Living with Rigorous Passion

Four years ago I was at a national conference about college level teaching.  The focus was sharing "effective, new approaches" to learning.  I was attending a session in which a professor was demonstrating how she had integrated video segments into her students' learning modules, in an effort to engage more diverse learners and increase engagement.  Today, that doesn't sound like such an earth breaking idea and that's not why I remember the session so vividly.  It's what happened next that sticks with me.  An audience member, seated a few seats down from me, was holding her hand up high, clearly fighting back her desire to say something.  The presenter paused and called upon her.  The audience member spoke, almost angrily, "Where is the rigor in that?!"

What followed was an awkward exchange between the presenter and the clearly annoyed professor who had asked the question.  The participant went on to demand, "We need to be requiring rigorous experiences for our college level students."  I remember sitting there, watching this exchange, thinking to myself, "What the hell is this really about?" 

After four years of chewing on that experience, it's a little more clear to me.  In the United States, we are confused about the essential underpinnings of of education. I've learned through my experiences as a student in K12, college and graduate school but more so through watching my two boys proceed through public elementary school.

Early on, we teach our children to sit, to write, to take multiple choice tests, to read books not for enjoyment and imagination but to score high on the multiple choice test that follows.  Oh, and by the way, earn enough points on those tests to be recognized amidst your peers or publicly crucified in front of your friends as one of those who couldn't make it into the 100 point club.  It's heart wrenching. 

These activities slowly teach our children that what matters to them -- what they love to do, what makes them happy -- is not an important part of an education.  We teach our children that to be successful in life, we must experience misery.  Now don't get me wrong -- misery is different from hard work.  And I would bet many people who has or who has had kids understands what I mean by this.   Kids will work endlessly to defeat a level in a video game, including going online to tap into communities and collaborate with gamers to understand how to advance.  They'll wake up at 2am to go online to harvest their potato crop in an effort to feed their crew of zombies and invade the local farmers.  They'll spend hours remixing videos with alternative audio tracks to express an opinion about something they feel strongly about.  But we continue to teach them that these things don't matter -- they're just superfluous, meaningless activities that will get you nowhere in life.  Now if we have a child who locks herself in her room for hours at a time to read novel after novel, that's a different story -- right?  We have biases against learning digital media that are silently destroying our childrens' passion.  And these biases are preventing us from seeing the potential to use digital media in public schools -- not to harvest zombie crops but to teach core competencies.

When I was young, I was fortunate to have parents who taught me to do what I loved.  When I got to college, I struggled in my large lectures classes.  I got great grades and ended up graduating Cum Laude.  But I didn't truly learn much in most of my classes that I was required to take.  I see now that grades in most college classes really do not equate to learning.  They are more aligned with seat time and how effectively you can memorize facts.   

You may argue that I got such good grades because I was an Art major and then received a graduate degree in Art History -- geez, I mean, where's the rigor in that, right? Well, my studies in art and art history taught me to see the world differently.  I learned how to value ideas that change the course of humanity, ideas that get shunned and disregarded as irrelevant by the mainstream until they slowly take hold and begin their slow disruption. 

My experiences as a student in art and art history also taught me how I learn best.  As a student, I was drawn to studying a visual discipline because I could understand it.  I remember feeling lost, confused, and stupid in my lecture classes that never integrated visual imagery.  Again, I did fine in those classes but only after spending countless hours agonizing on my own, with my books, taking laborious notes and figuring things out on my own.  I see now that it was the "rigor" that turned me off to other disciplines.  I worked hard in my art classes, learning how to draw, how to comprehend color and spatial relationships, how to create photographs of my surroundings in black and white and color, how to manipulate imagery in digital form, and how to understand the ways that images in my daily life are constructed to manipulate me.  It made me feel alive.  It made me feel talented.  It encouraged me to find my voice.  It made me feel good about myself. It made me want to live with rigorous passion.

If you can relate, you may enjoy checking out Sir Ken Robinson's new book, "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative." 

CEOs to America: Seeking Creative Disruptors

IBM's Institute for Business Value recently surveyed 1,500 chief executives to understand what the most highly sought after business skills are today.  #1?  Creativity.

Creativity has always been a driving force in innovation and innovation stirs disruption.  As business leaders continue to become more thirsty to find ways to set their business models and products apart from their competition, they need creative thinkers who can bring fresh, new ideas to the table.

While leadership in the private sector has clearly identified creativity as an essential business skill, has the same occurred within education?  Are our schools, colleges and universities clearly seeking evidence of innovation in our new leaders?

Moreover, while we, as educators, continue to focus on how to best meet the learning needs of today's Millennial students, this survey is more evidence that we need to also be reinventing the overarching objectives of education in general.

"How does the class you teach contribute to fostering creativity in your students?"

"Congrats! You did it Wrong!" The Critical Role of Innovation in Education

"Congrats! You did it wrong!"

Sounds odd, doesn't it? Encouraging mistakes is a paradigm shift for a society who raises children in a context in which he who earns the highest percentage of correct scores or reaches the finish line the quickest is the one who is rewarded and praised.

However, what must be realized is a person who is raised to fear mistakes will not take risks. And a society void of risk takers is a society void of innovation. As we sit here ready to plunge into the second decade of the 21st century, we all should now be cognizant of the critical importance of innovation across all spectrums of our society -- this includes teaching and learning. We need change agents, we need out-of-the-box thinkers, we need creative minds. We need to foster a generation of risk takers and I believe we, as educators, need to be weaving risk-taking into our pedagogy to model it to our students. Risk-taking is teaching creativity. It's teaching entrepreneurial thinking. It's teaching 21st century skills. It's what we need to be doing every day in our classroooms. And it's ok to make mistakes -- we should be striving to make mistakes because without them we aren't learning how to transform our existing models of learning.

Joshua Kim has offered a wonderfully insightful and some would still say "brave" excerpt of a sociology teaching experiment that required risk taking on his blog. In the end, his experiment resulted in some successes as well as some failures. What was his experiment? Instead of requiring his students to complete research papers, the traditional outcome of a higher education experience, he offered his students the experience of working with multimedia to create "voice-over lectures and video mashups" (with Jing and iMovie) that would be placed publicly online through YouTube. Check out his students' impressive work!

The success? As Kim notes, "We created a warm and supportive learning environment. The students did great work. I think we covered the foundations of the sociology, and maybe got some people excited (and prepared) to take more courses." The failures? The technologies implemented for creating the project took a long time to master (not everyone enters a sociology class with video editing skills) which limited the amount of time the students had to engage more thoroughly with the curriculum.

I have, personally, reflected on this challenge myself as I have thought through the potential of encouraging faculty to integrate movie-based projects into learning. My suggestion to Kim (and one that I left in a comment to his blog post) would be to check out Animoto, and easy way to create videos with voiceover from still images. The resulting productive doesn't use video but it creates a high quality video with amazingly cool transitions set to music. Animoto even incorporates the ability to use voiceover and text-only slides. The training time is minimal and (here's the best part), it's all web-based (students can do it from home with an internet connection) and they offer free accounts to educators!

Cheers to Kim and his efforts. Do you have examples of risk taking to share from your classroom? Take a risk today and applaud yourself or a colleague for making a mistake. Start a paradigm shift. Be a change agent.

MBA Applicant? Creativity is required

The University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, one of the top business schools in the world, announced a new requirement today for applicants. In addition to the traditional application and essays, each applicant is required to submit up to four Powerpoint (or Keynote I presume) slides about themselves. One might think this is an attempt to judge the applicant's ability to use Powerpoint efficiently; however, the school indicates that "[t]he slides submitted with the application will not be judged on technical ability but rather the self-expression that is revealed." Hmm. Looks to me like creativity is rearing its head even more prominently in the business world. In 2004, the Harvard Business Review published an article by Dan Pink titled "The MFA is the new MBA" which indicated an interest from MBA programs in pursuing potential MFA (Master's of Fine Arts) candidates. Looks like this trend is moving along. Creativity is becoming one of those essential qualities for success in the 21st century. It has the power to differentiate you from the others and the power to provide you with the ability to take risks, find innovative solutions to problems, and live a more meaningful life. So, remember, art classes aren't just for painters anymore.

Story: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/7/prweb539763.htm
MBA is the new MFA http://www.michael-r-nelson.com/design_blog/images/HBR_Feb2004.pdf