On Saturday morning, while walking Lucy, I had an interesting experience. I listened to a TED-talk podcast for a TED talk that turned out to be very visually oriented – “Rob Legato: The art of creating awe.” I so enjoyed imagining what was happening that I could not yet see. Because I was familiar with the histories and the films being shared, I am certain that I could see in my mind’s eye what was happening on that TED-stage screen.
When I got home, I could not wait to watch the TED talk, so that I could compare my pre-visualization with the reality. In some cases, I was pretty close. In other cases, Legato shows slides that he does not explain in words, so I had completely missed some screen jokes and key lines that I had guessed completely wrong. The auditory experience and the visual experience were both important and fun, and I am glad that I was able to have both.
Of course, I thought of some other things as well…
Why do some of us teachers say that we are not in the entertainment business? Why are some teachers so resistant to being thought of as entertainers? Think of what the world spends on movie entertainment. Think of how we could learn to create awe from being artistic in our teaching and learning environments.
I love the idea of using simulations, matched with reality, to place the brain in a fully real-world perception. That seems to have educational legs!
Isn’t it cool to think about what we remember as our most powerful, important learning moments? How might we re-imagine school to mimic what we remember about those moments? For creating awe seems to be more about what we remember than what actually is happening in many cases.
I learned so much from this TED talk – “Rodney Mullen: Pop an ollie and innovate!” – and I have no intention to literally pop an ollie. But I can think of 1,000 ways that Mullen’s lessons apply to schools and school change. Here’s just one…
Context informs content.
Mullen also provided incredible wisdom about creating for the sake of creating and contributing to one’s peers and to one’s community…not for earning the championship (read – highest grade, as I was listening). In fact, after winning 35 of 36 competitions that he entered in his 11-year pro career, he shared that the loss at the end really allowed him to create most joyfully.
Questions may be the single most important thing about learning, about school, about nurturing curiosity. If we want creativity to flourish, then we must nurture curiosity in schools.
Is school nurturing questions? How might we experiment with “school” so that we develop the core of curiosity and questioning – of the students, teachers, parents, administrators alike?
Over the weekend, thanks to Zite, I read a fabulous article entitled The Creativity Crisis. It may be one of the most important articles I have ever read. I hesitate to write much on this blog post because I would rather readers spend the time reading the article. In the piece, Bronson and Merryman weave together educational psychology, neuroscience, project-based learning, human development…and hope. Hope bred from motivation which considers how we educate young people. What are we nurturing in young people by the way we are educating them? Do our hopes and needs match our means and habits?
Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.
– Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in “The Creativity Crisis,” Newsweek, July 10, 2012, as found on The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
How might we keep them asking questions! How might we reflect back to them that we are all creatives…all discoverers! We began as such. School should nurture and develop such – for us all.
Are we facilitating the development of new discoverers? How are we balancing time spent in desks and textbooks with time spent exploring, hypothesizing, designing, and experimenting? Are we out of balance in the ways that many schools are operating? Adam Savage, of Mythbusters, sheds some light on the wonders of science and exploration and discovery in his TED talk: “How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries” (and embedded below). How might we re-imagine and re-purpose time in school so that we create the space and atmospheres of exploration and discovery? How might we make school more about getting in the field…couldn’t we flip the field trip? Through whatever means, we must help students understand that they are the discoverers…that they can change the world.
What happens when you look at what the discoverers were thinking about when they made their discoveries it that you understand – they are not so different from us. We are all bags of meat and water. We all start with the same tools.
I love the idea that different branches of science are called fields of study. Most people think of science as a closed black box. In fact, it is an open field. And we are all explorers. The people that made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at. And they were a little bit more curious. And their curiosity changed the way people thought about the world, and thus it changed the world. They changed the world.
And so can you.
– Adam Savage…6 min, 30 sec mark of 7 min, 30 sec talk
How are you helping to nurture questions, curiosity, exploration, and discovery? If you are not doing so, you are more aligned with the problems than with the solutions.
As an architect, I often ask myself,what is the origin of the forms that we design? What kind of forms could we design if we wouldn’t work with references anymore? If we had no bias, if we had no preconceptions,what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience? If we could free ourselves from our education? What would these unseen forms look like? Would they surprise us? Would they intrigue us? Would they delight us? If so, then how can we go about creating something that is truly new?
Michael Hansmeyer gives a beautiful TED talk. On the concrete and literal level, his architectural forms are stunning – based on the processes of nature for cell division and generative folding. On the metaphorical level, Hansmeyer taps into a river of thinking that deserves more flow in schools and education. How can we design the forms of “school” by functionalizing process – the processes to which we want to introduce students and learners of all ages?
Imagine the forms that could result if we would design for process like we try to design for product…even more than we try to design for product. Process is the horse, product the cart.
This morning, I discovered Kelli Anderson. She is brilliant, and I will be thinking for days on end as a result of watching her TEDx talk. Her designs leverage pathways between the expected and unexpected. [This makes me think of water and butter again.] In addition to being incredibly creative in their own rights, Kelli’s design philosophies seem to encourage re-examining the familiar and the everyday across many domains. Her advice and inspiration could certainly be applied to what we have come to expect from “school.” What if we expected more? What if we tweaked and re-designed to build something even more creative and purposeful for the next decade? What if we harnessed “disruptive wonder for a change?”
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