluribus Unum</i>--Out of Many, One." <b>In the next blogpost I want to explore some paradigms that are central to the way we tell our national story and how they have been adopted in schools.</b><br />
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But just to give you a final example of the power of paradigms to shape our thinking, <i>E Pluribus Unum </i>was <i>never </i>the official motto of the United States and it refers <i>not</i> to the inhabitants of the country but to the joining together of the thirteen separate colonies to form one country. The official motto of the United States you can find in your pocket on any piece of currency--<i>In God We Trust</i>. The fact that we put it on our money probably matters as well.<br />
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When was that motto adopted? 1956. The year after Louis Hartz's book was published championing American exceptionalism. Always respect the power of paradigms to shape your thinking.<br />
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Coda Below: a visual paradigm mash-up of how we constantly create and re-create our own personal and national histories--<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI9JZ5hwH2s0W4dNLfwvi9xwTW58nKWiOYyP8VefiMygrlD61YWLrligL32OmqC0bu_CTiTWJOfK7Nc-IE21-fkSz9MgoEMC2L5ZfE-Beph-HGQq_ZU6uECLhDuRYLbz0ZEz1qawiojiRj/s1600/images-1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI9JZ5hwH2s0W4dNLfwvi9xwTW58nKWiOYyP8VefiMygrlD61YWLrligL32OmqC0bu_CTiTWJOfK7Nc-IE21-fkSz9MgoEMC2L5ZfE-Beph-HGQq_ZU6uECLhDuRYLbz0ZEz1qawiojiRj/s400/images-1.jpg" /></a><br />
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<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-13397852878145284152018-09-04T15:15:00.002-07:002020-01-08T08:30:03.077-08:00Fractals: One Way Students Learn to Author Their Own Learning<!--[if !mso]>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The other day a participant from this
summer's Teaching for Experience</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> workshop (now the <a href="https://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2020/01/while-i-have-been-experimenting-on.html">Teaching for Transformation workshop</a>) wrote to ask about some comments I had made about the use of fractals as a
structure for learning. I realized that while I design learning experiences
with fractals in mind all the time, I had never written anything down about
why...or how. So, here goes. </span></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">It was 1975, I was a first year teacher
and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Benoit Mandelbrot</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> had
just coined a word for some mathematical thinking that had been going on for
centuries--"fractals." All of my math teacher friends were
raving about it. A few years later the "</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAzYWM7Yf4U"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Mandelbrot
set</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">" was created (check out that link if you
want to get a sense of the simplicity involved in complexity). When I first
encountered this, it was being called "the geometry of nature...</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">in which smaller and smaller copies of a
pattern are successively nested inside each other, so that the same intricate
shapes appear no matter how much you zoom in to the whole."</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">For </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: serif , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">example--
ferns or Romanesco broccoli.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipim_VqGk2u7y3qN2QJ33EOn-dlqHJHGzZdNBTq4L7sPwD5IOPmrKLbiVTcYngYIHesJSPrj2ujwoutCX66qjrThD3nAyZ6T2piOtEWZl6P6qySs7PQLDayShb1YsmHvYkbo4G1LHG9-x4/s1600/GraphOfBarnsleyFernBig.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipim_VqGk2u7y3qN2QJ33EOn-dlqHJHGzZdNBTq4L7sPwD5IOPmrKLbiVTcYngYIHesJSPrj2ujwoutCX66qjrThD3nAyZ6T2piOtEWZl6P6qySs7PQLDayShb1YsmHvYkbo4G1LHG9-x4/s320/GraphOfBarnsleyFernBig.gif" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLG3THhnrR6QzwtWxLtRYv7GcbFhjTr0-24zDlSulyc7rSncRWUkf2qhCX3XGMeW3T6cHdtGoXnAbb3tTYFTin8uYFgFTSQxaAhoA3UEVST3BWHA47VAgPoA1KtuIe3HKHQcBr79KCXn5o/s1600/download.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLG3THhnrR6QzwtWxLtRYv7GcbFhjTr0-24zDlSulyc7rSncRWUkf2qhCX3XGMeW3T6cHdtGoXnAbb3tTYFTin8uYFgFTSQxaAhoA3UEVST3BWHA47VAgPoA1KtuIe3HKHQcBr79KCXn5o/s400/download.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Now I
confess that I have long been a structure freak who loves seeing the way
structure can be adapted to create and induce meaning. Doesn't matter if it
is </span><a href="https://letras.cabaladada.org/letras/irony_principle_structure.pdf"><span style="background: white; color: blue; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">poetry</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> or </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/51ydez/a_condensed_inverting_the_pyramid_the_history_of/"><span style="background: white; color: blue; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">soccer</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "serif" , "serif"; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Or teaching and learning. Teaching that inspires
transformational learning almost always is a battle between a series of
tensions and two of those are chaos/order and complexity/simplicity. Fractals
are a structure that allows that tension to be held and explored.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The origins of applying the idea of
"fractal learning" come from an opening-day professional- development
presentation that was given my first or second year of teaching at Deerfield in
the mid-70’s. We had someone from Harvard Education School (I can’t remember the name) who spoke to the faculty about the importance of the first class of the
year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The Harvard professor had just posited this
powerful idea that <i>everything the student is going to deeply retain
from your class will be contained in this opening class.</i> Bold claim,
right? But it is true in a number of ways. For example, there is
something about “voice” that we internalize about memorable teachers and
memorable teaching (</span><a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2012/09/mature-and-immature-teaching-self.html"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2012/09/mature-and-immature-teaching-self.html</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">). </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Perhaps it is related to Maya Angelou’s quote, “</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">I've</span><span style="background: white; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> l</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">earned that people will
forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The point is that structures are a way of making people FEEL a certain way. I
think that the structure of fractals produces and induces certain feelings that
are hugely helpful in trying to get people to learn. (So is framing- but more
on that at the end of this essay.)</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">This subsequently led to
another more fully developed idea for a workshop that incorporated a backward
design experiment starting with a teacher asking the following question, “Your
student walks into their home at the end of the first day of school and their
mother/father asks, ‘How was school today?'” Thinking just about the
class you had with that student, write out exactly what you want that student
to say in response. Now, design your class so that you end with the desired
response you just wrote out. It is a really fun workshop, and the results
have been both eye-opening and terrifying on different occasions.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">If this professor was right, then the first day of class was “high stakes testing,” for the teacher, and I
took it as an interesting challenge to see what I could create. The
other impetus for this exploration came from a University of Michigan professor
named <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/A_New_England_Town.html?id=TtnlQQAACAAJ">Ken Lockridge</a> who </span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">claimed that in order for someone to learn something you had to present the
information or concept in <u>three different contexts</u> in <u>three
different periods of time</u>. He was, to say the least, intuitively
understanding interleaving and </span><a href="http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/6/23-1"><span style="background: white; color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">retrieval practice</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that is all the rage now in cognitive
psychology.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">I went looking for structures
that would be sophisticated enough to make my students feel <i>intrigued,
comforted, confused, and challenged</i>. Quite the paradox there, but it is a great
formula for growth and development. And then I came upon fractals as an opening
structure (after trying many other structures such as immersion, spatial
disorientation, expeditions, mysteries, picaresque novels and many, many
others.)</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Fractals have certain principles—they are
heavily detailed, they are recursive, they are infinitely self-similar, they
can invoke microcosms and macrocosms so that their scale can be very small or
very big, they are patterned in their self-similarity and they can expand and
evolve in their symmetry. Those sounded like ideal characteristics<b> </b>for being introduced to something, internalizing them and then perhaps even having them make the learning more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning">transferable</a> (one of the gold standards of this kind of learning) to other domains. Thank you, Benoit Mandelbrot!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">What follows is a recent example of how that
developed in some classes at CITYterm. One of the great things about fractals
is that you can expand and contract them. One example of a fractal class from
Day One of CITYterm is an exploration of Learning Theory. But this class moves
from practice to theory, and not from theory to practice. The focus is on
the student’s exploring the concept of surface, strategic and deep learning in
their own past. It is mining the student’s own experience to uncover something
that caused a paradigm shift or the destruction and re-creation of a mental
model previously held. Expectation failure becomes part of the vocabulary of
every deep learner. Tag lines include things like:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">- “Your primary obligation is to let me know
when my teaching is getting in the way of your learning.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">- "The confusion of the DKDK zone(</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> <a href="https://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/07/importance-of-dkdk-zone.html">https://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/07/importance-of-dkdk-zone.html</a>) what you are trying to engage.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">- “Ambiguity is misunderstood to be vague, it is
not; it is multi-layered and every text you will encounter here will be
ambiguous—embrace it.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">All of these are central concepts to CITYterm.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjfj0rlmXt2F2iaPcvGmgm9PbXgKFn-K4cbBHToPaHhyphenhyphen78QMweJtcMKAUNToHv1QggyVWDaSnNuwbAtaMCKNSVJrlc5aWpl_qXppkhMXw3CHhK0at7-w0w99MUQJTnDR3rvnr9CItI0y2C/s1600/images.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjfj0rlmXt2F2iaPcvGmgm9PbXgKFn-K4cbBHToPaHhyphenhyphen78QMweJtcMKAUNToHv1QggyVWDaSnNuwbAtaMCKNSVJrlc5aWpl_qXppkhMXw3CHhK0at7-w0w99MUQJTnDR3rvnr9CItI0y2C/s320/images.png" width="270" /></a></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Structurally, this class puts students through every
form of learning they will be doing during the course of the class—a
mindfulness meditation of sounds, individual writing to discover and record,
paired sharing, group thinking through a problem, the teachers leaving the room
for an extended period of time while students are working, students writing on
the board more than the teacher, and more. The chunking of time (a key
ingredient in temporal experience) is fast with distinct pauses that signal
transitions. The feeling is that we are introducing unfamiliar concepts but
they are actually rooted in the student’s own personal experience, but the
student <i>has had no language</i> to explore them previously. The
beginning of a common language is implied in the class though not usually
explicitly stated. Pause here to think about how different this
format is from a student who goes to class and receives a cumbersome,
intimidating “course expectation sheet” that includes extensive discussion of
grading policies and rubrics and warnings about how plagiarism will get you
kicked out of school. Now think about how that student who had THAT as an
opening class would answer the question above, “How was school today?”
(No wonder, as cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has entitled one of his latest
books, </span><a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Why+Don%27t+Students+Like+School%3F%3A+A+Cognitive+Scientist+Answers+Questions+About+How+the+Mind+Works+and+What+It+Means+for+the+Classroom-p-9780470591963"><i><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Why Student’s Don’t Like School?</span></i></a><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">)</span></i></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOh5C-_kLn2hEGOXvsgn0YfTYywCf7uMETHxUuRkF-Fh7I2PLVzvfpBwlJf4t-GphHGzI9W1y30_eNRg4-tgkgx4-k4YvoCaIsckI1bVEuFlcaIDb5NIMgDXR-Q_v0Y0-N6mjrfYx67WQj/s1600/kid-3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOh5C-_kLn2hEGOXvsgn0YfTYywCf7uMETHxUuRkF-Fh7I2PLVzvfpBwlJf4t-GphHGzI9W1y30_eNRg4-tgkgx4-k4YvoCaIsckI1bVEuFlcaIDb5NIMgDXR-Q_v0Y0-N6mjrfYx67WQj/s320/kid-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">That first class is a microcosm of what will
happen for the rest of the year. But remember, you can expand fractals. There
are five separate classes that are interlinked and each of them together forms
a still larger fractal. Paired with the Learning Theory class is one that
utilizes a text by John Stilgoe from </span><a href="http://layoftheland.net/archive/art6933_mapping2010/readings/magic1.pdf"><i><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Outside Lies Magic</span></i></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">. And
that is just where students go, out of the room, out of the building, out of
their comfort zone. Classrooms are everywhere being the subtext. The goal is
the integration of learning in and out of the classroom and destruction of a
fundamental dichotomy that defines adolescent life-- “school/NOT school.”
Integrity over dichotomy—yet another key experience-based learning principle.
What we have created is the intellectual kindergarten of sustained observation
and questioning through “wondering and wandering.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The second day has two other classes paired
together that when put together make for a fractal of four individual classes.
These two classes are based on first, Collaboration, Dialogue and Deep
Listening and second, Writing in Place: exploring the relationship between our
internal and external selves as they are grounded in the space we are
inhabiting at any given moment. The first class has students in creative
collaboration create board games based on the essay by E.B. White, </span><a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/here-is-new-york"><i><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Here is New York</span></i><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Concepts such as: meta-cognition, being “in the balcony and
on the dance floor” simultaneously and re-framing previous concepts of
leadership are all the conceptual understandings that are involved in this
group activity that will repeat not just three times, as Professor Lockridge
suggested, but scores of times in vastly different contexts during the course
of the fifteen weeks students are at CITYterm.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The second class seeks to undermine the
paradigm--another example of expectation failure-- that writing is
primarily for persuasion, and by introducing Barry Lopez’s genius article
from <i>Granta</i>, “</span><a href="https://granta.com/invitation/"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">The Invitation</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">.” Students do a
piece of writing by the banks of the Hudson River (yet another form of a
classroom) that asks them to be hyper-observant and mindful, to wonder and wander,
to explore their observations through writing, as well as to detail the
relationship between their interior life and the place they are inhabiting.
There is a visceral component that relies on the concept of the “felt sense”
based on the theory that what we know most deeply we know in our
bodies. In sum, all of these classes together form a fractal that
asks them them to begin to understand that they are "<i>the authors of
their own learning."</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">And at that point, the students and faculty get
on a train in Dobbs Ferry to engage in their first trip to New York City. To do
what? A collaborative scavenger hunt/exploration that will ask everyone to
apply all of the concepts they have been introduced to in the past two days in
real time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">But before they go, students will be asked
to <u>draw</u> their version of what they know about New York City on
a piece of paper. That paper will be part of the frame for the semester that
will bring both tears and laughter as they see that drawing again during the
last class of the semester and realize how much their conception of place (and
of themselves) has transformed. And now, perhaps, they will see "infinity" in themselves and their world because they know what it feels like and they have had a little practice in it.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyPfn9GK5JDc4ksMeYxQNRP09UcigwNe5ZDKFzHYUBUmHbnAWF-KTFw46oU4-mCPZ9k3-n0Z8HEA0xYNwfR0aLgsVQGZRAGG_LyV-eSi5Qi5knOCmU_ZR3ZSqIx38GQVdezJ2cfwVEug19/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyPfn9GK5JDc4ksMeYxQNRP09UcigwNe5ZDKFzHYUBUmHbnAWF-KTFw46oU4-mCPZ9k3-n0Z8HEA0xYNwfR0aLgsVQGZRAGG_LyV-eSi5Qi5knOCmU_ZR3ZSqIx38GQVdezJ2cfwVEug19/s400/images.jpg" /></a></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-80528394608966857462015-04-26T07:57:00.003-07:002015-04-26T07:57:43.690-07:00Hannah's Exploratory Essay: Mental Models of Reading and WritingAs I was writing the last blog post what some people in the experience-based learning realm call "the world speaking" occurred. When this happens, you end up receiving Facebook messages, notes, phone calls, even letters from all kinds of people in your past and present who are thinking about the same things you are. It is an exciting time where you feel like your "availability" (see earlier<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2011/08/availability-opening-thoughts.html"> blog post</a>) is very high in a good way. In this case, colleagues, friends and former students all seemed to have something to say about the last post on shattering mental models in reading and writing. So, I thought I would share some of what I received since it furthers <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2015/04/part-two-challenge-and-support.html">the last post</a> nicely.<br />
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<a href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8pu.KTpVyEcAcnQunIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTIyamo2a3BuBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZANmOGFjMmZlZTA5OGFkNTRmNjM3NmVjM2UzZTUyMDZlYQRncG9zAzIEaXQDYmluZw--?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dmental%2Bmodels%2Bof%2Breading%2Bimages%26n%3D60%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyhs-mozilla-003%26fr2%3Dsb-top-images.search.yahoo.com%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D2&w=453&h=278&imgurl=ccit333.wikispaces.com%2Ffile%2Fview%2Fmental_models.gif%2F30269257%2F457x278%2Fmental_models.gif&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fccit333.wikispaces.com%2Fmentalmodels&size=+8.6KB&name=%3Cb%3Emental%3C%2Fb%3E_%3Cb%3Emodels%3C%2Fb%3E.gif&p=mental+models+of+reading+images&oid=f8ac2fee098ad54f6376ec3e3e5206ea&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&tt=%3Cb%3Emental%3C%2Fb%3E_%3Cb%3Emodels%3C%2Fb%3E.gif&b=0&ni=336&no=2&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=11ajjgoet&sigb=15ud19f2v&sigi=12l45qfcc&sigt=10v7i35ab&sign=10v7i35ab&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1429876248602_646" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" height="245" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1429876248602_645" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=JN.OZxtrLWEuQFtGykAKh8ufg&pid=15.1&P=0" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="400" /></a></div>
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The first piece I received was on the sad occasion of the death of my friend Lisa's favorite author, Eduardo Galeano. I first came to know him through his "history" of soccer-- <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Soccer_in_Sun_and_Shadow.html?id=86AoxDK9l2oC">Soccer in Sun and Shadow</a>--where magical realism and spirituality capture the game in a truly unique way. But Lisa's quote came from another of his books--<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=-CYdNQAACAAJ&dq=the+book+of+embraces&hl=en&sa=X&ei=96s2VbXGIYWMyATXwoDICg&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA">The Book of Embraces</a>--where Galeano explores why he looks at the world the way he does. Lisa sent me the following entry entitled <i>Celebration of the Marriage of Heart and Mind</i>:<br />
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<b>"Why does one write, if not to put one's pieces together? From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces; it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word <i>sentipensante</i>, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth."</b><br />
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Analysis dominates so unrelentingly the way we approach reading and writing in high school that is does, in fact, "chop us into pieces" or at least so it feels to many of my students. Galeano deeply understands something I have been consciously struggling with for a few years now--the integrity of the "feeling-thinking." This moment is what I was exploring in any earlier post related to the immersion theater piece<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2014/03/on-felt-experiences-rituals-saying-yes.html"> Sleep No More</a>, as well as the pre-verbal experience of "awe" that I had at <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2014/03/cultivating-awe-delicate-arch.html">Delicate Arch</a> in southern Utah.<br />
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<a class="link" href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8p4uKzpVGx4A24MunIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTIyaGtmajdiBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZAM0NDExYjBlYjA4YTRlNjdiMzA0ZjEyMjRlOTk3NmNlYQRncG9zAzQEaXQDYmluZw--?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dfeeling%2Bthinking%2Bimage%26n%3D60%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyhs-mozilla-003%26fr2%3Dsb-top-images.search.yahoo.com%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D4&w=400&h=260&imgurl=www.personality-central.com%2Fimages%2FT-F.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.personality-central.com%2Fthinking-feeling.html&size=42.7KB&name=%3Cb%3Ethinking%3C%2Fb%3E-%3Cb%3Efeeling%3C%2Fb%3E&p=feeling+thinking+image&oid=4411b0eb08a4e67b304f1224e9976cea&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&tt=%3Cb%3Ethinking%3C%2Fb%3E-%3Cb%3Efeeling%3C%2Fb%3E&b=0&ni=336&no=4&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=11omgfp9o&sigb=15lofoau8&sigi=11ajge77l&sigt=10uoc41cp&sign=10uoc41cp&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="ihover-img-wrap" style="height: 195px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="">
<img alt="thinking-feeling" height="260" id="ihover-img" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=JN.AnmYmmVqOGHCu%2bTvwMG%2bug&pid=15.1&P=0" title="thinking-feeling" width="400" />
</a></div>
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<br />
<br />
Then my friend Miranda sent me the following quote from the Mexican painter Jose Clemente Orozco that reminded her of her time at the <a href="http://www.cityterm.org/teaching-for-experience-summer-institute/index.aspx">Teaching for Experience</a> workshop the previous summer:<br />
<br />
<b>"In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a story. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus. There are many as many literary associations as spectators. One of them, when looking at a picture representing a scene of war, for example, may start thinking of murder, another of pacifism, another anatomy, another history, and so on. consequently, to write a story and to say that it is actually TOLD by a painting is wrong and untrue."</b><br />
<br />
Orozco is reminding us that the reader creates the "story" from the idea that the artist has put forth into the world. Reading is the act of creation that parallels and even mimics in its need the writer's or painter's. To deny it is to miss the point of the piece of art.<br />
<br />
<b>Reading in experience-based learning is about the kind of integration and synthesis of reader and artist and text that Galeano and Orozco are describing.</b><br />
<br />
What reading entails is one mental model we play with at CITYterm, but the other mental model we usually have to unsettle a bit with CITYterm students is the dictatorial power of the "five-paragraph, persuasive, expository essay" as the essence of their conception of writing. Paul Graham, for example, does a lovely job of introducing people to another form of essay writing in his <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html">The Age of the Essay</a>. <b>However, the real goal at CITYterm is to have students come to see writing as an act of discovery--as a technique one can rely on to understand what you think.</b> (Kind of what I use this blog for actually).<br />
<br />
This past week I received the following "exploratory essay" from my former student Hannah. She had been in the car on the way to a college visit and the following discussion with her present history teacher just wouldn't go away. So, she decided to write an exploratory essay for herself to see what she really thought. I find it not only to be a great example of using writing for discovery (and the successful transfer of it from school into someone's outside life) but also Hannah's own thinking about reading from the point of view of someone in high school. <br />
<br />
When reading becomes experience-based, what does that mean?--some thoughts from Hannah. Thank you so much for sending this on, and I look forward to many more conversations about this and other things with you.<br />
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<i><u>Is Reading Selfish? : An Exploratory Essay</u></i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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A few days ago, I sat down and had
a discussion with my history teacher. We talked a lot about reading, and having
empathy for characters and authors. Then, in a state of elation of having found
someone who understood my perspective on learning, I let something slip. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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“Reading is
selfish!” I exclaimed. There was a silence in which I immediately tried to
shrink into my chair.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Selfish?”
My teacher inquired. “How so?” <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
I muttered
something about having a class, and then hurried out of the room. The truth is,
I had no reasoning behind my statement. The blurted generalization proceeded to
follow me throughout the rest of the week, nagging at the back of my brain. Was
I wrong?</div>
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<br /></div>
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My generation
is famous for our self-obsession. We have Twitter to let everyone know what
we’re doing, Facebook to prove how many friends we have, Instagram to showcase
our privilege and photography skills, and Snapchat to show just how much we
party. Whenever we use these platforms as outlets for self-expression, we are
immediately tagged as selfish. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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“Kids these
days,” I’ve heard many an adult grumble. “So obsessed with themselves, always
texting on their phones. Why can’t they pick up a book?” My argument is as
follows: picking up a book, in some ways, is just as self-centered as posting a
selfie on Instagram. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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What I’m about to claim sounds very
blunt, but I believe it to be the truth. When we read, we don’t read to find
the author’s message. We read to find what the book means to us, and if any
author thinks otherwise they’re kidding themselves. Reading gives us an insight
into our own lives: we either love or hate characters based on what we see of ourselves
in them, we empathize with situations similar to our own, we make judgments
based on our worldviews. We each read through our own lens, and this lens
distorts everything we view based on how it relates to <i>us. </i><o:p></o:p><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
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This is why there’s no consensus
that Camus is more correct than Sartre, and no agreement on the symbolism of
Gatsby’s famous dock. It’s the reason people both despise and adore Draco
Malfoy, and explains the huge fan base of 50 Shades of Grey. We read to fill a
need, and we get different things out reading based on our lives.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Most high school English classes
teach us to read selflessly. We step back from a work and analyze the themes,
motifs, and symbols, trying to find the author’s exact purpose. I’ve actually
had teachers tell me to “try to see it in the author’s point of view, instead
of inflicting your own opinions.” Being taught to discard your judgmental lens
is discouraging to a student: the teacher is basically telling you you’ve been
reading wrong your whole life. <o:p></o:p><br />
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For this reason, many people
(myself included) start to dislike reading after they’re required to read for
school. Even if we do continue reading for pleasure, we rarely enjoy the books
we read for class as much as the ones we read for fun. This is because reading
selflessly is not how reading is naturally done, and we can’t properly distance
ourselves from the text without first understanding how we relate to it.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Writers are also selfish creatures
at their core. David Dunbar, a teacher at CITYterm, told
a story to our class. He had been talking on the phone with an author, and
asked the author how progress on the book was coming. The author responded,
“Great! I’m almost done, I just have to put in the symbols.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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David looked around, grinning, but
the class responded with only a few uncomfortable chuckles. Was it a joke? <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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“Exactly,” David said, slapping the
table. “It seems possible that he throws the symbols in at the end, because
that’s how you’re taught to learn.” <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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In fact, the author in question,
and most authors in this world, didn’t recall adding any symbols to the book.
The “symbols” found in books are created by accident, in an attempt to express the
author’s own values and beliefs. Does an author expect everyone who reads his
or her book to extract the symbolic nature of a top hat or a rainstorm? No, simply
because he or she didn’t even realize the things were symbols in the first
place. Even the all-knowing writer is selfish in his or her writing: he or she
has little regard for the meaning extracted by the readers. In fact, if a
reader comes away with some meaning that the author hadn’t intended, it can be
exciting and rewarding for the author. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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I suppose the next step is to
clarify the implications of “selfish” reading. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
In fact, I think it’s how readers are meant to read. If writers write out of
need, and write through their lens on life, then is it so wrong for readers to
do the same thing? <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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As long as I remain aware of my
biases and background while reading, experiencing a book the way <i>I </i>want to experience it makes me relate
what I read back to my own life, and thus think more about myself. Some may
call reading like this conceited, but I consider it self-reflective. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Thus, is being selfish really so
bad? The Webster definition of selfish is “having or showing concern only for
yourself and not for the needs or feelings of other people.” Selfish reading
does exactly that: readers prioritize what <i>they
</i>get out of the book before what the authors put into the book. But would
you rather have an army of students who understand exactly why Marx wrote what
he did, or a group of individuals who can argue about how Marxist values relate
(or don’t relate) to their own lives? <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m not attempting to challenge the
high school curriculum: I understand the value of analyzing a piece of writing
from the perspective of the author. I’m also not giving kids an excuse to be on
their phones all the time: reading is undoubtedly a more valuable type of
selfishness than Facebook. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Instead, I want to embrace reading
as an act of selfishness, and emphasize that maybe being “selfish” isn’t all
that bad. If everyone recognized that what they pull from a book directly
correlates with their identity, then reading selfishly would improve people’s
self-awareness, which in turn improves society in general. Suddenly, selfish
reading becomes a very selfless thing to do.</div>
</div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-32959391106808214352015-04-11T08:16:00.001-07:002018-09-08T11:36:11.833-07:00Part Two: Challenge and SupportEarl Weaver was once asked about the essence of the game of baseball. He replied, "A very simple game--<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDaFcQJC4z8">you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball</a>." But, of course, hitting a baseball has been documented as perhaps <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/ten-hardest-splash.htm">the hardest thing</a> to do in sports. There was a time after I had been teaching for awhile when I began to think that teaching could be distilled down to one phrase, "Challenge and Support." But, like Earl Weaver's remark about baseball, while true, that phrase is such an unbelievably hard thing to do in real life and get it right.<br />
<br />
When you are engaged in teaching in an experience-based model, however, there are <i>very particular</i> kinds of challenges (and supports) that bring the greatest possible transformation in the learner. <b>Put most simply, if you can effect a "paradigm shift" in someone's world-view, then you have added a level of learning that will be transformational. </b>If you do it enough times, you may have the good fortune to have that person become someone who deeply understands and can effect their own self-transformation on a repeated basis. <b>In other words, the very act of learning becomes a form of ACTIVISM that the learner uses to effect change in themselves and their world. Sometimes I think of it as service learning on yourself. </b>If you get interested in the psychology behind this, <a href="http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2013/05/robert-kegan-further-reaches-of-adult.html">Bob Kegan</a> has been my go-to person since his book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Self-Problem-Process-Development/dp/0674272315/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428418610&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=the+evolviong+self">The Evolving Self</a></i> transformed my own teaching in the early 1980's.<br />
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<a href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8p4uSSxV8AUAU78unIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTIzMDhwNjk3BHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZANmYTFlMmU1MmJjMmY3NThiODgyYTQwNDEzNTRlZTFkNQRncG9zAzQxBGl0A2Jpbmc-?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3F_adv_prop%3Dimage%26va%3Dparadigm%2Bchanges%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D41&w=455&h=467&imgurl=antipatternzoo.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F09%2Fparadigmshift.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fantipatternzoo.com%2Fnoprinciple%2F&size=17.1KB&name=paradigmshift&p=paradigm+changes&oid=fa1e2e52bc2f758b882a4041354ee1d5&fr2=&fr=&tt=paradigmshift&b=0&ni=216&no=41&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=1160vp9l0&sigb=13t02qjt1&sigi=11s61t5ao&sigt=10dmltfh8&sign=10dmltfh8&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1428966775145_655" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" class="" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1428966775145_1287" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=JN.TCpvK3hmfVLrkainc9ItzA&pid=15.1&P=0" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" /></a> </div>
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But the book that really informed my thinking about paradigms (see the <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-paradigm-shifts-induced-by.html">earlier blog post </a>about the paradigm shifts induced by the experience of <i>awe</i>) was one I discovered while teaching a History of Science class: Thomas Kuhn's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</a>. Kuhn was the person who had me first seeking out the valuable "anomalies" in my own teaching that would be the key to my own craft evolving. In addition he got me to realize that if I could effect a "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution">Copernican Revolution"</a> in my student's world view, then I would be creating experience-based learning. So, you may ask, how do</div>
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we do this?</div>
<br />
Like Copernicus, you first have to have deeply understand the world the way your students (or, in his case, Ptolemy) do. They have mental models of how the world of learning works and you have to know what they know--and HOW they know it. Years ago, I was on a federal government grant team studying "effective teacher behavior." I ended up staking my claim in that study that the number one teacher ability for effectiveness was "cognitive empathy." However, Kierkegaard probably put it best in his journal when he wrote: <br />
<br />
"If real success is to attend the effort to bring a person to a
definite position, one must first of all take pains to find him where he
is and begin there. This is the secret of the art of helping
others.... <b>In order to help another effectively I must understand more
than he - yet first of all surely I must understand what he understands.
If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to
him.</b> Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the
learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he
understands and in the way he understands it..."<br />
<br />
The act of cognitive empathy is perhaps the foundational feature of the experience-based teacher; it is what I think should be the backbone of teacher development. If you understand the world the way your student understands it, then you can design curriculum where the student's model will "fail" or not be sufficient to fit the situation they find themselves in. It is this "expectation failure" then triggers experience-based learning.<br />
<br />
This epistemological "split-screen" teaching where you are conscious of not only the content of what is being learned, but also the cognitive skills that are being taught, is what allows the teacher to identify the "mental models" a student is unconsciously using. What I have found so encouraging for the future of experience-based learning <i>is that this kind of thinking/learning/teaching is available to all teachers--those new to the classroom and those with years of experience.</i><br />
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<a href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8pY9HSRVLDoAX_SJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTIzNWthb2EyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZANkMzRjZmVjNTlhYjYxNTY5YTAzYTU2NmQ3NmRjMjliOARncG9zAzY5BGl0A2Jpbmc-?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dexpectation%2Bfailure%2Bcartoon%26norw%3D1%26n%3D60%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyhs-mozilla-003%26fr2%3Dsp-qrw-corr-top%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26nost%3D1%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D69&w=320&h=320&imgurl=3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_eQPy-yli67M%2FSrq4CVDZCyI%2FAAAAAAAAACM%2Fl7ysaZdORsM%2Fs320%2FBad%252520Planning.gif&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdalmoresolutions.blogspot.com%2F&size=40.6KB&name=Donald+Munro+-+Dalmore+Solutions&p=expectation+failure+cartoon&oid=d34cfec59ab61569a03a566d76dc29b8&fr2=sp-qrw-corr-top&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&tt=Donald+Munro+-+Dalmore+Solutions&b=61&ni=280&no=69&ts=&tab=organic&norw=1&sigr=115jrklms&sigb=15qrr07ih&sigi=12sutuq7e&sigt=1100fkb74&sign=1100fkb74&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&fr2=sp-qrw-corr-top&norw=1&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1428431227244_1146" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" class="" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1428431227244_3236" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=HN.608011281929407466&pid=15.1&P=0" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
But let me give you two concrete examples--one that effects the student's disposition and one that effects their worldview.<br />
<br />
On the first day classes at CITYterm students have read an excerpt about "wondering and wandering" by Harvard professor <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/outside-lies-magic-john-r-stilgoe/1103809031?ean=9780802719058">John Stilgoe</a>. The first day of class is actually a fabulous time to design something based on re-arranging the mental models that students come in with; it is prime time because you will have already established mental models in the students by the end of the first class. CITYterm students arrive having done the reading (maybe the night before) and ready to "discuss" the reading. Some of them are also waiting for an "expectations" sheet to be handed out including plagiarism and grading policies. But after a few minutes identifying the basic concepts of the reading the students and teachers head outside for the rest of the hour to actually DO what Stilgoe is writing about. They literally spend the rest of the hour making increasingly detailed observations about everything on the campus and generating questions and hypotheses about those observations. I know this sounds simple, but it has surprised me how memorable and defining this day becomes for students in their attitude about where learning occurs. What the faculty is trying to do is to have the physically felt experience of what they will do all semester in New York City. <br />
<br />
The second example of expectation failure is a bit more complicated but is one of the most powerful Copernican Revolutions (paradigm shifts) that can happen where students learn to read in an experience-based way. (For those of you who follow this blog, I have discussed this in an earlier <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2012/10/teaching-experience-based-reading-how.html">blog post</a> about the act of reading.) The other day in class I was telling the story recounted in an earlier <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-problem-with-way-we-teach-reading.html">post</a> about the author Junot Diaz responding to my query as to where he was on his latest book project--<b>"Oh, yes I am just about done. All I have to do is go back and put in the symbols."</b> However, when I tell students this story virtually none of them ever laugh. In fact, one of them remarked, "that makes a lot of sense because it would be more efficient." That is because his quip fits their mental model of reading as being decoding books for symbols--cue the "green light on the end of Daisy's dock" from <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. <br />
<br />
The other mental model that students generally hold is that the author's intention is what solely controls the creation of a piece of fiction. Therefore, they are stunned when an author whose book they are reading tells them that an observation of theirs makes total sense and is very interesting but that "they (the author) did not intend that and had never seen that in the text." Students are befuddled by that until they come to realize that, as the poet Cassie Pruyn writes, "a text is a living beast."<br />
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<a href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8p6vNSRVbwgAS0WJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTIzZGxjY3JlBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZANjMTZiMDhmNDQzZjYxY2E0MTMyODI0OGFmMjIxNDQ0OARncG9zAzM2BGl0A2Jpbmc-?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dsymbols%2Bin%2Bthe%2Bgreat%2Bgatsby%2Bcartoon%26n%3D60%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyhs-mozilla-003%26fr2%3Dsb-top-images.search.yahoo.com%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D36&w=800&h=600&imgurl=shrdocs.com%2Fpars_docs%2Frefs%2F31%2F30582%2Fimg8.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsafeguardquotes.info%2Ftag%2Fsparknotes-the-great-gatsby-themes-motifs-symbols&size=63.4KB&name=%3Cb%3EThe+Great+Gatsby%3C%2Fb%3E+%3Cb%3ESymbols%3C%2Fb%3E+The+Green+Light+and+the+Color+Green&p=symbols+in+the+great+gatsby+cartoon&oid=c16b08f443f61ca41328248af2214448&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&tt=%3Cb%3EThe+Great+Gatsby%3C%2Fb%3E+%3Cb%3ESymbols%3C%2Fb%3E+The+Green+Light+and+the+Color+Green&b=0&ni=280&no=36&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=12h4ao1bc&sigb=16385eao7&sigi=11cumitjv&sigt=12a6gu99b&sign=12a6gu99b&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1428437485980_648" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" class="" height="300" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1428437485980_2305" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=HN.608056293189423039&pid=15.1&P=0" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="400" /></a></div>
A large part of learning how to read in an experience-based way at
CITYterm is designing experiences for students that challenge previously
held mental models and force them to create new paradigms for
themselves. Many of them, for example, come to a new model that believes
that "to read a book is to author it." That shift changes the act of
reading for them forever--it is truly Copernican. It also allows them to actively create their own personal understandings of what reading really is. I have found that once you get people comfortable and embracing self-transformation they become enormously creative at it.<br />
<br />
There is an enormous amount of creativity and joy that goes into empathizing with students, coming to understand the mental models they hold, and then designing curriculum that forces paradigmatic shifts in thinking. It is when you provide <u>this particular kind of challenge</u> that experience-based learning becomes transformational. <b>It also has the effect of bonding the faculty in wonderful collaborative design efforts that evince and even create a sense of common purpose in what school is supposed to be about--creating students that are their own teachers and teachers who are constantly learning about learning. </b><br />
<br />
But what of support? To be sure, some of the most essential support comes in the form of personal and psycho-emotional awareness of what the student is going through. And there is a great deal written about to be effective in this manner. In the next blog post, however, I will explore what "cognitive supports" might be most helpful in these moments pf paradigmatic, transformational change.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-64068583964449692582015-03-29T11:49:00.004-07:002015-04-22T05:46:36.914-07:00Part One (b): Designing with Both/And'sOne of the key ideas behind any planning for experience-based learning is to identify the cognitive skills that are embedded in the text you are exploring. <b>In other words, when you are teaching something you are never just teaching subject matter, you are also teaching a specific cognitive skill. The role of the experience-based teacher is to be transparent and precise in identifying this skill. </b>Experience-based learning, as <a href="http://visible-learning.org/">John Hattie's</a> seminal study shows, dramatically increases its effect when teachers are transparent in making the learning process visible to students.<br />
<br />
For example, I might choose to teach a short story like Irwin Shaw's "<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=6RjwbLghxG8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Irwin+Shaw%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4HcVVYPBHsfroAS0g4HwDA&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">The 80 Yard Run</a>" not only for its thematic content but also because it is a great text to practice the basic analytic, literary critical skills of reading. On the other hand, if you are trying to practice reading intuitively then a great story to use is Delmore Schwartz's <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=9yAbYPySgxIC&pg=PP5&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false">"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"</a> because it resists the use of rational, analytic skills precisely because it is a dream. Practicing intuitive techniques for reading is a much more rewarding skill to practice on this text. Looking at the subject you are teaching and locating the cognitive skill at its base is a fascinating exploration and best done with your fellow teachers.<br />
<br />
Finland, in fact, has just gone one level better by <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finland-schools-subjects-are-out-and-topics-are-in-as-country-reforms-its-education-system-10123911.html">ceasing to teach "subjects"</a> but, rather, teaching interdisciplinary topics based on skill development. As the Helsinki education manager posited, “We really need a rethinking of education and a redesigning of our
system, so it prepares our children for the future with <u><b>the skills</b></u> that
are needed for today and tomorrow."<br />
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Guy Claxton has termed this kind of teaching <a href="http://www.coetail.com/magsfaber/2015/02/12/split-screen-teaching/">"split-screen"</a> because it has the content on one side of the teaching equation and skills on the other side. <b>Because experience-based learning is always about "doing," there has to be an identifiable skill that is being practiced.</b> (As a side note--"short term cognitive recall" is too often the skill being practiced by students and it is not a particularly engaging one if you are trying to induce an experience in the student.</div>
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Teaching "design" is a much more complicated enterprise than simply identifying a skill needed to interpret a short story, but it is an incredibly rewarding one. The important thing to remember is that there are skills at the foundation of the act of designing something that can be identified and their practice is what often makes learning experience-based.<br />
<br />
So, what is an example of an assignment that we do at CITYterm that
has an explicit design element in it? Once you have watched and listened to something that CITYterm students designed, we can unpack what the skills were that they were practicing.<br />
<br />
One of my favorites, which has
undergone a decade of iterations over the past decade, is the Skyscraper Visual Essay. Here
is the assignment: "Choose a skyscraper in New York City and, with a
group of four other people, design a visual essay of 15-18 images.
You may set your essay to music, if you like."<br />
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The premise is that as short stories have authors, so buildings have
architects. Each is exploring a particular problem in their medium and
attempting to create a product that engenders an experience. The
assignment has been scaffolded by already practicing reading stories and
buildings with parallel techniques. The student's objective (although I use this in the <a href="http://www.cityterm.org/teaching-for-experience-summer-institute/index.aspx">Teaching for Experience summer workshops with teachers</a> as well) is to design an essay
that is visual (and auditory) that conveys your experience of the
building.</div>
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<a class="link" href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8pyZlzdV22MAOzMunIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTIzbjM4NXQwBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZAMxYzUwOWQ2OTE3NzUyNzEzNzcyYzA5ZjdlNDQ2ZmQ2ZARncG9zAzM3BGl0A2Jpbmc-?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dflatiron%2Bbuilding%2Bpictures%26n%3D60%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyhs-mozilla-003%26fr2%3Dsb-top-images.search.yahoo.com%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D37&w=512&h=694&imgurl=3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-O1h9-D2IZMg%2FTqWYx9k3xnI%2FAAAAAAAAVv8%2Fj6Zd_WJo1IY%2Fs1600%2FThe%2BFlatiron%2BBuilding%2Bcirca%2B1903.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vintag.es%2F2011%2F10%2Fflatiron-building.html&size=89.8KB&name=The+%3Cb%3EFlatiron%3C%2Fb%3E+%3Cb%3EBuilding%3C%2Fb%3E+circa+1903%2C+with+Broadway+on+the+left+and+Fifth+...&p=flatiron+building+pictures&oid=1c509d6917752713772c09f7e446fd6d&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&tt=The+%3Cb%3EFlatiron%3C%2Fb%3E+%3Cb%3EBuilding%3C%2Fb%3E+circa+1903%2C+with+Broadway+on+the+left+and+Fifth+...&b=0&ni=280&no=37&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=11js8fihu&sigb=15qi0chdp&sigi=13d4a48cc&sigt=12n1cbecr&sign=12n1cbecr&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&fr=yhs-mozilla-003&fr2=sb-top-images.search.yahoo.com&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="ihover-img-wrap" style="height: 300px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="">
<img alt="The Flatiron Building circa 1903, with Broadway on the left and Fifth ..." height="400" id="ihover-img" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=JN.ZaQwtCsICUZ5ORzSi1xGVw&pid=15.1&P=0" title="The Flatiron Building circa 1903, with Broadway on the left and Fifth ..." width="294" />
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Click on this link below to watch one recent
group's essay on the Flatiron Building (it takes about 2:30 minutes, but
you get to listen to Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World.")<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/c3mu8r7s6p9ujj7/flatiron%20%EF%80%A0essay%EF%80%A0.mp4?dl=0">Flatiron Visual Essay</a><br />
<br />
There
is a lot going on in the creation of that essay: group
collaboration dynamics, the feeling of being an author making choices and the
imposition of an order on a large mass of data. This group's author's feedback
write-up revealed an enormous number of iterations in the creation of
the piece--particularly the "four image conclusion" that ends with them
using the reflection of the Flatiron in the sunglasses to position both themselves and
the building in history--pretty inventive.<br />
<br />
The process of designing this essay targets three big "Both/And's" (that was what I posited at the end of the <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2015/03/introduction-what-do-experience-based.html">last blog post</a>
as a crucial idea in making something an experience) that is one of
the keys to why adding a design element helps to make learning
experience-based. <br />
<br />
First, <b>Analysis/Synthesis</b><br />
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Designing
something requires that the author(s) be both analytic and synthetic in
the same project. You have to be adept at both taking things apart and seeing the component parts of the text you are exploring. But then you also have to be able to take those pieces and re-arrange them in a coherent order that produces an inventive synthesis. And, as Howard Gardner notes, “Alas, under ordinary circumstances, the synthesizing mind
achieves little formal attention during school years.” Experimenting with different ways to synthesize things has been something <a href="http://www.cityterm.org/teaching-for-experience-summer-institute/index.aspx">CITYterm</a> has been exploring for seven or eight years. </div>
<br />
Second, <b>Convergence/Divergence</b><br />
<br />
Designing
something means that you have to converge down onto a solution at the
end of your exploration. <b>Designing something ultimately demands it, but students get a great deal of practicing the speed, accuracy and logic of deriving a single, best answer. They get much less practice embracing the ambiguity of seeing multi-layered possible answers to a problem. </b>Divergent thinking, the ability to come up a large number of possible answers to a problem has been <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Divergent-Thinking-Creativity-Research-Series/dp/0893917168/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1TGJ55KVSEV5DTE0RQRC">generally recognized</a> as being one of the most important tools in creativity.<br />
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Third, <b>Routine Experts/Adaptive Experts</b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_expertise">Research</a>
has shown that "routine experts" are people who accept the technical
limits of the problem and get things done as efficiently as possible. Routine experts can be highly sophisticated in the way they work and they can often get better and better at solving problems over time. But the accompanying feeling is often one of fulfilling an assignment--no matter how complicated.<br />
<br />
"Adaptive experts," however, tolerate ambiguity for longer periods of
time and are more willing to stretch their knowledge and abilities when
they are designing something. Assignments that have a modicum of "designed confusion" incorporated into them so that the person completing them has to make <u>choices</u> that make them feel like they are "authoring" something that is new and original will be more likely to emerge as "adaptive experts." Interestingly, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/opinion/skills-in-flux.html?emc=eta1">David Brooks</a> in the <i>New York Times</i> was just citing having the flexibility to define problems in insightful ways as one of the key 21st Century skills. People with a high adaptive expertise have this capacity to a much higher degree that routine learners--no matter how expert the latter are.<br />
<br />
<b>My
experience as a teacher has been that schools I have taught in are very good at teaching
the first part of each of these pairs--analysis, convergence and
routine--but less attention gets paid to the second half of the
pair--synthesis, divergence and adaptation.</b><br />
<br />
Experience-based
learning depends on using design as a fundamental concept
precisely because it combines all of these three crucial pairs in a
symbiotic manner. In other words, assignments become experiences more
often--and even transformational ones--when let students both <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2015/03/part-one-designing-experience.html">dance and choreograph (see previous blog post)</a> in the same assignment.<br />
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One of the most rewarding things about experience-based learning is that it has such far reaching adaptations and applications. It is important to remember, and to communicate to students, that the real extension of this kind of learning is the way we design our lives, not just our school
assignments.<br />
<br />
For me, one of the great "Both/And's" is need/love. Where
design takes into account both need and love, then you have something
very special in terms of unity and integrity. Look at your own life and see if it isn't true in the way you have designed the way you live on a daily basis.<br />
<br />
So I
leave the final word to one of my favorite "designers" (he was strict in his parameters,
by the way, once referring to free verse poetry as "like playing tennis
without a net")--Robert Frost. <br />
<br />
<br />
This excerpt is from the end of <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/poems/tramps.htm">Two Tramps in Mud Time</a>--<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: verdana, arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana, arial; font-size: x-small;">But yield who will to their separation,
<br />My object in living is to unite
<br />My avocation and my vocation
<br />As my two eyes make one in sight.
<br /><b>Only where love and need are one,
</b><br />And the work is play for mortal stakes,
<br />Is the deed ever really done
<br />For Heaven and the future's sakes. </span></span>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-91069924787144419892015-03-26T07:55:00.002-07:002015-04-22T05:40:17.991-07:00Part One (a): Designing Experience<span style="font-family: 'Cambria'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">I hear and I forget,<br />
I see and I remember, </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Cambria'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">I do and I understand. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Cambria'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">--Confucius c. 450BC
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At its most basic level, experience-based learning is almost always defined as "learning by doing." While that is helpful in a broad way because it does mean that learning has to be active, it doesn't make the fine distinctions necessary to plan activities that are experience-based. John Dewey addressed this early on in his exploration of <i>Experience and Education</i>, "The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative... It is not enough to insist upon the necessity of experience, nor even of activity in experience. Everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had."<br />
<br />
So, what influences the "quality of the experience?" <b>One of the most important questions I ask when I start to plan experience-based activities is this, "Where and when in this activity is the student going to be <i>designing something</i> that is crucial to the learning that I want to occur?"</b><br />
<br />
My first understanding of the importance of design came only a few years into teaching when I was coming up with a lesson plan to teach the 1929 Stock Market Crash to my United States History class. I remember this vividly because the son of the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange was in the class and the class was happening on Parent's Day! My normal style of teaching had been a kind of "Socratic dialogue" in the true sense of that term. By that I mean Socrates always had an agenda (or least the way Plato portrays him) and he, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx22TyCge7w">Professor Kingsfield</a> from <i>The Paper Chase</i> in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFRBWq2puw">last blog post</a>, always had a question that played off the answer the student had just given. After you have been teaching the same material for a few years, you can get pretty good at anticipating what the answers might be that students will put forth, and you can be ready with the next question that will push their thinking in the direction you want it to go. <br />
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The class went wonderfully well, I thought, until later that afternoon as I was replaying it in my head I had a startling epiphany--sure I had been pushing the student's thinking in some ways but wasn't it remarkable that they always ended up exactly where I did at the bottom of that yellow legal sheet of paper that I had in front of me with my notes on it? This was the beginning of one of many pedagogical "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul">dark nights of the soul</a>" that have haunted my teaching life. <b>This one centered upon the realization that, in metaphoric form, while I was very good at teaching my students how to "dance," I should actually also be teaching them to be "choreographers." What I had done, unwittingly, was to take all the design aspects out of the learning that was happening.</b> And the more I looked, the more I saw how I had been doing that not only in the way I taught class, but the way I created assignments, the way I gave feedback and the way I interacted with them. I was a good "dance teacher;" but I realized there was something more that I needed to add. Most people are able to learn to dance to someone else's choreography - think of those Arthur Murray dance centers all over the country, classes for everyone who wants to learn how to waltz, fox trot or tango in the way they've been taught forever. But how many dancers actually learn to create their own choreographed dances of steps, swings, jigs, twists, shimmies, and moonwalks that expand the definition of learning? <b>You increase the intensity and the density of experience-based learning by not only teaching students how to dance but encouraging them to be choreographers as well.</b><br />
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My second glimpse into this area happened not long after that class. It began innocently enough when I was picking my own children up from elementary school. I asked them, "How was school today?" And what I got back was a litany of events about art projects they were creating, math puzzles they were playing with, games they created during recess, plays they were writing to be performed and on and on with great enthusiasm. That evening I got a call from an excited former student who wanted to talk about how she was creating the schedule for her sophomore year of college and how the courses she was choosing all fit together and led toward an internship she was pursuing in the summer that would dovetail with a two-pronged junior year abroad in Scotland and Argentina. <br />
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In short, my own children and my former students were eagerly designing things and couldn't get enough of "school." But when I talked to my own students they sounded like the inverse of that position--they were not talking about what they were "doing;" they were talking about "what was being done TO them." Why this feeling exists is a very complicated question, but one reason I realized was that high school students didn't get to <u>design</u> very much. As I ask that question even today--"What was the last thing you designed?"--I usually get blank stares and the mystified retort, "You mean, in school?" The most frequent answers involve "extra-curricular" activities or CD mixes for people they are dating. I also found myself much more willing to create soccer practices and even coach competitive games where my players <i>actively made choices</i> on the field rather then follow prearranged steps. But it took me years to have the confidence to give up that kind of control in my classroom.<br />
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<b>The issue of design is so delicately but firmly tied into student motivation, disposition and sense of purpose that I have found it to be one of the single most influential facets of creating experience-based learning.</b> In recent years, there has been a recognition of the importance of design most notably through the concept of design thinking. The IDEO global consultancy headed by <a href="http://www.ideo.com/people/tim-brown">Tim Brown</a> has brought an awareness to this idea as a key not only to innovation but to transformation of organizations. The <a href="http://www.k12lab.org/">d.school at Stanford University</a> has also been instrumental in getting the concept of design front and center in all grades K-12. And Dean Kamen's Robotics competition, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Robotics_Competition">FIRST</a>, has been gaining momentum every year since its inception in the mid-1990's. So, I think there is little doubt that question, <b>"Where and when in this activity is the student going to be <i>designing something</i> that is crucial to the learning that I want to occur?" </b>is one that will gain increasing attention in all classrooms.<br />
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So, what is an example of an assignment that we do at CITYterm that has an explicit design element in it? That will be the topic of the next blog post where we can examine some of the fundamental design principles at the heart of how to give students the chance not only to be accomplished dancers but also inventive choreographers. </div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-22376292955666304402015-03-21T16:26:00.002-07:002015-04-22T05:55:58.448-07:00Introduction: What Do Experience-based Teachers Think About Learning?A couple of weeks ago some friends of mine who work in a school in Chicago that I had recently visited called to ask for the best articles I knew of that defined experience-based learning. At first, I was ready to unearth all the wonderful books and articles I had collected over the years--<a href="http://www.amazon.com/John-Dewey/e/B001IQZCBM/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1">John Dewey</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget">Jean Piaget</a>,<a href="http://www.amazon.com/David-A.-Kolb/e/B001IR3HJK/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_3?qid=1426977691&sr=1-3"> David Kolb</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Lewin">Kurt Lewin</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Jerome+Bruner&search-alias=books&text=Jerome+Bruner&sort=relevancerank">Jerome Bruner</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=kurt+hahn&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Akurt+hahn">Kurt Hahn</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=lev+vygotsky&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Alev+vygotsky">LevVygotsky,</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=kieran+egan&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Akieran+egan">Kieran Egan</a> and even the recent spate of cognitive psychologists (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=a9_sc_1?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3Ahoward+gardner&keywords=howard+gardner&ie=UTF8&qid=1426979026">Howard Gardner</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=robert+sternberg&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Arobert+sternberg">Robert Sternberg</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=david+perkins">David Perkins</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Daniel-T.-Willingham/e/B001IO9SZ0/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1426977562&sr=1-1">Daniel Willingham</a>) and researchers (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ken+bain&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Aken+bain">Ken Bain</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=guy+claxton&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Aguy+claxton">Guy Claxton</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=john+hattie&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Ajohn+hattie">John Hattie</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=robert+kegan&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Arobert+kegan">Robert Kegan</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=carol+dweck&sprefix=carol+dweck%2Cstripbooks%2C132&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Acarol+dweck">Carol Dweck</a>) that I have spent the past twenty years or more reading--when I realized that I really didn't have anything I could pass on that was written from the teacher's point of view that tried to summarize a definition of experience-based learning. I had a lot of theory-to-practice articles and a voluminous set of studies of best practices, but not really anything that pinpointed what they wanted. I tend to be someone who works practice to theory so it was fun to think of answering their request. <b>Their request was straightforward--"Can you identify FIVE major questions that are at the foundation of the way you plan for learning to be experience-based?"</b><br />
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I should start, however, by saying that I got interested in this whole topic because when I first started teaching I was around teachers (and have continued to be around them throughout my career) whose students were walking out of their classrooms having had, for lack of a better word, an "experience." The kind of learning that was happening was deeper, more lasting, more "mind-blowing." All I knew was that was not how I would describe what was happening in MY classroom, and I was curious about <u>how</u> that was happening in those rooms next door to mine. <b>So, experience-based learning, for me, has always been about the learning itself, not just about the place it is happening.</b> It can happen anywhere at anytime if the conditions are right in the environment and in the learner; I just happen to be lucky enough at <a href="http://www.cityterm.org/">CITYterm</a> to be able to radically experiment with seeing how many places it happens and what variations are possible.<br />
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However, before I start to unpack the five questions I ask myself when I am trying to be a teacher that practices experience-based learning, it is important to define what learning is as richly as possible. Take a minute right now and answer that question yourself. What characterizes learning in your class? Describe it in all its forms. And how do you determine when learning has occurred? Maybe give yourself a couple of examples from the past month or so.</div>
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Around the time that CITYterm started, <a href="http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED173371">research</a> conducted in Sweden in the 1970's was becoming more talked about in the States. Ference Marton and Roger Saljo were able to identify two different student approaches to learning. Those engaged in "surface learning" focused on parts of what they were reading so that they could memorize material that they believed they would be questioned on later.<br />
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For the past couple decades I have been asking high school students the following question, "Assume that I am the cognitive skill God and that I can grant you one cognitive skill of your choice that you feel will allow you to be at the top of your class, what skill would you like me to give you?" In most cases, I have to explain a bit about what a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition">cognitive skill</a> is and give examples of how cognition works in classrooms.<b> But, after that, the vast majority of them give the same answer, and it is rarely the same answer that their teachers give--"photographic memory." </b>Take a moment and think about the possible reasons for their answer. There are many possibilities, I think, but since there are no teachers that I know who focus a great deal on teaching that skill, it is kidn of alarming and depressing that this answer persists. Now do an <i>assessment inventory</i> of an individual student's tests, quizzes, labs and so forth for the past two weeks. After you collect the student's assessments, try to identify the cognitive skills that would have been most necessary to perform at the top of the class and see what you find.<br />
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It didn't take Swedish researchers to discover this, however. When I was doing my first teaching internship in a summer school in 1973 (which I was only doing because I got to run the soccer program and was pretty sure the <u>only</u> thing I did <u>not</u> want to do was be a teacher), a movie came out that captivated my attention--<i>The Paper Chase</i>. The movie, in some ways, is an embodiment of all the different kinds of approaches to learning that we are exploring here. Take a moment and watch the following clip starting at 6:27 to 9:10: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFRBWq2puw">Paper Chase. </a><br />
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Professor Kingsfield humiliates Mr. Brooks for his prodigious "surface learning" abilities but identifies another kind of learning--"strategic learning"-- that he explains earlier in the film:<br />
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"Why don’t I just give you a lecture? You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. Because through my questions
you learn to teach yourselves.... Questioning and answering. At times you
may feel that you have found the correct answer. I assure you that this
is a total delusion on your part. You will never find the correct, absolute,
and final answer. In my classroom, there is always another question—another
question to follow your answer. . . . <b>You come in here with a skull full
of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer."</b><br />
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This is an important and sophisticated approach to learning that all of the schools I have taught in do extremely well. In fact, they do it so well that their graduates often return from the first year of college announcing, essentially, that they do not have to "do any work" in order to achieve excellent grades. This occurance is another kind of concern, but one I will explore later. This kind of training of minds--the ability to manipulate data, ideas, numbers, equations, images--is much more, as Professor Kingsfield suggests, than just having a surface knowledge.<br />
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For the Swedish researchers, however, "surface learning" was in contrast to the group engaged in "deep learning"
who were characterized as being in an active search for meaning. In the movie, this approach is what the main character, appropriately named Mr. HART, comes to learn by the end of the film. Ference Marton and Roger Saljo saw "<b>deep learning as interpreting and understanding reality
in a different way. Learning involves comprehending
the world by re-interpreting knowledge.</b>" What I have been doing for a long time now is talking to people (mostly my own students but not only that age group) when it appears to me they are engaged in a "deep learning" approach to their learning. Listed below are what I hear people exhibiting or overtly saying when they are taking that approach.<br />
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"Deep" learners have a relationship with what they are learning that can be identified by:<br />
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1) a quest for <i>understanding</i> more than knowledge<br />
2) developing multiple perspectives<br />
3) being meta-cognitive (constantly thinking about their own thinking)<br />
4) relating what they are learning to previous experiences<br />
5) being hyper-aware of assumptions that are the foundation of what they are learning<br />
6) feeling that they were the "authors of their own learning"<br />
7) identifying their motivation as primarily intrinsic<br />
8) its deeply personal nature<br />
9) seeking out feedback on how they are learning<br />
10) a courage that invites paradigm shifts in themselves that are transformational<br />
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Personally, I think we all need all three of these approaches (surface, strategic, deep) at
different times and they are all valuable. I have a surface level
approach to driving my car, a strategic approach to following the daily
news, and a deep approach to thinking about teaching and learning. Think
this through for yourself: when do you use each of these different
approaches? And ask your students when they do. <b>Fostering a transparency about a teacher's beliefs about the nature of learning always helps students feel more in control of <i>their own</i> learning and makes the relationship with the teacher more collaborative and less adversarial or collusive.</b><br />
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Lastly Experience-based learning almost always appears to be a "both/and" proposition, not an "either/or" choice. There is not one approach to learning that we use all the time, there are many. In this way the dichotomies that are often posited by nay-sayers -- such as "skills versus content" and "transmission versus construction" -- are red herrings in that they force a choice that leads one away from making learning experiential.<br />
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One of my hypotheses about experience-based learning is that it may well require the creation of a specific environment that is peculiarly conducive to development and growth. <b>Almost all of my five major foundations of "experience-based" learning (Design, Challenge and Support, Collaboration, Feedback and Transfer) contain challenges to the way we operate as schools right now.</b> <br />
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<a href="https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrB8pJqCAtV3jYA0OeJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTI0aWw4OTUyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZAM1YmM4YmZjODhiYjE3ZjUwZTgzNjc2OGM4OGNjZDVkYQRncG9zAzI1NwRpdANiaW5n?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Ddeep%2Blearning%26fr2%3Dpiv-web%26hsimp%3Dyhs-003%26hspart%3Dmozilla%26nost%3D1%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D257&w=600&h=700&imgurl=sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk%2Fi%2Fkeep-calm-it-s-deep-learning.png&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk%2Fp%2Fkeep-calm-it-s-deep-learning%2F&size=33.6KB&name=KEEP+CALM+IT%26%2339%3BS+%3Cb%3EDEEP+LEARNING%3C%2Fb%3E&p=deep+learning&oid=5bc8bfc88bb17f50e836768c88ccd5da&fr2=piv-web&fr=&tt=KEEP+CALM+IT%26%2339%3BS+%3Cb%3EDEEP+LEARNING%3C%2Fb%3E&b=241&ni=21&no=257&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=121j4q9p9&sigb=13t6o3lkm&sigi=11s988mtk&sigt=1179biif9&sign=1179biif9&.crumb=SkkAJF8gGHS&fr2=piv-web&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1426787453219_3462" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" class="" height="400" id="yui_3_5_1_1_1426787453219_4319" src="https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=HN.608045688903172132&pid=15.1&P=0" style="height: 168px; margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; width: 144px;" width="342" /></a></div>
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<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-57248581430935685212014-08-06T13:25:00.002-07:002014-08-06T13:25:56.935-07:00Teaching for Experience: The Symposium June 23-25, 2015This is a little different as a blog post, but I wanted to let people who follow the blog that we have finally set up a Symposium for next summer--June 23-25 2015. You are all invited. We have tried to keep the cost as low as possible, and I am working on foundation grants to get financial aid for scholarships. I don't want any one to miss this opportunity.<br />
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What follows below is the first page of the website:<br />
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<a href="http://www.cityterm.org/tfe">www.cityterm.org/tfe</a><br />
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Put that address in and you will get a page where you can see who is on the <a href="http://www.cityterm.org/teaching-for-experience-summer-institute/workshops-schedule/keynote-panel/index.aspx">panel of Heads of School </a>and who is presenting what kind of<a href="http://www.cityterm.org/teaching-for-experience-summer-institute/workshops-schedule/workshops/index.aspx"> workshop</a> (just click on all the links on the left hand side of the page for all the information). There is also a page for registration. It is all still a work in progress--so, if you have ideas for anything at all, write us at tfe@cityterm.org.<br />
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And, spread the word, OK? This is going to be a lot of fun and learning!<br />
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<a href="http://www.cityterm.org/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/TFE_Postcards.pdf">
<img alt="QUESTIONS?: tfe@cityterm.org | 914.479.6502" src="http://www.cityterm.org/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/thumb/xlg-TFE_Postcard2.jpg" />
</a>
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<dd style="text-align: center;"><b>QUESTIONS?: tfe@cityterm.org | 914.479.6502</b>
</dd></dl>
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<u><b>What is TFE?</b></u><br />
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<br />
Almost twenty years ago, CITYterm
at the Masters School was created as a laboratory to investigate how and why
some types of learning become transformational for both students and teachers.
In the same year, Swedish researchers published one of the first pieces of
research confirming that there was a distinction amongst “deep,
transformational learning,” “strategic learning,” and “surface learning.”<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>For the past two decades, CITYterm’s mission
has been to explore the cognitive and affective bases for why certain kinds of teaching
and learning become transformational experiences. At this point in time, over a
thousand students have experienced the CITYterm program, and are exploring how
they can be the “authors of their own learning” in their lives.<br />
<br />
A decade ago, the week-long workshop, <i>Teaching for Experience</i>,
was established to share some CITYterm’s findings with teachers from
around the world, but also to have those teachers create a deep learning
experience for themselves. Each summer 15 to 18 teachers attend <i>Teaching for Experience</i>
in order to make that happen. But now over 150 teachers have come to
Dobbs Ferry for the week and returned to their home schools to implement
the ideas that were fostered during the workshop.<br />
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<br />
<u><b><span class="lead-in">Who's Invited? </span></b></u><br />
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<span style="color: black;">Every summer there has been a call
to come together again to take the next step in furthering those ideas. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Next summer, from June 23-25, we are creating
a network of teachers from all over the world who are interested in creating
transformative learning in their classrooms and in effecting institutional
change in their schools</b>. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">We will have scores of TFE alums returning,
but we are also inviting ALL teachers and administrators who want to create a
world-wide network of like-minded educators to join us. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This gathering is not only a reunion, it’s a symposium
for EVERYONE engaged in this kind of work, a way to connect with each other and
build a network that supports and enlivens our work moving forward.</span>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-91973481128855804082014-07-21T09:15:00.006-07:002014-07-21T09:15:56.973-07:00Walking the City of Serendipity<div class="MsoNormal">
The American Historical Association asked me to write a couple of essays about walking New York City for their annual meeting coming up later this year. I decided I would try and look at what makes New York City different as a place to walk. So, part of the audience for this one is professional historians who are visiting New York City. I think what I learned from writing is actually something about how hard it is to get to a mindset that will inculcate serendipity. It seems to me that it is about holding the tension between being "mindful and meta" at the same time. I am not sure I am ready to explain that to a body of professional historians, however. But maybe they can feel it walking New York?<br />
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</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Walking
the City of Serendipity</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Walt Whitman is
New York’s patron saint of serendipity largely because of his capacity for
embracing others empathically. As a result, the city never ceased to yield up
surprises and discoveries that thrilled and enchanted him. Whitman changed the
tradition of walking New York City forever when he made Gotham and its denizens
his own. <b>Whitman loved New York City—its crowds, its multicultural aspect, its
physical landscape. And he embraced it all with a kind of cosmic empathy that
embraced both immanence and transcendence.</b> When you walk the streets of New
York you will be walking in the footsteps of Walt Whitman. If there were still
omnibuses roaring around Dean Man’s Curve on the southwest corner of Union
Square, you could have seen Walt hanging onto the back of the bus reciting his
epic poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song of Myself</i> to the
crowds.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But one place you
should go to truly understand what New York meant to Whitman is the Fulton
Ferry Landing under the Brooklyn Bridge. There, carved into the metallic
railing that surrounds the pier, will be the words of the poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crossing Brooklyn Ferry</i>.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It avails not, neither
time or place—distance avails not:</i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I am with you, you men
and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;</i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I project myself—also
I return—I am with you, know how it is.</i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Just as you feel when
you look on the river and sky, so I felt;</i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Just as any of you is
one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd…</i></div>
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<b>Whitman’s capacity for empathy was so vast that he even knew
you were coming to Gotham, and the prospect of bumping into you on the streets
delighted him.</b><br />
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<a class="rg_l" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F1%2F1c%2FWalt_Whitman%2C_steel_engraving%2C_July_1854.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWalt_Whitman&h=3052&w=2329&tbnid=augy-ySqBs97dM%3A&zoom=1&docid=_l8GBB6JDo3pXM&ei=MhjMU5nSBMSjyASTwYKIBA&tbm=isch&client=firefox-a&ved=0CEEQMygOMA4&iact=rc&uact=3&dur=2174&page=2&start=12&ndsp=20" style="height: 187px; left: 0px; width: 139px;"><img class="rg_i" data-src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcThuXMGVArwxhOxzQjcn-8HoWDGbODIxNRLkiz4kZZbrDCxkWO0Pg" data-sz="f" height="400" name="augy-ySqBs97dM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcThuXMGVArwxhOxzQjcn-8HoWDGbODIxNRLkiz4kZZbrDCxkWO0Pg" style="margin-left: -2px; margin-right: -2px; margin-top: 0px;" width="305" /></a><br />
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You will have a
chance in the next few days to experience and practice one the great delights
of being in New York City—serendipity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But what is serendipity, exactly? <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Serendipity” –the
word-- was actually invented by Sir Horace Walpole in a letter on January 28th,
1754. He wrote, “This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call
Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell
you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the
derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called
"</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Princes_of_Serendip"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Three Princes of Serendip</span></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">;" as their Highnesses travelled, <b><span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of
things which they were not in quest of.”</span></b> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because of its size, density and that it is the most multi-cultural city
in the world (in one Queens high school there are over 125 languages being
spoken right now), the streets and neighborhoods of Gotham will provide you
with an abundance of chances to “make discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of
things you were not in quest of.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But just as the King of Serendip hired a tutor to teach his princely
sons how to cultivate this skill, we can learn from the long tradition of past
“walkers of the city” who honed their skill of serendipity on the streets of
Manhattan. Probably the first thing you need to know is HOW to look at the city
streets. For this, let’s turn to one of finest chroniclers of city life, A. J.
Liebling, “The finest thing about New York City, I think, is that it is like
one of those complicated Renaissance clocks where on one level an allegorical
marionette pops out to mark the day of the week, on another a skeleton death
bangs the quarter hour with his scythe, and on a third the Twelve Apostles do a
cakewalk. The variety of the sideshow distracts one’s attention from the
advance of the hour hand.” <b>New York is a city of microcosms that is best
approached by invoking the old Zen Buddhist aphorism, “Everything changes,
everything is connected, pay attention.” </b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because New York is in constant flux, you have to add a level of time to
your understanding of how to really see New York (this will come in handy since
you are probably an historian). As the novelist Colson Whitehead says, “</span>No
matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you
say, ‘That used to be Munsey's’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.’ That
before the Internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the
mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was
there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New Yorkers fell in love with walking
streets because they were fascinated by the “flaneurs” of Paris and London in
the 1820’s and 1830’s—Charles Dickens chief amongst them. Dickens was so
admired that his visit to the city in 1842 was celebrated by a ball attended by
3000 people that was described as “the greatest affair of modern times.”
Dickens himself remarked on the bustle of Broadway (though he abhorred the pigs
that ran wild across his path) but found the Five Points slum “all that is
loathsome, drooping and decayed.” </div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Native authors
were also obsessed with observing and describing the extremes of street life in
the city’s neighborhoods. Ned Buntline and George Foster were two of the first
professional flaneurs who both exposed and weirdly celebrated this polarized city.
Their kind of walking the streets led to elaborate descriptions of the gawdy,
meretricious life style of the wealthy on Fifth Avenue to the Bowery with its
“deep, dark, sullen ocean of poverty, crime and despair.” Matthew Hale Smith
summarized what these flaneurs saw as the very nature of the city in his expose
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunshine and Shadow in New York</i> when
he wrote, “Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness; the
repositories of piety and wickedness; the home of the best and worst of our
race; holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.”</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dickens,
Buntline, Foster, however, were all flaneurs who made their observations with
an aloofness, almost a voyeurism that established a firm distance between them
and the people on the street. <b>They were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>ON</u></i>
the streets, but they were not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>OF</u></i>
the streets. You might take something from their courage of going places that
seem to push them out of their comfort zones, but you will need to kindle your
Whitman-esque attitude if you are to really become a “Prince of Serendip.”</b></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Returning to Manhattan across the Brooklyn
Bridge from the Ferry Landing you will need to give yourself over to the
rhythms and the characters of the streets as the modern day Whitman Vivian
Gornick does in her essay, “On the Street: Nobody Watches, Everyone Performs,”</div>
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“The day is brilliant: asphalt glimmers, people knife
through the crowd, buildings look cut out against a rare blue sky. The sidewalk
is mobbed, the sound of the traffic deafening. I walk slowly, and people hit
against me. Within a mile my pace quickens, my eyes relax, my ears clear out.
Here and there, a face, a body, a gesture separates itself from the endlessly
advancing crowd, attracts my reviving attention. I begin to hear the city, and
feel its presence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two men in their
twenties, think and well dressed, brush past me, one saying rapidly to the
other, ‘You gotta give her credit. She made herself out of nothing. And I mean
nothing.’ I laugh and lose my rhythm. Excuse me, my fault, beg your
pardon….Cars honk, trucks screech, lights change… My shoulders straighten, my
stride lengthens. The misery in my chest begins to dissolve out. The city is
opening itself to my. I feel myself enfolded in the embrace of the crowded
street, its heedless expressiveness the only invitation I need not to feel shut
out.”</div>
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<a class="rg_l" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nycroads.com%2Fcrossings%2Fbrooklyn%2Fimg17.gif&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nycroads.com%2Fcrossings%2Fbrooklyn%2F&h=270&w=480&tbnid=25ONnseBckTiyM%3A&zoom=1&docid=wbpKD3-3t6lCqM&ei=jtvKU9STG86GyATOwYD4Bg&tbm=isch&client=firefox-a&ved=0CF4QMyglMCU&iact=rc&uact=3&dur=712&page=4&start=33&ndsp=12" style="height: 168px; left: 0px; width: 300px;"><img class="rg_i" data-src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRzbvD9ZMzDzEAMeSK2qS4HkVc8gxldb-Q1e98rmonGUYPihHDZ" data-sz="f" height="358" name="25ONnseBckTiyM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRzbvD9ZMzDzEAMeSK2qS4HkVc8gxldb-Q1e98rmonGUYPihHDZ" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="640" /></a><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As you walk the
streets and investigate the neighborhoods of New York City during this
conference remember—“Everything changes, everything is connected, pay
attention.” If you do, I guarantee you will make serendipitous discoveries of
things you were not in search of. And if you get really good at it—like Whitman
or Gornick—you might even discover things about yourself in the other people
walking the streets around you.<br />
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Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-30557007823849941712014-04-03T05:51:00.002-07:002014-04-03T05:51:11.810-07:00An Exercise in Self-Implication: Does the Type of Thinking I Teach Foster the Experience of Awe?In what was yet another serendipitous moment of the world speaking to me, I
returned home from my trek across the Southwest where I tried to see if I could experience awe every day, to find a series of links sent to me by my friend Greg. It appears there is a fair amount of interest in the academic
community to try to test for the effects that the experience of awe
produces, and particularly in the way it might change people's outlook
on the world. My own experience had led me to conclude that it does, indeed, change one's outlook, but I was curious to see how far the claims of researchers were going to go.<br />
<br />
Dacher Keltner from the Greater Good Science Center has done <a href="http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/an_awesome_way_to_make_kids_less_self_absorbed">studies </a>that
have shown "awe to be a potentially powerful emotion that might help
students develop empathy" by reorganizing the participants sense of self
to feel more connected to the world. The speculation is that awe might
make adolescents less narcissistic, and self-absorbed. I am always interested in these kinds of studies, but, I confess, I often wonder about some of the claims. If one group looks at a T-Rex skeleton and another looks down a long hallway, can you really claim that one group "feels part of a larger whole" because of that experience?<br />
<br />
<a class="rg_l" data-ved="0CMQBEIQcMCM" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.weirdexperiments.com%2F%2FBilder%252520Das%252520neue%252520Buch%252520der%252520verrueckten%252520Experimente%2FSkinner%252520Cartoon.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.weirdexperiments.com%2F&h=640&w=542&tbnid=_udNBsxJpCnagM%3A&zoom=1&docid=55pC1hJOCYm_iM&ei=PTo8U8rWDsW70gGR7oGwBw&tbm=isch&client=firefox-a&ved=0CMQBEIQcMCM&iact=rc&dur=299&page=3&start=25&ndsp=15" style="height: 183px; left: 0px; width: 143px;"><img class="rg_i" data-src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlDIP1IPqd-7Tc2hyXaEha5F7B4wzEyNEVxUA6ndihZOq1EXlR0g" data-sz="f" height="400" name="_udNBsxJpCnagM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlDIP1IPqd-7Tc2hyXaEha5F7B4wzEyNEVxUA6ndihZOq1EXlR0g" style="margin-left: -12px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="339" /></a><br />
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<br />
In another recent study, researchers Melanie Rudd and Jennifer Aaker of the Stanford University,
and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/make-time-for-awe/282245/">examined whether awe can expand perceptions of time availability</a>. They found that
participants "who felt awe, relative to other emotions, felt they had
more time available, were less impatient, were more willing to volunteer
their time to help others, and more strongly preferred experiences over
material goods." Can you really claim that listening to Beethoven's <i>"Ode to Joy"</i> will make people change that much on the spot? Still, I find it interesting that these kinds of studies are being developed.<br />
<br />
There have been people, however, since the 1990's who have been promoting the experience of awe as an important "habit of mind." <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT0vXFP_RYI">Art Costa</a> is probably the most well known of these thinkers, and he developed a list of <a href="http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108008.aspx">habits of mind</a> that "are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolution to which are not immediately apparent." This list was his response to Jean Piaget's belief that the "principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generation have done...Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." "Responding with wonderment and awe" or <a href="http://www.habitsofmind.org/content/searching-wonderment-and-awe">"searching for wonderment and awe"</a> has been one of Costa's 16 habits of mind from the very beginning of his work.<br />
<br />
These past few months I have been on a subcommittee for "21st Century Learning Skills" as part of a strategic plan to be implemented at the school where I teach. Costa's work on habits of mind seemed to me to be an important and missing addition to the debate over "skills acquisition." But I think there is a missing precursor before we can even begin to talk about skills or dispositions. The work of Carol Dweck, popularized in her book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/0345472322/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395775086&sr=8-1&keywords=carol+dweck">Mindset</a></i>, has shown that we must consider how our particular mindset creates a certain culture of learning. <b>In
short, this kind of 21st century learning is not done through curriculum design,
training regimen or program addition, it is done by <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/whats-your-learning-disposition-how-to-foster-students-mindsets/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29">creating a culture</a>
that supports it. If we do not understand the present culture of learning we have created, we will reduce our chances of making the necessary adaptive changes.</b><br />
<br />
So, I set myself a little thought
experiment of trying to describe the foundational beliefs about the nature of thinking that the schools I have been involved in inculcate. Could I describe the kind of thinking that the learning culture of my school embraced most whole-heartedly? What is the cognitive bias of that culture of
learning? <br />
<br />
To my aid came the work of Guy
Claxton in his wonderfully engaging book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hare-Brain-Tortoise-Mind-Intelligence/dp/0060955414/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395777092&sr=8-1&keywords=guy+claxton"><i>Hare Brain/Tortoise Mind</i></a>
which champions the "slow ways of thinking." In the beginning of the
book, Claxton describes a certain kind of thinking he calls "d-mode" --- "d" standing for either
default or deliberation. Many of the facets of what Claxton describes as
the basis for "d-mode" overlap with the following list that I created.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a class="rg_l" data-ved="0CLkCEIQcMEI" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.glasbergen.com%2Fwp-content%2Fgallery%2Fteen%2Fedu01.gif&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.glasbergen.com%2F%3Fcount%3D3%26s%3Dschool&h=468&w=589&tbnid=H-RCB-sCwzh02M%3A&zoom=1&docid=FnK0ZOVhpOzimM&ei=QvA6U9ycLqXW0QHxxoDACw&tbm=isch&client=firefox-a&ved=0CLkCEIQcMEI&iact=rc&dur=573&page=6&start=58&ndsp=13" style="height: 149px; left: 0px; width: 176px;"><img class="rg_i" data-src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQCTmTUgzDvPO__IMfwCGnwNZVG6p82zVc3dzOaoesiNrC5uyhx" data-sz="f" height="316" name="H-RCB-sCwzh02M:" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQCTmTUgzDvPO__IMfwCGnwNZVG6p82zVc3dzOaoesiNrC5uyhx" style="margin-left: -6px; margin-right: -5px; margin-top: 0px;" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<u><b>What is the innate bias in the dominant type of thinking that I have been engaged in since I was in school?</b></u><br />
<br />
The culture of learning that I am part of-<br />
<br />
--favors the analytic; is primarily concerned with taking things apart and naming them<br />
--believes in knowledge that is rational and is distrustful of knowledge from other sources <br />
--is much more concerned with answers than with questions (though states the opposite)<br />
--tends to reward thought that <u>converges</u> down toward an answer<br />
--values short-term memory and recall very highly<br />
--gets nervous when there is no answer or multiple answers <br />
--values proof over exploration<br />
--values structure that is straightforward and easily comprehended<br />
--values explanation (sometimes at the expense of detailed observation) <br />
--rewards ability to explain precisely why a particular action is chosen<br />
--requires rational justification and evidence for any proposal (but is skeptical of hunches)<br />
--rewards the ability to sound like a critic and make judgments<br />
--favors exposition and persuasion over exploration and insight <br />
--judges the value of the thinking by its demonstrated utility <br />
--praises clarity and coherence (shies away from and/or fears confusion)<br />
--values quickness, urgency, time pressure and production<br />
--values production over presence (but has graduation speakers urge people to value presence) <br />
--creates lists as a form of organization so that items can be "ticked off" <br />
--values punctuality and segments time into confined boxes <br />
--values effort and being busy (and gets nervous when people are playful)<br />
--rewards precision and direction (sometimes tolerates the implicit but is skeptical about indirection)<br />
--loves generalizations, rules, principles, universals, traditions and familiar routines<br />
--gravitates towards patterns and is made nervous by anomalies <br />
--likes to categorize things, label them and put them in order<br />
--values talking and being in control over listening and being messy/undisciplined <br />
--prefers "concrete" precise definition to metaphor or analogy<br />
--is biased towards thinking that is <i><u>not</u></i> conscious of itself (devalues meta-cognition)<br />
--sees intelligence as a personal possession and some people have more of it than others<br />
--values knowledge over understanding<br />
--sees all of the above as exhibition of mastery and control<br />
<br />
<br />
I
am not suggesting that this "d-mode" way of thinking is not useful or helpful.
Quite the opposite, in fact. In certain situations, they are the
cornerstones of good decision-making, well-being and future learning.<br />
<br />
However, I am suggesting that this way of thinking was not useful for me at Delicate Arch (though it was vital in <i><u>getting</u></i> me to Delicate Arch). <br />
<br />
<b>The kind of thinking described above does not put us in the present moment, it does not connect us to
others, it does not connect us to our surroundings; it may not even
enhance our well-being in terms of how we feel about ourselves.</b><br />
<br />
The
kind of thinking described above puts us in control of things, and it
may create a particular sense of "self" that the experience of awe actually
strips away. Awe challenges us in fierce and wonderful ways to
reconfigure what we thought we knew and to create new mental models that
we can assimilate into a new way of looking at the world. Awe
demands that you put aside the self you have created in order to
control the world, and to create a new self that is connected to the
world in very different ways.<br />
<br />
<b>One of the things that I noticed while I was on the committee for 21st century skills was that all the literature seemed to echo exactly what people on the committee wanted to include in their lists-- creativity, ingenuity, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, originality, vision, design thinking...and so on. What my experiences with awe have led me to wonder is whether or not the type of thinking that we have committed ourselves to in schools is actually not sufficient to foster any of these skills. In some cases, they may even undermine and counteract those skills. </b><br />
<br />
(And I do confess that I have begun to wonder whether what we are trapped in is like an old <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIJBUZm1HoY">"Bert and I" Maine humor routine</a> about how to get to Millinocket--you can't get there from here.)<br />
<br />
What, then, would the type of thinking look like that would foster this kind of experience and the nurturing of those skills? That would seem to be worthy of another blog entry. It would also give me some clues as to what I think the strategic plan for my school ought to include.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-31709020240108221862014-03-30T07:08:00.000-07:002014-03-30T07:08:15.359-07:00The Paradigm Shifts Induced by the Experience of AweIn the weeks after <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2014/03/cultivating-awe-delicate-arch.html">visiting Delicate Arch </a>outside of Moab, Utah, my wife, Nicki, and I continued our trek through virtually every National Park in southern Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Each day became a new adventure into a different landscape. Dead Horse State Park, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce, Zion, the Grand Canyon, Sedona and Red Rocks, the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert and finishing way under ground with the bats in Carlsbad Caverns. <br />
<br />
Many questions arose for me around this concept of "awe." <i><b> </b></i>Would the repetition of the experience of awe become what Woody Allen depicted with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isrd7E5nzIQ">the Orgasmatron</a> in his movie <i>Sleeper</i>? Was there something about the way we exist as human beings that makes us more or less prone to the experience of awe? Finally, is the experience of awe tied to what we are as human beings and is it something that <u>should</u> come naturally on a regular basis?<br />
<br />
But before I start to explore that topic, I think I should offer some kind of definition of what I think awe is--or what it does. As I have read about awe, there area multitude of definitions over such a long period of time that it is a difficult word for people to agree on. Awe is often a kind of linguistic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes">Procrustean bed </a>that gets chopped up in order to make it fit the situation. Sometimes it is associated with wonder, or reverence, or surprise, or fear, or the apprehension of the sublime. There is even <a href="http://www.amazon.com/AWE-Delights-Dangers-Eleventh-Emotion/dp/0757305857">a campaign</a> afoot to certify it as the eleventh scientifically accepted emotion. One definition that I like is used by <a href="http://www.voicesofyouth.org/en/posts/-we-have-a-responsibility-to-awe--2">Jason Silva</a> from National Geographic which he has taken from a Stanford University study-- <u><b>"an experience of such perceptual vastness you
literally have to reconfigure your <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model">mental models</a> of the world to
assimilate it."</b></u> Obviously, he is using vastness because nature is his primary text, but what makes a particular impression on me is that he understands that one of the prime ways that an event becomes an experience is precisely because it, "reconfigures your mental models." I also think awe changes the person who experiences it in potentially deep and dramatic ways; that is why it is so important for experience-based learning. <br />
<br />
<a class="rg_l" data-ved="0CHEQhBwwCg" href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.learning-knowledge.com%2Fworld%2Fparadigmshift.gif&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.learning-knowledge.com%2Fworld.html&h=200&w=606&tbnid=wxV84M3ycZYCkM%3A&zoom=1&docid=XyAwMe-6NiO3iM&ei=0scxU8SMPITk0QG-3ICwCw&tbm=isch&ved=0CHEQhBwwCg&iact=rc&dur=946&page=2&start=8&ndsp=12" style="height: 129px; left: 0px; width: 391px;"><img class="rg_i" data-src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR_xdx_LodxRcQInW2kTg3r-Jw7riEDIDIDdmTEhXyN7nNBrCd6" data-sz="f" height="211" name="wxV84M3ycZYCkM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR_xdx_LodxRcQInW2kTg3r-Jw7riEDIDIDdmTEhXyN7nNBrCd6" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="640" /></a><br />
<br />
I first came across the concept of awe when I was studying in Divinity School where, as you might guess, awe is a regular topic of conversation at morning coffee. In fact, my first <a href="http://www.trinity.utoronto.ca/library_archives/theological_resources/theological_guides/exegetical.html">exegetical essay</a> in grad school was an exegesis of Genesis 28:16 where Jacob has a dream in which God speaks to him at Bethel-- "When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, "Surely the Lord is in this place, <i>and I was not aware of it.</i>" He was afraid and said, "How<u><i> awesome</i></u> is this place! This is none other than the house of God: this is the gate of heaven." Two important qualities of awe emerge in this short passage. First, <i>considered through the lens of a paradigm shift, </i>awe often is perceived by and taps <u>the unconscious</u>; in Jacob's case it is portrayed by his awakening from a dream. But when he acknowledges with his rational mind what has happened, he is changed. He was asleep, and now he is awake: he has become aware. His experience of awe changes his perception of his physical place in the world, but also it changes his understanding of himself. The experience of awe is a challenge to the world as he presently constructs it and Jacob is, rightly, "afraid." <b>The first paradigm shift that awe engenders is a re-working of the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious. The unconscious takes a firm hold on the steering wheel at the beginning of the journey of awe.</b><br />
<br />
As second major paradigm shift that also occurs involves our conception of time. The Greeks had two words for time that capture the transfer of what happens in the experience of awe--<i>chronos</i> and <i>kairos</i>. <i>Chronos</i> is just what it sounds like, chronology. It is "clock time," and it can be represented by a number. In short, it is the measurement of time. <i>Kairos</i>, however, is a different conception of time. It is "event time." If <i>chronos</i> is quantitative, then <i>kairos</i> is qualitative. <i>Chronos</i> tells you it is March 28, 2014; <i>kairos</i> tells you it was the day you first went for a walk after surgery. <b><i>Chronos</i> is a number for measurement; <i>kairos</i> is an experience of an event that requires interpretation.</b><b><br /></b><br />
<br />
An experience of awe is always an experience of time as <i>kairos</i>. Time doesn't actually stand still in this sense as you are swept up completely in the moment. It is really that the sense of <i>chronos</i> that dominates out daily life is replaced for a period of time with a sense of <i>kairos</i>. Digital watches embody <i>chronos</i>. Each number that flips by is an exact measurement of that moment. I remember when digital watches came into existence and replaced the analog watch that I refused to wear them. It took me a long time to realize that a clock with arms that sweeps through a circle is time in a closer relationship to kairos. That kind of time has a relationship to something outside itself--it is part of an hour. <b>The question this all raises for me is this--is it true that the more chronological we become, the further away we place ourselves from the capacity for awe? Clocks are the enemy of awe; digital clocks are the enemy doubling down.</b> (There is one exception, in my experience, that is actually quite captivating--<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNBe5OSbMv0">watch the Millennium Clock Tower in the National Museum of Scotland</a>.)<br />
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<br />
Perhaps the most powerful paradigm shift that seems to be part of the experience of awe is the way it often transforms your relationship to your world and to yourself. My experience at Delicate Arch (and at Weeping Rock in Zion National Park, deep underground in the Green Lake Room at Carlsbad Caverns and with myriad other natural wonders) was such an entrance into <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/07/importance-of-dkdk-zone.html">the DKDK zone </a>because there was a novel, surprising vastness (though that could be internal as much as external) that forced me to stop and think about my relationship to what I was seeing. Different people have different emotional reactions to those kinds of situation; awe is never experienced the same way for people. <b>For some it might be amazement, humility, fear, reverence or fascination, but the effect is that you are jerked out of your conscious self in chronological time and forced to <i>implicate </i>yourself in the sense that you are brought into an intimate connection. </b>In short, the way you thought the world was constructed has been challenged and there is a forced, involuntary re-evaluation; and this can happen anywhere at anytime.<br />
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<br />
I am presently taking a <a href="https://courses.edx.org/courses/HarvardX/GSE1x/2014_JFMA/wiki/GSE1x/">MOOC course</a> at Harvard X (with around 10,000 other people from all over the world) with Professor Bob Kegan entitled <i>Unlocking Immunity to Change</i>. The course explores a technique that counteracts the impulse to stasis as well as exploring why we fail when we try to change. One of the first things you have to do is choose a goal that is "adaptive" rather than "technical." An adaptive goal is one that requires a change in mindset, attitude or beliefs; it is a goal that cannot be solved with a technical fix. Another way to look at this is that technical problems can be solved with your reasoning skills and through thinking. Adaptive problems require changing people's beliefs and are addressed with your stomach or your heart. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to achieve more space would be a technical problem. Coming to the realization that you need to get off the Titanic would be adaptive. <br />
<br />
The other part of my goal setting for this course requires me answering four questions: Is it true for you? Is there room for improvement? How important is it to you? Does it implicate you? It is this last question that has generated a number of questions from the class participants. Many of them want to know exactly what "implicates" means. In fact, the instructors warn, "A common mistake is people choosing a goal that does not implicate them." It is like they are choosing a goal that has a <i>chronos</i> solution, when, in fact, they need to look to <i>kairos</i> for some answers. Sometimes I think that self-implication may be the most difficult experience-based learning concept to explain.<br />
<br />
My goal for the course is, "How can I increase the number of times I experience awe?" After you set your goal, the course instructors ask for a rationale for why you have chosen this goal. I just wrote in a quote from Albert Einstein that I love, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It
is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and
science. <b>He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer
wonder and stand <i>rapt in awe</i>, is as good as dead.” </b>As they say in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9J4RsUwMh4">Fiddler on the Roof-- TO LIFE</a>!<br />
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</style> Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-4517762462910574882014-03-23T10:08:00.001-07:002014-03-23T10:08:30.787-07:00Cultivating Awe @ Delicate ArchI spent two months this fall seeing how many times I could put myself in a place where I might experience "awe." I had a hunch that what we sometimes call "awe" might be something that had gone underdeveloped in thinking about why and how we can make some experiences deep, memorable and life-changing. Usually when I hear the word "awesome" in contemporary culture, it seems to be a cheapened and even falsified use of the word. Somewhere in the early 1980's with the creation of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Official-Preppy-Handbook-Lisa-Birnbach/dp/0894801406"><i>Official Preppy Handbook</i> </a>and the rise of the film <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_%28film%29">Valley Girl</a></i>, the word became synonymous with "totally" and often followed by "dude." In fact, sometimes I think that people use that word as a kind of wish fulfillment; we actually desire and even need awe in our lives, but we don't actually have the feeling very often.<br />
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Awe, I am speculating, may be like other concepts--<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/06/empathy-and-imelda-marcos-protocol.html">empathy</a>, <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/07/princes-of-serendip.html">serendipity</a>, <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2011/08/availability-opening-thoughts.html">availability</a>--that I have explored earlier in this blog. <b>These are all ideas that, if we can identify and develop them as skills and dispositions, might give us increasing number of ways to make our learning truly transformative and life-long.</b><br />
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I began outside of Moab, Utah at a place I had read of long ago in Edward Abbey's book, <i>Desert Solitaire</i>--Delicate Arch in Arches National Monument. To get there you follow the well-worn path up sandstone and sliprock for about two miles enduring a number of false "peaks" and promises that make you think you're there. The actual arch appears alarmingly quickly as you follow up a narrow path that hugs the side of a cliff. But then the path ends, the cliff wall recedes and ....<br />
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One of the things that I have discovered about awe is that it is highly subjective. One person might look at this scene and become mute and immobile; another person give it a glance and check their I-phone. When I arrived there was only one other person there, a man from Seattle who had been to this spot decades before and had returned because he had just retired and was not sure what to do with the rest of his life. He was looking for inspiration, and we sat silently for a long time periodically sighing. But then some recent college grads arrived and after a cursory glance at the scene before them sat down and analyzed the "awesome" party they had been to the night before.<br />
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And, finally, a middle aged couple weighted down with photography equipment turned the corner from behind the cliff and, in what seemed to be the blink of an eye, the man had set up his paraphernalia and had turned to his wife and was saying something about the glare from the sandstone and his need for a device that would calibrate the light for him. I was reminded of Annie Dillard's words of wisdom from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395594123&sr=8-1&keywords=pilgrim+at+tinker+creek"><i>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</i></a> when she realizes that she experiences different ways of seeing. After describing how sometimes she has to verbalize and analyze what she is seeing she writes, "But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer."<br />
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For me, Delicate Arch set the stage for a series of future events as I became obsessed with trying to see if I could recreate the feeling I had there, but it was not until a good deal later that I could even begin to process and give language to what it felt like. <b>One of the characteristics of awe might well be that it is pre-verbal, and that it resists capture as well as duplication. In fact, as I look at the picture at the top of this blog post, I find it so inadequate as to be laughable. </b>Again and again I found myself in the next months standing next to someone at Dead Horse State Park, or Bryce, or Zion, or peering into the Grand Canyon saying, "I can't describe this; no picture of this will make any sense."<br />
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If I try to put words to the feeling I would say that first, time ceased to feel chronological; to look at my watch would have seemed comical. My focus became sharper; I lingered on certain vistas for longer periods of time. At the same time, I found myself involuntarily asking all kinds of questions about the relationship between myself and my surroundings but not with the desire for explanation but something more like connection. Second, that desire for connection came, paradoxically, I think, from the vastness and the novelty of what I was seeing. I would describe it as a simultaneously moving outward and inward. Oddly, a line from Fitzgerald's <i>The Great Gatsby</i> floated through my head, "I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." And I chuckled to myself as I imagined sharing this moment with a more cynical Nick Carraway. And third, in that same vein, I found myself being more self-aware but not self-conscious. In the same way that time had changed, my sense of self was more open, more what I have called in an earlier blog post "<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2011/08/availability-opening-thoughts.html">available</a>." All of these characteristics mimic what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found in his study of peak experiences in his book, <i>Flow</i>. <br />
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Abbey described his first experience of Delicate Arch this way, "The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to it own character, is equally beautiful. If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful--that which is full of wonder...The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels." <b>Awe awakens us to new possibilities, but, at the same time, it also challenges our customary way of moving through the world.</b><br />
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<b>So here is something else I learned-- You do not find awe, awe finds you. </b>And perhaps that is one reason why it is so subjective as an experience. But what I want to explore further is whether, even though I know you cannot <u>create</u> awe, can you <u>prepare </u>for it in a way that will increase the chances that it will find you? Are there things that we do, mindsets that we embrace, that actually divorce us from what might be a daily dose of awe? These were questions that came much later, however; they could not have been of the moment.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-27383405597261142722014-03-18T10:04:00.002-07:002014-03-18T10:04:51.971-07:00On Felt Experiences, Rituals, Saying Yes and Being PresentFor the past two months, I have been practicing being fully present in the moment. But it wasn't until I went, again, to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR0MPk69Iao"><i>Sleep No More</i></a> the immersion theater piece that I have written about in an <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-third-thing-how-do-we-tell-dancer.html">earlier blog post</a>, that some realizations about how to be fully in the present came together in powerful ways.<br />
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<i>Sleep No More</i> is a theater production that contains twenty-one characters, multiple plot lines loosely based on Shakespeare's play <i>Macbeth</i> and Hitchcock's film <i>Rebecca</i> that rotate three times each night and a six floor hotel as its setting. It also completely eliminates the "fourth wall" in a way that intentionally pushes the audience out of their comfort zone. In short, it is a wonderful creation to explore how to live in an experience-based way.<br />
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<img alt="Jim James at the McKittrick Hotel, home of 'Sleep No More' in New York." src="http://assets-s3.rollingstone.com/assets/images/blog_entry/1000x600/20130221-jim-james-1-600x-1361471372.jpg" />
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Some of the power of <i>Sleep No More</i> is that it is performed without language. <b>The absence of the ability to speak (it is forbidden for the audience and cast) means that what you know most deeply over the course of the evening you know in your body first. </b>In this case, unlike most of most of daily life, your body gives you the most immediate information about your surroundings. I tend to live in my head most consciously, and this theater piece confronts and confounds that impulse. During the course of my sabbatical year I have been experimenting with a process called Focusing--one that I described in detail in an <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-look-at-empathy.html">earlier blog post</a>. Perhaps the most revolutionary concept in the Focusing process is the ability to access what is called the "felt sense."<u> </u><br />
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Focusing begins with the recognition of a "felt experience." The racing of our heart, our palms beginning to sweat, the aching in the pit of our stomach are all seen as our body recognizing something important occurring <u>before</u> our conscious mind can access what is happening. For example, the witches know that Macbeth is approaching through a felt experience, "By the pricking in my thumbs,/ Something wicked this way comes." Embodied cognition (as it is now called by some cognitive psychologists) is, for some people, a deeply powerful way to know something. While some literary critics see the witches as having supernatural powers, I think that they actually are just good at listening to their bodies. <b>Acknowledging what we know in our bodies brings you into the present in dramatic ways.</b><br />
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A second factor increasing the capacity for being present was offered by the actor playing Macbeth in the talk back after the play. He explained that "since the the text is an unwritten one--it is physical and it is repeated three times every night--then becomes a routine that is like a ritual. You have to follow the ritual because that is what allows you to be fully present with the people who surround you." <br />
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Finally, the actor playing Hecate immediately pointed out that, even though there is a ritual, things never go as planned; there are always changes that have to be made spontaneously. What was most revelatory to me, however was what she said next, "You are not going to be able to fix what has been changed, so you have to accept the changes, not deny them. You have to say 'Yes!' to whatever happens."<br />
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One unusual aspect of <i>Sleep No More</i> is that in a show where everyone is wearing masks (see the picture above), the actors choose audience members at different times in the show to engage in a private "one on one." When someone asked how the actors chose the audience members to engage in one on ones, they answered, "There is usually just something about the way they are engaged with everything; they are the people who are most present."<br />
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Two months ago my wife had basal cell cancer and a subsequent surgery on her nose that meant that she was ordered to be immobile for the next six weeks. My role in this was just to be there--to be present. So, the daily routine for a month revolved around changing bandages twice a day. We would sit down to the dining room table--now covered with bottles of hydrogen peroxide, aquaphor gel, xenoform strips, boxes of sterile gauze pads and what would eventually be hundreds and hundreds of Q-tips--and methodically go through the ritualized procedure of taking off the old bandage and setting a new one in its place.<br />
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I was really more like a sous chef in this process--I layed out the materials and then was responsive whenever needed to supply the correct item. Since the procedure always had its little quirks, I had to simply watch and say whatever I thought was needed in the moment. As days went by, I began to notice that the consistent verbal chatter that I had been offering began to recede--oftentimes because I was being told it wasn't helpful. It felt like I had become the soccer coach I always abhorred and avoided--the one who constantly yelled out at the players while they were performing.<br />
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So, in response, I began to settle in to simply watching intently and stopped talking. If I had to describe it I would say that I was much more aware of the immediate surroundings, of where everything was on the table and how far away it was when I had to reach for it. I also became more aware of my own place in the surroundings, of my breathing and anytime my body moved. Finally, because there were always little things that would go wrong during the bandage changing, <b>I was aware of the <u>purpose </u>of each part of the process and how things had to be improvised to go forward. It was always true that "What's done cannot be undone;" you could not fix what was happening, you could only accept it and move forward.</b><br />
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Over the month, as I became more and more grounded, centered and connected, the bandage changing process took on a levity and a lightness. What happened, I believe, is that we both became more fully present with each other and with the moment. And that feeling began to grow out from those moments to the rest of the day. Days would go by where we had just been with each other for the day.<br />
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<b>The power of being productive holds great sway over my own life, I am trained to get things done and often to them quickly and efficiently. But I have begun to notice that the power of presence seems to have changed me in ways that make the world look a bit different. </b>The world, I think, may be looking at me differently as well. I have been to <i>Sleep No More</i> four times before the other night, but I never had a "one on one" with any of the actors; the other night I had three.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-80669426009198001202013-08-27T10:26:00.000-07:002013-08-27T10:30:25.187-07:00Women's Ways of Knowing and Divergent Thinking I got a note the other day from one of my former students, Carl, who was reflecting on our class together last year. He wrote, "<span class="null">I miss our history lessons! All the times we went off-topic and started talking about interesting things, haha!" Carl was remembering the times we were practicing connectivity on the tangent board (see this <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/08/tangents-and-divergent-thinking.html">earlier blog post</a> for a discussion of the role of tangents in fostering and inculcating divergent thinking) or explicitly practicing divergent thinking. Carl was someone who came into that class as a wonderful analytic, convergent thinker who had been well trained in the basic techniques of the sciences in Europe. </span><br />
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<span class="null">What surprised him most about the class, however, were the times when we diverged and connected people, events and concepts that seemed far ranging and even, "off-topic." Sometimes these connections would take the form of creating analogies that seemed to contain portions of what we were exploring. Other times, we would have "metaphor practice" to try to construct a metaphor that described an historical event as fully as possible using our own experience. <b>At the highest levels of thinking, analysis and metaphor meet as the critical and creative forces that make for original thought. To permanently separate them is to create a false dichotomy that chokes off imagination.</b> I like to think that I was just trying to get Carl ready for a career in science (or whatever) by following the dictum of evolutionary biologist R. C. Lewontin, "It seems impossible to do science without metaphors."</span><br />
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<span class="null">As I was responding back to Carl's note I was reminded of one of the first times I ever thought about divergent thinking in this manner. I had made the conscious move to change schools from a rural all boys boarding school to an urban co-ed day/boarding school. Other than in summer schools, it was the first time I had taught girls, and it was remarkable to me how much more the girls' thinking was connected to both their own experiences as well as to other stories while they talked in class. </span><br />
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<span class="null">This led me to start listening for "how" someone was saying something rather than only "what" they were saying. <b>It is this added level of listening that is one of the cornerstones of shifting from thinking about teaching as being solely about the t</b></span><span class="null"><b>ransmitting of information to examining teaching as also encompassing the exploration of <i>how </i>what is being transmitted is being received. </b>Once you make this transition, it is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole or Dorothy waking up in Oz--a world full of talking scarecrows and mad hatters that consistently resists full comprehension. (I explored another form of this phenomenon in an earlier post on "<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-hedgehog-and-fox.html">The Hedgehog and the Fox.</a>") It is has been one of the most profound paradigm shifts in my understanding of what I am doing in a classroom.</span><br />
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<span class="null">The confusion induced by my paradigm shift was compounded as I realized that having a full class of people who were ALL using different techniques to process what we were discussing was overwhelming and exhausting. But it also felt exciting every day because even if you had taught something before (I am up to having taught <i>The Great Gatsby</i> over forty times), you could never predict HOW a student was going read a book. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="null">I began to to investigate this phenomenon and, in a serendipitous moment, I discovered the <a href="http://www.jbmti.org/About-us-Extra-Info/our-history">Stone Center </a>at Wellesley College. It was the work of Jean Baker Miller, the founder of the Stone Center, on the psychology of women that first drew my attention, but in the same year I had shifted schools a book appeared called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Womens-Ways-Knowing-Development-Anniversary/dp/0465090990/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377530144&sr=8-1&keywords=womens+ways+of+knowing"><i>Women's Ways of Knowing</i></a> that made me re-think (and subsequently expand) the way I had been thinking about teaching. The discovery that Blythe McVicker Clinchy and her colleagues documented in that book was that there were identifiable epistemological levels to the way students engage material they are learning. I remember being so excited that I made my newly formed interdisciplinary course in Philosophy and Literature read the whole thing.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="null">Clinchy discerned that there were levels of understanding that could be described and that were common to all students. But the real discovery, form my point of view, was that men and women appeared to have different techniques of making meaning at the upper levels of the stages. In short, men and women showed similar approaches in early stages of learning until they came to the level of "procedural knowledge." When people are in this stage they are asking questions about the accuracy and worth of the information they are receiving. Is Nick a reliable narrator in Gatsby? Does Jefferson really believe what he wrote in the Declaration? </span><br />
<br />
<span class="null">In other words, learners in this category were engaged in a reasoned reflection about the nature and authenticity of authority. <b>Clinchy posited that in this stage there were "separate knowers" and "connected knowers." The former detached themselves from what they were studying, tried to remain objective and were often willing to argue and debate about whether something was reasonable. These were predominately male. Connected knowers, however, were more likely to try to empathize with the source's point of view, to see the source in its real world context and to connect the source to their own experience. These learners were predominately female. </b>Obviously, I wanted my students to be able to do both, but it seemed to be true that most students, like Carl, favored one form--separate or connected-- over the other. </span><br />
<span class="null"><br /></span>
<span class="null">But it was when I started teaching and coaching at a school out West that Clinchy's findings became even clearer. And it was not surprising for me that it was when I shifted from coaching boys to coaching girls in soccer that the difference between separate and connected knowers became most vivid--and most useful. Sports---like theater and music and all of the arts--are performance based activities and, as a result, you get immediate, real time feedback about whether something has been learned or not. Did the ball do what you wanted it to do? Did you hit that note, or not? </span><br />
<span class="null"><br /></span>
<span class="null">Furthermore, the more confident you were, the better you performed. But where did that confidence come from? What was its foundation? What was immediately apparent to me was that it was different for girls than for boys. With a girls team the more they empathized, saw what they were learning in a larger context and connected it to their own experience, the more confident they grew, the more they developed technically and strategically, the higher the their level of intrinsic motivation and the more it meant to them. From that moment on my teaching, and my coaching, became both more varied and more focused at the same time whether it was with boys or girls.</span><br />
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<span class="null">The point, however, is not that one way of procedural learning--separate or connected--is better but rather that it is good to know the epistemological strengths of the people you are teaching (and coaching) as well as where you think they could grow in the future. </span><br />
<span class="null"><br /></span>
<span class="null">Finally, Clinchy's last level of learning--constructed knowledge--understands that learning is a process based on construction, destruction and reconstruction. These most sophisticated learners have a high level of tolerance for paradox, ambiguity and developed a narrative sense of self that tried to "establish a communion with what they are trying to understand." And being meta-cognitive--understanding the techniques that you yourself use to learn best--seemed to me to be a fundamental goal of any teacher or coach.</span><br />
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<span class="null">By the way, it turned out that Carl was a superb connected learner as well; he just hadn't done it much before. </span>Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-22496156488146934842013-08-15T09:28:00.001-07:002013-08-15T09:28:11.094-07:00Divergent Thinking about the Purpose of Studying and Doing HistoryOne of the hardest things about starting the school year is remembering the things I need to forget. Once you have been teaching for awhile (and this only gets worse the more you do it), you build up such a reservoir of tacit, assumed understandings about what you are teaching that it is even more important to remind yourself that you have to see what you are teaching from the student's point of view. If you don't, you will never move them forward. I need to forget that I already know a lot about doing history, and look at it from their point of view. For example, if I don't let students explore what they think about history and what their past experiences have been in classes, then I will not have an accurate benchmark to know where to begin.<br />
<br />
For example, many of them are really Henry Ford historians--"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition.
We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a
tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (<i>Chicago Tribune</i>,
1916). But some of them might be Arnold Schwarzenegger historians--"Ba Ba Ba BOOM. You're History." (<i>The Terminator</i>, 1984).<br />
<br />
Another vital skill I have to remind myself to introduce is the idea of "divergent thinking." I wrote about this briefly in an <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/01/when-you-are-up-to-your-ass-in.html">earlier post </a>where I paid the price and induced a frightened non-engagement in my class for a week because I forgot how crucial this skill is to creating an experience-based learning environment. So, what is "divergent thinking?"<a data-ved="0CAUQjRw" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=issurIki4uLOpM&tbnid=F_nIh2RoqgMQFM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcreativegibberish.org%2F439%2Fdivergent-thinking%2F&ei=XLgLUvveBo_D4APYxoDQDw&bvm=bv.50723672,d.aWc&psig=AFQjCNEtIZVBmOMi7JKLS4vqIIs1hliaWQ&ust=1376586198775954" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="295" id="irc_mi" src="http://creativegibberishcom.ipage.com/wpfiles/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/divergent_thinking3.jpg" style="margin-top: 78px;" width="550" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
The objective of divergent thinking is to generate a lot of
ideas in a relatively short period if time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling famously said, “To get good
ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.”<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Years ago there
was a study that tested “divergent thinking” on a group of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These people were in kindergarten. The
percentage of people scoring at “genius level” for divergent thinking was ---
ready, 98%.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When that group was tested
five years later that number was down to 32%.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When these children were fifteen years old, the number was down to
10%.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the time they were twenty-five,
the number was down to 2%. When I ask my students what they ascribe this downward trend to they are quick to say, "School." Regardless of whether they are right, it is kind of damning that they think this in the first place.</div>
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One of the major reasons we create environments that are not experience-based is because we are so focused on <i>convergent</i> thinking. We have a lot to cover, and we need every second to transmit that information to our students. In the past few years I make sure I have "shadowed" a student through their class day as an exercise to try and see the world from their point of view. What I find is the explicit or implicit goal of virtually every class is to converge down to a formula, a piece of information, a previously held interpretation. <b>In short, the objective is to know something but the process is almost always a converging down on an answer, not on an opening up to an exploration. </b>Divergent thinking is something that fosters the latter, and I always have to remind myself to include it as part or all of classes early in the year. And then I have to remember to keep doing it.<br />
<br />
I thought I would practice a little divergent thinking myself on the topic of the "purpose of studying and doing history." There are a few rules in divergent thinking--avoid judging what you are thinking, try to be additive and play off what you just thought and be as playful as you can are vital. As Plato said, “What, then, is the right way of living?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Life must be lived as play.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">So, here goes:</span><br />
<br />
<i><u><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">Some Reasons to Study and Do History: </span></u></i><br />
<br />
<b><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>George Santayana-
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." </b><br />
<br />
This seems to be the most common starting place for history teachers in staking a claim for the relevance of their discipline. However, I find that few <i>historians</i> actually subscribe to it. The "condemned" part seems both didactic and prescriptive. History certainly has to do with the past, but the past can't be repeated. At least that is what every historian I know thinks. This, of course, was the downfall of that non-historian, Jay Gatsby--"Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">2) You can't repeat the past, but there are cycles and patterns that can help you identify where you came from. </span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cycles-American-History-Arthur-Schlesinger/dp/0395957931">Arthur Schlesinger</a> was very big on this idea; he saw the identification of these cycles as leading to a more ideal society. For Schlesinger, the tension between pragmatism and idealism is part of the American character. It is important, however, that the identification of cycles is never helpful as a predictive mechanism. That is a fundamental difference between social scientists and historians. The former are trying to be predictive; the latter never are. Historians are wary of generalizations and dwell in particular settings, whereas social scientists are using particulars to achieve general theories and rules. Understanding the difference between social sciences and history is crucial and often muddled in a way that confuses students.</span><br />
<a data-ved="0CAUQjRw" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=J8AQg7EbQ0HEGM&tbnid=i2Rf6JUA5hymkM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcheekyhistory.blogspot.com%2F&ei=49wLUua2N7as4AOS6YDgDQ&bvm=bv.50723672,d.aWc&psig=AFQjCNGXLt5A78-0xtK_pP3TzK_feNEk6A&ust=1376595517580384" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="400" id="irc_mi" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUmdAtAkyiYMKYbjVrTPFgMzRnP_eo2YO2iqvl6v3valkTR1BWsl-i4LeT4nLsiB-n_t8ASEmo7t4ziKA1upLQJQMBne_tOHcSsA-jRLs_g6ePTrtZw1KRr5jSjUO8Vl4DBho0Y98Jhyrf/s400/repeating+history.jpg" style="margin-top: 66px;" width="348" /></a><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b>3) Maybe the past cycles, or maybe it provides models and analogies for the present and the future. </b> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Time-Uses-History-Decision-Makers/dp/0029227917">Richard Neustadt</a> was a big proponent of this. Much of this argument sees the past as a powerful analytic tool for making policy decisions. It uses case studies to examine whether something happening now is analogous to something that happened in the past. For historians though, models are like lenses on a camera, they bring some things into focus while blurring other things. It is a trade-off, you see some things more clearly but you miss other things completely when you use any model or analogy.</span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">4) Perhaps the way to see the past most clearly is to see it through the lens of myth? </span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Cry-Myth-Rollo-May/dp/0393331776">Rollo May</a> wrote a good deal about this. Myths, in this view, are not falsehoods, they are stories that are either living or dead. The way to understand the unconscious of another world is to understand its myths. As May wrote, </span>"A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are
narrative patterns that give significance to our existence [...] myths
are our way of finding meaning and significance. Myths are like the
beams in a house; not exposed to outside view, they are the structure
which holds the house together so people can live in it." Myths tell us what we have internalized in our unconscious in ways that we are unaware of--another version of the DKDK zone. </div>
<br />
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
(Divergent
thinking should not be confused with brainstorming, by the way,
although they are related. Brainstorming is a technique that encourages
divergent thinking. Brainstorming is just one of many possible ways to
produce divergent thinking, however.) - See more at:
http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/most_of_what_you_know_about_divergent_thinking_is_wrong#sthash.EPeBaKCS.</div>
<b>5) If myths aren’t true or false but, rather, living or dead, then<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> w</span>e gain self-knowledge by understanding
change over time in the mythic as well as the “historical” sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </b><br />
<br />
The unveiling of underlying collective, cultural
myths gives one a greater control over one’s life in the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> In other words, </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">an understanding of one's deeply held myths is essential to both national
and individual mental health.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Here is an experiment I have been running for thirty years since I was reading May's work. What book has EVERY American read or had read to them? My findings have been that I can say four words to you and you will all give the same answer. Ready? Here are the words-- "I think I can." </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Answer--<i>The Little Engine That Could</i>. Every year, the students who are "American" howl with delight that they all shout out the same thing. The "non-American" students just look quizzically at that behavior. The reason is that the "myth" of that story, and its multiple lessons on persistent striving and being the underdog, is so deeply internalized in our culture that it tells us, as a country, who we are. Interestingly, from an historian's point of view, it may be one of the myths most in jeopardy of dying right now.</span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">6) Mark Twain looked at the past in a kind of poetic way--"The past does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." </span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">What I am realizing in this divergent thinking exercise is that studying and doing history provides a <i>context</i> for our lives. It reminds me of the philosophers--I remember reading Ludwig Wittgenstein in grad school--who believe that the origin of meaning is really in context. In other words, meaning comes primarily when we are able to put something--a word, an event in our lives--in context. Without context, you have no meaning, only action. <i>We need history in order to provide meaning for our lives. History is like the landscape of a scene you are looking at; you need that landscape to provide context that will tell you where you are. </i>Perhaps history is to one's life what perspective is to a painter. I confess, however, that there are times that I think I am teaching history to people who are the least historical people (teenagers) in the least historical country (America) in the world.</span><br />
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">7) And, of course, William Faulkner saw the past as always with us when he wrote, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past." </span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">I think this is true, and it is most obviously seen in the idea of history as being actually similar to memoir--something I talked about in an <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-can-we-create-experience-based.html">earlier post</a>. But Joan Didion is perhaps the person who resonates most deeply on this topic, and provides a nice closure to this first set of divergent thinking posts. She writes in "On Keeping a Notebook," </span>“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people
we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on
the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted
them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”<br />
<br />
Put Faulkner and Didion together and you end up with a poignant plea for history as a necessary signpost to self-knowledge and deeply understanding who one is as a person. But that understanding only comes when something means something. Studying and doing history provides the necessary <i>context </i>that allows that kind of deep meaning to emerge.<br />
<br />
What this little piece of divergent thinking has shown me is the power of connection, and the way in which you create idea through that act of connecting. Next time, I will play off some of these ideas to explore reasons to study history based on the role of narrative, the relationship of stories to intelligence, and empathy.<br />
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Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-35663438770153582042013-08-06T09:54:00.004-07:002013-08-06T09:54:58.413-07:00A Meditation on the Difference between Purpose and RelevanceI remember my college freshman economics book using the example of a someone dealing marijuana in order to explain a particular principle in the study of economics. It is significant, however, that I remember that the book used marijuana dealing as an example, but not the principle. The book was making a pandering play at trying to gain my interest--and perhaps the interest of my hall mate who actually was dealing marijuana--but it misfired because of a misunderstanding of the difference between relevance and purpose. Relevance is, unfortunately, dependent upon the perception and perspective of the viewer, and that, also unfortunately, is oftentimes myopic and shortsighted.<br />
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The poet and essayist Wendell Berry beautifully expresses the problem with relevance in teaching and learning-- “<b>Of all the issues in education, relevance is the phoniest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If life were as predictable and small
as the talkers of politics would have it, then relevance would be a consideration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But life is large and surprising and
mysterious, and we don’t know what we need to know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>When I was a student I refused to take certain subjects
because I thought they were irrelevant to the duties of a writer, and I have
had to take them up, clumsily and late, to understand my duties as a man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>What we need in education is not
relevance, but abundance, variety, adventurousness, thoroughness. A student
should suppose he will need to know much more than he can learn.” </b>Relevance has the negative side effect of actually closing us down to what we might most deeply need. But how do we combat this tendency?<br />
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<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=otwWVJ8BPisUoM&tbnid=MmBHcGND_7bo5M:&ved=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnicholsoncartoons.com.au%2Frelevance-in-english-teaching-226.html&ei=lN7_UevmDsXl4AOF4oCACg&psig=AFQjCNEoVlWOnrx6FCwl44lB1XGVPy2c-g&ust=1375809556401972" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img height="400" id="irc_mi" src="http://nicholsoncartoons.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/2006-06-08-Relevance-in-English-teaching-226.jpg" style="margin-top: 117px;" width="387" /></a></div>
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<b>Experience-based learning gains much of its energy and direction not from trying to be relevant to the student, but by trying to identify with great precision the <i>purpose</i> of what is being learned.</b> Each summer I try to spend some time thinking through the purpose of whatever disciplines and skills I am teaching that coming year, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how my thinking has grown over the years with the repeated returns. This focus on purpose has had an effect on my relationship with my students as well -- most immediately when they want to know, "Why are we studying this?" and "When am I going to use this?" To me those are legitimate questions that we, as teachers, all ought to have sophisticated answers at the ready. <b>Learning sticks with you when it has meaning, and meaning is directly related to purpose. </b><br />
<br />
As one of my favorite cognitive psychologists Robert Sternberg has written concerning the major factor as to whether people achieve expertise (<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-final-principle-for-experience-based.html">see the previous post</a> for an investigation of how that operates with historians), "It is not some fixed prior ability (that determines whether one achieves expertise), but <b><i>purposeful engagement</i></b>." Purpose is both the engine and the compass of experience-based learning and if you can't articulate the purpose of something, then the "abundance, variety, adventurousness and thoroughness" that Wendell Berry talks about is never really embraced. Furthermore, Carol Dweck, author of <i>Mindset</i>, has posited that a sense of purpose a foundational precondition for creating a "growth mind-set" that is, in turn, a key to intrinsic motivation. In short, <i>with having a sense of purpose</i> the stakes are high. <br />
<br />
The other day my friend Dan sent me an article that approaches this same idea from a different angle. What happens if you <u>don't</u> have a sense of purpose in your activities? <b>A sense of purpose, the creation of meaning and feeling of control are all linked together.</b> If having a defined sense of purpose gives you a greater feeling of control over a situation, what happens when you start to feel like you are not in control of your life? British epidemiologist <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/status-and-stress/?emc=eta1">Michael Marmot </a>has concluded that you risk a significant increase in the amount of debilitating stress you endure. He writes, "Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and
high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress
with a capital 'S.' The former can be considered a manageable if
unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen
one’s mettle. The latter kills. What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective
explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor,
they argue the more toxic that stressor’s effects. <i>So the stress that kills, Dr. Marmot and others argue, is characterized
by a lack of a sense of control over one’s fate. Psychologists who study
animals call one result of this type of strain “learned helplessness.""</i> If we want to avoid the toxic stress and the resultant motivational desert of "learned helplessness" that often results, we need to be able to articulate to our students the purpose of what we are doing together.<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=mtjuuSSG1RWE8M&tbnid=kIGBP6HyMVuAFM:&ved=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.toonpool.com%2Fcartoons%2Fcaveman%2520natural%2520selection%2520stress_155251&ei=0B0BUsG_PIXI9gT19IDoCA&bvm=bv.50310824,d.eWU&psig=AFQjCNGQpgmxTXxP7iJbRZdeMMmjHbKb-w&ust=1375891281939557" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="357" id="irc_mi" src="http://www.toonpool.com/user/997/files/caveman_natural_selection_stress_1552515.jpg" style="margin-top: 62px;" width="500" /></a><br />
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In clarifying our understanding of the importance of purpose we might also rescue the concept of stress with a small "s." Toxic stress is debilitating, but what often happens, as a result, is that people try to avoid <u>all</u> stress as much as possible. There is another kind of stress, however-- "understandable stress"-- that is the basis for the creative anxiety we feel in many of our most beloved activities. The "butterflies" that someone gets before a music recital, a dance performance, or in the locker room before the big game is a kind of stress that increases the depth of the learning and, for many people, the enjoyment of the activity. We are encountering a problem, but one that we think we can solve. That process, cognitive psychologists have found, is what triggers learning, not the addition of relevance. <i>It's the feeling you have when you have heightened sensations that help you FOCUS more clearly and INTENSELY. Anxiety or stress in this sense is creative because it puts you more fully in the moment, </i><i><i>more alert, </i>and more attentive to what is needed in that moment.</i><br />
<br />
Experience based learning actually tries to induce that kind of understandable stress in order to foster creativity. It is the creation of an environment where you try to coax people into the DKDK zone. The DKDK zone is where the most transformative learning occurs, and it is often characterized by understandable stress when properly managed. How would you know what you were capable of if you only did what was comfortable -- and what you thought at the time was relevant? Wendell Berry is right-- "we don't know what we need to know... and we will need to know much more than we can learn." The problem with teaching and learning seen through a lens of <i>relevance</i>
is that it provides a way for both students and teachers to avoid
stress and anxiety, because it is always seeking a link/connection to
what is already known. Whereas transformational
learning inculcates the ability to tolerate - and embrace - that sense of understandable stress inherent to the DKDK zone, that is actually a necessary spark to creativity.<br />
<br />
So, in the next post I will introduce the concept of divergent thinking as a way of mitigating toxic stress. And then I will practice that technique concerning the PURPOSE of studying and doing History; that will be a messy operation, I suspect.<br />
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<br />
I am just finishing Roger Schank's new book <i>Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools</i> and in it he issues this warning about the activity we are about to undertake to articulate purpose. He writes, "We say things to students like "You will need this later." But this is usually a bold-faced lie. You don't need algebra later. Making up nonsense convinces nobody." Now, THAT is throwing down the gauntlet.</div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-75072370058295654552013-07-27T09:20:00.000-07:002013-07-27T09:20:14.854-07:00A Final Principle for Experience-based History: "People are Trapped in History, and History is Trapped in Them"The other day I was sitting in an Upper West Side cafe with two friends of mine, Ken and Valerie, who happen to be expert historians. Both of them are professors at Columbia University and one of them knows as much about New York City as anyone in the world, and the other is the chief historian of the New York Historical Society. In short, they have internalized all the skills that an historian practices to a point where they don't even consciously think about being historians--they <i>are</i> historians. What I realized as I was talking to them--well, listening really carefully actually--was that there was another vital element of being an historian that they exuded almost as second nature. <br />
<br />
The way in which they approached every topic we addressed reminded me of something James Baldwin had said years ago, <b>"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."</b> Baldwin came to this realization when he chronicled his experiences in a remote Swiss village in 1951 in the essay from <i>Notes of a Native Son</i> entitled, "Stranger in the Village." And it was precisely this sensibility that Ken and Valerie possessed as a foundation for the way they constructed their world. In other words, whether they were talking about the effect of the urban planner Robert Moses' ideas on the physical place where we were sitting or the way long dead New York City mayors were obviously influencing the present mayoral race-- there was always the the ability to see the past in the present. This kind of time travel to the intersection of the past and the present is what expert historians do, and it is one of the hardest things to teach novice historians. As a side note (though perhaps not really too much to the side) why are some of the best experience-based "historians" -- Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison -- writers in genres other than traditional history? All of them possess deep and sophisticated understandings of the way the past and present intersect, and it is part of what makes their writing so psychologically compelling.<br />
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<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=CcRW4Q9fLsV_vM&tbnid=SLHeMSlhrPkSGM:&ved=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewsone.com%2F37832%2Fgallery-famous-gay-african-americans%2F&ei=u-7yUbyIGMXd4AOUtIGQAw&bvm=bv.49784469,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNGu7rLiOGEJTInUHhdXD_S6C0-bRg&ust=1374961723865440" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="400" id="irc_mi" src="http://ionenewsone.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/james_baldwin11.jpg?w=449" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="359" /></a></div>
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Baldwin continued his thinking fourteen years later in a much under-appreciated essay entitled, "The White Man's Guilt." As well as being one of the most striking examples of empathy in the way I have been describing it in previous blog posts, Baldwin explains in this essay how the past and the present exist simultaneously, and how that affects who one is and how one acts.<span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> Baldwin writes, "History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. <b>On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally <i>present</i> in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. </b>And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view." </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">What Baldwin is reminding us is vital to having students engage in experience-based history early in their academic lives. We have collective <i>public</i> pasts that constitute history and we have <i>private</i> pasts that are expressed through memoir, and the intersection of those two is what we call daily life. It is the daily life we encounter every day, and it is what we are unconsciously controlled by. Students can be brought to see this in a multitude of ways, but many history teachers are reluctant to let students play the game of history the way Ken and Valerie do for fear they will do it poorly.</span><br />
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">One of the biggest debates in the teaching of history is less about what constitutes an expert historian and more about <i>when</i> one should introduce complicated ideas like the ones Baldwin is identifying to novice learners. In other words, history is seen as a kind of a club in which you have to pay your dues before you can become a member. To be sure, there is a difference between novices and experts, but when are the novices allowed to try to do the things the experts know how to do on a very high level? </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Virginia, is someone whose work always interests me because he looks at the acts of cognition that a learner employs in creating meaning. He goes beyond more traditional dictums passed out by teachers to just "work harder" and delves into strategies that are based on the cognitive strengths that a person possesses. However, in his recent book, <i>Why Don't Students Like School</i>?, he comes down on the side of not letting novice learners into the game of history that experts play too quickly. He writes, "A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. A student may not be able to develop his own (historical) theory, but he can develop a deep understanding of existing theory. A student may not be able to write a new narrative of historical fact, but she can follow and understand a narrative that someone else has written." He continues by comparing expert historians to expert tennis players, "In the same way expert tennis players (like expert historians) spend most of their time during a match thinking about strategy and trying to anticipate what their opponent will do. But we shouldn't tell novices to think about strategy; novices need to think about footwork and about the basics of their strokes."</span><br />
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">Willingham would have people gain the necessary background knowledge that experts have before allowing them to play the game. This is, in fact, the way many history classes are taught; learn the material through a series of drills so that you may hope to be allowed to play the real game of history later in college.</span><br />
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But the fact of the matter is we need to let novices play the game of history earlier rather than later precisely because of what Baldwin illuminates in the quote above-- "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." In daily life, this principle is one that makes all the difference in how you understand the situation you are in. If you don't practice it, and deeply understand its implications, there are often serious consequences.<a data-ved="0CAUQjRw" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=JxtMCqQrXZiToM&tbnid=MvBw-6mj9WIfyM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.smashpipe.com%2F%3Ff%3D5l_4YWNYeXk%26auto%3D0%26page%3D1067890%26e%3D1%26d%3D2013-07-19%252019%253A24%253A55.0&ei=zujzUdP7J6Tl4AObo4DwBQ&bvm=bv.49784469,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNFye7qZDZr2TExwdz65DF5EpDa1-A&ust=1375025662111448" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="360" id="irc_mi" src="https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/d87h9nAajqM/hqdefault.jpg" style="margin-top: 60px;" width="480" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Most recently, Barack Obama sounded much like an expert historian (and memoirist) when he was <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/21/the-full-obama-speech-on-trayvon-martin-and-race-in-america-video/">trying to explain </a>the aftermath of the court decision in Sanford, Florida. <br />
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--><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"You
know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my
son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35
years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American
community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think
it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at
this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There
are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the
experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department
store. That includes me. There are very few African American men
who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the
locks click on the doors of cars. That happened to me -- at least before I
was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the
experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously
and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens
often.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And
I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the
African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.
And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The
African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of
racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws -- everything from
the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up
having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the things that was not surprising to me, given what I have heard from President Obama in other settings, was something that did seem to surprise news commentators. They noted how "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/19/president-obamas-remarkably-personal-speech-on-trayvon-martin-and-race-in-america/">remarkably personal</a>" his talk was. It almost seemed to these commentators as if the historical was objective and the personal was subjective. But as I wrote about in the last blog post, from an experience-based point of view-- history is public memoir, and memoir is public history. Our public and our private lives are both influenced by history because history is most fundamentally the stories we tell ourselves about the past. The two are intertwined in our daily lives and we make decisions all the time based on Baldwin's principle--"People are trapped in history; and history is trapped in them." And that is why <i>experience-based </i>history is so important to both novices and experts.</span><br />
<br />
We
really have no choice about whether to be historians, only whether we are conscious that
we are "doing history" whenever we act. And whether we will be historians trying to be as expert as we can be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-11451281260628281232013-07-23T07:55:00.002-07:002013-07-23T07:55:51.979-07:00How Can We Create Experience-based History? : Part II<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Almost to the day three years ago I presented some ideas on the topic, <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-can-we-create-experience-based.html">"How Can We Create Experience-based History?"</a> That particular blog post explored the different mental models that people who are <u>not</u> historians hold about the nature of being an historian. At the end of that post I asked what some of the implications might be for making history more experience-based and less a forced march through random dates and facts dominated by short term memory practice.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Three guiding hypotheses emerged:</span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">1) History is <i>NOT</i> the past; it is the <i>stories</i> we tell ourselves about the past. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">2) History, therefore, occurs in the PRESENT not in the past; history is our "authoring" of the past.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></b>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b>3) "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past." --William Faulkner</b></span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">One of the things I love most about teaching where I do is that I am given a free reign to experiment and explore. So, for the past three years I have looked at these three controversial ideas as a basis for having my students think like historians. But it is more than just wanting them to think like historians by looking at their world and the past; I wanted to find the intersection of their world and themselves. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">I started by asking them to create metaphors for their previous understandings of studying history. Many of my students come from all over the world and from very different kinds of school systems, so I wasn't sure what to expect. The results were remarkably varied. Students wrote things like, "History has been like having a shopping cart and the whole grocery store and a short period of time and you run through and throw things in the basket as fast as you can--but you don't know how much any single item is worth. You then check out with everyone else that was doing the same thing and someone totals up how much the stuff in your basket is worth. The person with the highest total wins." (Remarkably, this student had never heard of one of my favorite shows growing up --<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se4syko6Law"> Supermarket Sweep</a>.)<i><b> </b></i>Clearly, running through the market might be fun, but the checkout would be anxiety producing.<b><i> </i></b></span><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">I came across a line from E.L. Doctorow while I was reading his work of historical fiction, <i>Ragtime</i>. Doctorow wrote, <b>"There is no fundamental difference between history and fiction; they are just different forms of narrative."</b> This was reminiscent of what Roland Barthes had been maintaining when he concluded that the notion of "objectivity" that historians want to claim in their voices "turns out to be a particular form of fiction." Doctorow continued his claim in an interview in the <i><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/08/notes-on-the-history-of-fiction/305033/">Atlantic</a></i>, "</span>Historians research as many sources as they can, but they decide what
is relevant to their enterprise and what isn’t. We should recognize the
degree of creativity in this profession that goes beyond intelligent,
assiduous scholarship." <i><b> </b></i>The historian side of me struggled with this for quite awhile because I was not willing to give up the idea that fiction writers could simply imagine things to be true without having to worry about whether they happened. Historians could not do that. In that sense, I felt there <i>was</i> a fundamental difference between history and fiction, and I needed to embrace that difference.<br />
<br />
And then in Vivian Gornick's book <i>The Situation and the Story</i> I read, "But memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. <b>Truth in a memoir is achieved not through he recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader come to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to <i>make</i> of what happened."</b> This description sounded more like what I was doing in my own historical writing and what I wanted from my student's work.<br />
<br />
I began to reflect on all of the strategies and
techniques that the memoirist/historian uses to make that narrative
happen. In the back of my mind I heard Aldous Huxley reciting, "Experience is NOT what happens to you; experience is what you DO with what happens to you." <br />
<br />
In Patricia Hempl's memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-You-Stories-Sojourns/dp/0393320316/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374508885&sr=1-3"><i>I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory </i></a> she writes, "The big fiction advice is 'Show, don’t tell,' but this is not what
memoir writers are embroidering on their pillows and sleeping on. It’s
instead 'Show and Tell.' It’s the idea that you can’t tell unless you
can show, but you don’t just show. You have to talk about it. You have
to somehow reflect upon it. You have to track or respond to it, this
thing that’s happening. And in the intersection of these two things is
the excitement we feel about this genre. <b>Too much show and, 'Why aren’t
you writing fiction?' Too much tell and, 'I’m not going to listen to you
because you’re boring.'" </b>History shared with memoir this fundamental characteristic--they were both SHOW AND TELL.<br />
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<br />
Excited by these ways of thinking about history, I began to use the following list (in no particular order) of suggestions - as the basis for trying to teach students how to create
history :<br />
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>select
events – using analytic and intuitive techniques--that seem significant</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>assign
meaning and significance – give those events weight(they cannot all be of equal weight)</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>keep your goal in mind:
achieve insight and un-cover wisdom</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>know that this will be a process
of discovery not pontificating on something you already know</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>the historian/memoirist has a <i>need</i>--articulate in precise terms what your <i>particular need</i> is</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>pick
beginnings and endings carefully – consciously frame the events</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>choose
the “container” with care--what will be the organizing principle of your narrative?</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>use
the elements of fiction (setting, characters, climax, conflicts) to create your narrative</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>know
your bias – you must be aware of yourself as an author--self-implicate with aplomb</div>
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<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>immerse
yourself in that time in the past (music, places, pictures)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.5in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>do
your research on this time period – what sources would be essential to include? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.5in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>create
a narrator and know their characteristics--you are not simply a reliable reporter</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.5in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span>Show
AND Tell</div>
<br />
I also began to invite memoir writers--Lee Stringer for <i>Grand Central Winter</i> and Danzy Senna for <i>Where Did You Sleep Last Night: A Personal History</i>--to class to discuss how they created memoir or, in Danzy's even more relevant phrase, "personal history." And then the students would craft their own "personal history/memoir" and we read each other's creations and noticed how they had been constructed using the techniques listed above.<br />
<br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I came to the view that history can be seen as
“public” memoir... and that also means that
memoir can be seen as “private” history. </b> <br />
<br />
To be sure, all this attention to narrative construction put me a month "behind" in terms of covering the material of this American history course, but there was a remarkable transformation in the way in which my students read and asked questions. The most noticeable change was an increased interest in historiography ("the history of history" seen by looking at what an historian has written through the lens of the time she was writing in) and collecting competing accounts of the same event. In short, they went "meta." But, at the same time, they began to question the creation of whatever they read and assume that the author had made choices of data without being explicit about the criteria for those choices. In short, they went "inside" what they were reading. <b>One of the things that I need to think about in terms of a principle of why some learning becomes "deep," or "transformational," or "experiential" is whether it <i>always</i> involves this rising above to go "meta" as well burrowing in to get "inside." Is that, in fact, part of how we make our own lives experiential?</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
I knew there was some paradigm shift when I read this student's observation and metaphor at teh end of the year about the work we did in class on being historians: "Playing history is kind of like playing <i>Scrabble</i> but you have this infinite number of pieces. And you can only select a certain number of letters--but some of them you choose and some of them seem to choose you (but it feels right). You look at all the pieces and you start to see some words you could create from the pieces that seem to fit the board. But you have to be careful to see if you are really just making up a word, or if it really exists. But then, sometimes, you have to make up a word because it is correct even though it doesn't exist. Compound this with everyone else around you playing on the same board, but with different pieces. Sometimes, it is just chaos." Hopefully, transformative chaos.</div>
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<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=6l4N7kiXi04laM&tbnid=MVn-P-0QrQ-OeM:&ved=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmarketingforhippies.com%2Fmetaphors-in-marketing-the-power-of-uncovering-your-core-metaphor%2F&ei=tXntUdbYN7i54APGi4HwAQ&bvm=bv.49478099,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNEKJ530TW-l3BMNoFHbAsxAvApjCw&ust=1374603967108819" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img height="275" id="irc_mi" src="http://marketingforhippies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/metaphor-cartoon.gif" style="margin-top: 93px;" width="289" /></a></div>
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Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-12980001121454357222013-07-17T04:26:00.002-07:002013-07-17T04:26:50.144-07:00A Final Precursor to Empathy: Not-KnowingAs I mentioned in an earlier<a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/07/wonder-another-precursor-to-empathy.html"> blog post</a>,
I have not had the courage to suggest that "practices wondering with aplomb" go on
the CITYterm skills checklist, but we do have another skill within the
"Habits of Learning" category that is called "embraces confusion and
explores not-knowing." <b>While wondering is a practice that most students
have some familiarity with from when they were younger, "not knowing" is
something that terrifies many of them every day. </b>Obviously, this idea
of school as a place where you are supposed to know things (and get
punished if you don't know them) goes back to the <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2010/07/importance-of-dkdk-zone.html">very early posts </a>of this entire blog, and to the importance of the DKDK zone as a basis for experience-based learning.<br />
<br />
What Emily (composite) and I discovered as we talked about her anxious feelings about practicing being empathetic was that Emily had an
extraordinarily high fear of "not knowing" that was inhibiting her
ability to dare to enter into someone else's experience. In short, she
could be sympathetic and even enjoy that experience because she was sure
that what she was feeling was accurate. But, when she was being asked to
imagine what someone else was feeling and how they were constructing
their world, she was paralyzed by her fear of "not knowing." What were the premises and assumptions at the base of that other person's world? How could you see implicit ones from their actions and hear them in their language? What were the foundational myths that this person believed in? What metaphors could you construct that they would agree that they lived by? What were the questions that preoccupied them most deeply? <b>And, at the heart of it all, how could you be sure you were right? Wasn't this empathy practice just a complete, random shot in the dark? </b><br />
<br />
The
more I listened to Emily the more I was reminded of the poet John Keats' idea of
"Negative Capability." In a letter to his brother in 1817 Keats was
wrestling with the idea of creativity and trying to figure out why
someone like Shakespeare (whom Keats greatly admired) should possess the
ability to inhabit someone's character in such depth and breadth. He posited that Shakespeare
cultivated a "<i>Negative Capability</i>, that is, when man is capable of
being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason." In other words, in order to understand
how someone else constructs the world you have to have the courage to
set aside what you, yourself, already know to be true and deeply listen
to what, and how, another person constructs their world.<br />
<div id="irc_mimg">
<a data-ved="0CAUQjRw" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=pUvRLR7U6XuCyM&tbnid=iNbnD7Uiqy9w1M:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdumbledad.wordpress.com%2F&ei=MEjlUfHOBfGx4AO9o4HwBQ&bvm=bv.48705608,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNGZl2apgHgVImY3QnvaQbGHVTnqKQ&ust=1374066948442791" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="456" id="irc_mi" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6038/5880238032_368671cb52.jpg" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="408" /></a></div>
<br />
Think about this in your own life for a second. How often do we take in something new we are presented with (a conversation, new data, something we see) and just file it immediately into what I think of an "experiential rut" in our minds? More often than not, we don't really even listen to what the other person is saying when we respond, we think about how what the other person is saying applies to what we already know to be true and then you comment on it. Listen to the conversations around you on a daily basis and see if this isn't the norm.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.rogerschank.com/">Roger Schank</a>, who used to teach at Northwestern and writes a good deal about the relationship between story-telling and intelligence writes, "We match new events to stories we already know that are not exactly like those stories. We might, for example, recall an earlier attempt to get a teacher to change a grade while thinking about getting our boss to change his or her salary decision...To do this, we must be capable of thinking of stories we have acquired in he past to see if one of them matches closely enough to what we need to know. Thus, partial matching of one story to another is a critical aspect of human intelligence." By this theory, "the more successfully you adapt old stories, the more creative you are." My point here is that much of our daily life seems to revolve around adapting our own experience to what comes at us day to day, not imagining someone else's stories. We don't empathize, we match up someone else's experience so that it fits our own.<br />
<br />
<b>So, when you think about the process of taking on someone else's world view it is a pretty scary proposition--you have to destroy or
annihilate what you know in order to experience something new. </b>However, for a
less threatening, and wildly humorous, view of the use of negative capability in casual conversation I would urge you
to watch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8FpnM0NlXk">Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's interchange</a> in an art gallery in <i>Manhattan</i>.<br />
<br />
I realized that there
may be some good reasons for Emily to be anxious about practicing
empathy. Empathy appears to be a dangerous business. Keats, in fact,
confirms Emily's fears in another letter when he writes, "A poet is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no identity--he is
continually in for--and filling some other Body--The Sun, the Moon, the
Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and
have about them unchangeable attribute--the poet has none; no
identity--he has no self." It sounds a bit like Walt Whitman in <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/142/14.html">stanza 6 of <i>Leaves of Grass</i></a> or <a href="http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wwhitman/bl-ww-crossing.htm"><i>Crossing Brooklyn Ferry</i></a>, doesn't it?
In order to fully understand what someone else understands you have to
sacrifice your own self in the sense that you have to be willing to give
up what you think is true; you have to enter into "not knowing." It may well be an act of imagination that requires what some therapists describe as an self-annihilation.<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=og5NbpWOk7noVM&tbnid=6qXLcuA22VkZuM:&ved=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.michellehenry.fr%2Fkeats.htm&ei=VEnlUZH5Luz94AOYkoHIBQ&bvm=bv.48705608,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNEkEYAFm_QpnDwU0g5Z8nq3eMGB0Q&ust=1374062632733397" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="357" id="irc_mi" src="http://www.michellehenry.fr/keatsmonk.gif" style="margin-top: 50px;" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
As
we went through the rest of the semester, Emily and I heard many of the
literary authors we met with at CITYterm echo what Donald Barthelme has written
in a volume called <i>Not-Knowing</i>, "Writing is a process of dealing
with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard
novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are
utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it
might be written, even though they have done a dozen of them before."
And the repeated chorus of these authors reiterating the same sentiment began to give Emily some confidence that not knowing was less
permanent than it had felt before. <b>She began to see empathy as not about
being correct or completely accurate, but rather about getting as close as one could to the desired
object. It was like watching her move from doing arithmetic to doing calculus-- from
the idea of getting the right answer to the concept of gaining a more precise
understanding of something or someone.</b><br />
<br />
At the beginning
of the semester Emily's attempts to practice empathy in her own writing looked
more like descriptions of other people trying to act like Emily. But
once she realized that if she could just put aside the "irritable
reaching after fact and reason" that she could come out with a "positive
capability" of getting closer to understanding how someone else
constructs the world, then her anxiety lessened.<br />
<br />
I
think I learned from Emily that empathy is an imaginative act in a different way than
sympathy and schadenfreude are. I think I also came to
appreciate how scary being empathetic can be. And finally, I came to
realize that "creative writing" might really be as much about
confronting "negative capability" and becoming increasingly comfortable with "not-knowing" as it is about giving people a chance to
be creative and express themselves.<br />
<br />
What I found perhaps most surprising throughout this investigation is that empathy is usually presented as being a positive embracing of other people's views; it is a pretty warm and fuzzy business the way lots of people describe it. What Emily (and Keats) got me thinking about was how the empathetic act might also necessitate a submerging, perhaps even an aggressive obscuring of the self that might easily be seen as scary, unnerving--even terrifying. The most highly successful programs teaching empathy seem to be focused on the pre-adolescent population. Why is that, I wonder? And would a program for teenagers need to contain a more "Keatsian" element of not knowing?<br />
<br />
My task is to now figure out where else I can develop this
sense of "not-knowing" as an active precursor to the "positive capability" that might lead to empathy.<br />
<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-55149015417527244102013-07-15T07:05:00.001-07:002013-07-15T07:06:35.894-07:00Is Sympathy different than Empathy? And Does it Matter?This past year I had a student who, while working on the <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/06/empathy-and-imelda-marcos-protocol.html">empathy protocols</a> I mentioned in an earlier blog post, got me thinking about whether sympathy was different than empathy. <b>And then, of course, whether the distinction between the two concepts was just a matter of semantics and, then, did it matter if there was a difference?</b><br />
<br />
Emily (a composite person) was remarkably good at connecting
with other students on a multitude of levels. She was one of those
students who truly wants to be kind to other people, and who practices
hard at making groups feel good about themselves. In the group
self-assessments at the end of each project at CITYterm, she was one of
the people who received high praise for making the group congenial and
upbeat. She was a cheerleader, to be sure, in that she gave the groups she was part of a greater energy and spirit to help them complete their task. But she had other qualities as well that led her to be quite sensitive to the emotional reactions that other students had to stress and conflict.<br />
<br />
What was intriguing was that when we began to practice empathy through the <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/06/empathy-and-imelda-marcos-protocol.html">use of protocols</a>,
Emily was very unenthusiastic, resistant and surprisingly
uncomfortable. I had (wrongly) guessed that she would embrace the
protocols because they were designed to gain understanding in ways that
were not your typical rational, analytic, lit-crit kind of reading that schools
and particularly Advanced Placement English classes specialize in. I anticipated that accessing a more emotional technique would be helpful to her in ways that I documented with other students in <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/06/student-comments-on-empathy-protocols.html">an earlier blog post</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cultureofempathy.com/Projects/Free-Empathy-Card/image/empathy-card.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="http://cultureofempathy.com/Projects/Free-Empathy-Card/image/empathy-card.jpg" width="652" /></a></div>
<br />
Emily
and I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out why practicing
empathy made her feel so ill at ease and anxious. And I think we came to a couple of realizations as a result that were helpful to her and revelatory to me.<br />
<br />
Emily was particularly good at feeling and expressing sympathy. <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sympathy">Sympathy</a>,
etymologically, is the act of having "fellow feelings" or of joining a
"community of feelings." Literally, it is "feeling together." This is,
in fact, what Emily was so good at--helping to create a
community of feeling that bonds people together. She cared about how other people were feeling, and she was brave enough to put forth how she was feeling as a starting point of connection.<br />
<br />
There are lots of examples of different communities of feeling coming together. Sympathy means that you acknowledge that people feel a certain way and that you feel bad for them, and that you
care about the fact they are feeling this way. The other person is in a
difficult place and you are acknowledging it--it is literally "feeling
sorrow or pity for someone else's misfortune." The brilliant Broadway
musical <i>Ave Q</i>, for example, contained <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gWShlg1bRk">a hilarious song</a> about how to build a community around a common idea-- "it sucks to be me." It is worth listening to; it will make you laugh.<br />
<a data-ved="0CAUQjRw" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=P0NDkQ1Gimv6_M&tbnid=QD7Qy_VRpuLCRM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmovie-posters.feedio.net%2Fschadenfreude-funny-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder%2Fia.media-imdb.com*images*M*MV5BMTY2NDkxMDgwMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzY1NDM2NA%40%40._V1._CR122%2C91%2C394%2C295_SX200_SY150_BO200%2C0%2C0%2C0_PIimdb-blackband-204-14%2CTopLeft%2C200%2C200_PIimdb-blackband-204-28%2CBottomLeft%2C200%2C-199_PIimdb-goldbutton-big%2CBottomLeft%2C372%2C-201_%2F&ei=pZ_iUYLXL82g4AOI3YGAAg&bvm=bv.48705608,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNGppznysaBjmvrkx_ZMEzG8zkpSRA&ust=1373892709197015" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="356" id="irc_mi" src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2008/02/11/cartoons/080211_cartoon_3_a13058_p465.gif" style="margin-top: 33px;" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
<i>Ave Q</i> flips this idea on its head as well by having those same characters admit to a secret Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude (depicted hilariously in another song from<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5isHw02S0Cg"> <i>Ave Q</i></a>)
is "feeling joy at the damage done to someone else" or "pleasure at the
misfortune of others." I sometimes wonder whether or not sympathy and
schadenfreude are just flip sides of each other. When the better angels
of our nature are at work we are sympathetic, but other times we are
less generous.<br />
<br />
Two of the stories that we used to practice empathy were Junot Diaz's "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxqB7X1v77A">How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl or Halfie</a>" and Bernard Malamud's "<a href="http://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/AngelLevine.html">Angel Levine.</a>" The protagonist in the first is a Dominican-American adolescent male, in the latter it is an aging Jewish man. The first is sometimes aggressively dislikeable, the second more pitiable. I wondered if the fact that these characters lived lives very far from my and Emily's own experiences made it difficult to find ways to connect to them or their situations.<b> Can you feel connection to, or compassion for, people whose lives are unimaginable, who appear hard to know from your perspective? What if you</b> <b>don't know them at all, can you develop skills to be able to imagine what this different life is, what this alien person feels? </b>What I realized from reading these stories with Emily is that having the ability to be sympathetic (as Emily demonstrated consistently in her day-to-day life) is one skill that is important as a reader of books and of life, but that empathy is different skill that may have to be acquired in a different manner for some people. It seems that sympathy and empathy are closely related--kind of a sister act--but that for all their similarities in terms of expressing connection to other people there may be important distinctions. <br />
<br />
Empathy, it turns out, is a surprisingly new word, having come into
existence in 1858 thanks to German philosopher Hermann Lotze who was
trying to explain how the appreciation of art depends on the viewer's
ability to project his personality into the viewed object. It was then adopted (or translated) into a psychological term by Edward Bradford Titchner in 1909. For Titchner, sympathy might be described as a "feeling with" someone, empathy is a "feeling one's way into." For example, Emily could have compassion for these characters, but she was quite unsure whether she could feel their actual feelings. In other words, Emily could feel sympathy for the characters, but projecting herself into either of the characters lives and experiencing those sensations was, as she said, "difficult, uncomfortable and potentially inaccurate." <b>It was this last phrase--"potentially inaccurate"-- that actually gave us the clue that unlocked the reason for why Emily was so comfortable with expressions of sympathy, but blanched at the idea of trying to be empathetic. Exploring that reason--her profound discomfort with "not knowing"-- will be the subject of the next blog post.</b><br />
<br />
For me, I was left to ponder how sympathy and empathy might<i> both</i> be used to form deep bonds of connections amongst people, but why one might be more accessible at certain times and in certain conditions. And, of course, to be thankful and grateful that I get to learn things like this from working with my students.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171250541612293421.post-25836134289012560592013-07-11T08:09:00.000-07:002013-07-11T08:09:14.339-07:00Wonder: Another Precursor to EmpathyIn the <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2013/06/precursors-to-practicing-empathy-role.html">last blog post</a> I was exploring the way in which the cultural hostility to ambiguity might make it difficult for the practice of ambiguity. But what spurred those thoughts was my reading of Tony Wagner's new book <i>Creating Innovators</i>. While I love the ideas that Wagner and others support, my focus always comes back to the practical implementation of these grand ideas. <b>What I have found in my own work with empathy is that the concept of ambiguity is actually a key precursor to being empathetic. If I could foster a deepened understanding of ambiguity as "multi-layeredness," then my students made progress in their ability to understand how someone else constructs the world. </b>The <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2013.783735#preview">study from the University of Toronto</a> confirmed some of my suspicions about why my students had some severe roadblocks to practicing empathy.<br />
<br />
Reflecting on these ideas, it occured to me that a missing link that needed exploration was the role of <i>wondering</i> in the development of empathy. Years ago I was trying to design an opening class that would be fitting for an experience-based program that used the world outside the classroom as both a laboratory and classroom. What we designed was a "wondering and wandering" expedition based on John Stilgoe's book <i>Outside Lies Magic.</i> (I wrote about this in an <a href="http://dkdkzone.blogspot.com/2011/08/availability-wandering-and-wondering.html">earlier blog post</a>.) But I can still remember the face of one student, Rose, as we returned from that first exploration to the parking lot and the campus beyond. There was confusion on her face, but also anger and resentment. It was not until later in the day that I had a chance to catch up with Rose to see what was happening. In halting sentences, she explained that she had felt ashamed and inadequate during the class. I was stunned. I thought we had engineered an "expotition" that Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh would have have been proud of only to realize that it had gone terribly, terribly wrong. But why?<a data-ved="0CAUQjRw" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&docid=GfSDLwaG-PhlpM&tbnid=Ku3_NIrh2Y2HtM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcovertocoverpurses.com%2Fitem_327%2FWinnie-the-Pooh-and-the-North-Pole-Expotition.htm&ei=YXTdUfCeDrKw4APCwoHYAQ&bvm=bv.48705608,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNEBh8FaCdnavqtnEBFP6DICs16Zww&ust=1373554117148991" id="irc_mil" style="border: 0px none;"><img height="349" id="irc_mi" src="http://covertocoverpurses.com/images/thumbnails/pooh1.jpg" style="margin-top: 48px;" width="466" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
Rose explained that she was embarrassed because she had realized that she didn't "wonder about things." In fact, she explained, she would go along almost every day without wondering at all. At first, I was <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gob1.htm">gobsmacked</a>; the idea seemed completely implausible. But as I talked with Rose it appeared to be true. And I have talked to other students since, they have confirmed that they often go through the day without "wondering." As one student said when I asked him as he was about to go into the Academic Dean's office, "Hey, I have two tests today, SAT prep and I probably won't even start my homework until 10 PM. Wondering is not on my to-do list."<br />
<br />
As I often do in cases like this, I looked at the etymology of the word <i>wonder</i>--and there it was. Wonder: "miracle, portent, horror, monster, object of astonishment." None of these things existed in Rose's life. In fact, she had designed her life (or it had been designed for her) to not contain these concepts. <b>Wondering, I realized, cannot be assumed; it has to be explicitly practiced, modeled, reinforced. And frankly, I am not so sure that we aren't as alienated from the idea of miracle as we are protected from horrors. </b>Nonetheless, I realized that adolescents do not have miracles and monsters in their daily lives the way they used to when they were younger.<br />
<br />
Practicing "wondering" on a daily basis might seem somehow silly to some, but as Rachel Carson said in her piece for Woman's Home Companion in July 1956, <a href="http://digitalmedia.fws.gov/utils/getfile/collection/document/id/1055/filename/1056.pdf"><i>Help Your Child To Wonder</i></a>, “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over
the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child
in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last
throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and
disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things
artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy excitement and mystery of the world we live in." Rachel Carson's particular venue for practicing wonder was the natural world on the coast of Maine, but I have found plenty of miracles and monsters in New York City's "urban jungle."<br />
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(A side note: The Environmental Protection Agency in its Aging Initiative has instituted the Rachel Carson <a href="http://www.epa.gov/aging/resources/thesenseofwonder/">Intergenerational Sense of Wonder Contest</a>, though I am not sure Rachel had a contest in mind to preserve our sense of wonder.)<br />
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After that class with Rose, I began to monitor the assignments I gave my students for their "wonderment factor." What I found about my own teaching was discouraging, but, I confess, not surprising. I did not have that many assignments that explicitly were designed to engage students in the act of wondering. <b>It was much more likely that I would be asking them to explain, defend, critique and assess the merits of of this or that thing. I was quite good, I found, at getting them to be insightful critics with lots of judgments.</b> But I was not very good at getting them to formally, or even informally, practice wondering. Check your own assignments--to both yourself and your students--and see if the same isn't true for you. <br />
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And while I have not had the courage to put "ability to wonder" on the critical thinking skills checklist at CITYterm, I am much more conscious that I need to activate this skill in order to provoke imaginative acts--like empathy. And, surprise, the more you practice it, the better you get at it.<br />
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Walker Percy in his novel <i>The Moviegoer</i> insightfully links the idea of wondering and wandering to the warding off of what I think many people succumb to--despair. <b>Theologically, and educationally, despair is something that occurs when you lose faith in the possibility of wonder. Wondering is what one does naturally when one is on "the search."</b><br />
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Percy's narrator, Binx Bolling, posits that "the search is what anyone would undertake, if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair...And I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder. Before I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion."<br />
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Going back to Wagner's book, <i>Creating Innovators</i>, one of its features is a series of case studies of
individuals who he hails as being truly innovative in one field
or another. For his purposes the people he is
examining are those who win every fellowship imaginable and invent
the I-phone. Wagner is examining a
Lake Wobegon on steroids where not only "all the women are strong, all
the men are good looking, and all the children are above average," but
they are the strongest, the best looking and the most exceptional. Nonetheless, what matters here is the role that "wondering" had to do with his subjects ability to be able to imagine. He tries to ferret out what he thinks are the conditions that made them innovative, and discovers that family and <b>school</b> have essential positive and negative roles. That is what interests me, the ways in which we can use the classroom, and our students' life experiences, to help them cherish the world of <i>wondering</i> and <i>imagining</i>, and lead them toward the deep waters of empathy.<br />
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<br />Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16811463567457697454noreply@blogger.com2