Category: Week 4 – Anti-Teaching / Mindful Learning

Um, Permission to Rebel?

“With organic systems, if conditions are right, life is inevitable.”

Equal parts comedian and educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley,” has a serious—though, too, seriously optimistic—message: We’re all humans. We’re all organic. We, in the United States, are not setting up our students to learn. There’s a solution to make our system better.

As humans, we’re born to be curious by nature; and such innate curiosity is what makes humans so advanced, as curiosity is, in Robinson’s words, “the engine of achievement.” Likewise, however, it’s also been an “achievement” of the U.S. to “stifle that ability” to be curious at all. Many of our (mine, included) posts these past couple of weeks have touched on students’ (and our) desire to check the boxes in school. It’s what we’re taught to do, in fact, regardless of the reality that the desire to mechanically move from task to task is not what we’re drawn to do; it’s what we’re compelled to do; it’s a method of self-protection.

This rings true already in these first few weeks of me teaching the new incoming class of freshmen. Have my students come to me—in-person or over email—to discuss the assigned readings, to collaborate on exploring one of their writing assignments, to consider alternatives to their approaches? Nah. But how many questions have I received along the lines of Will we have a final exam or How many pages does this paper need to be or Will you ever quiz us or Could I receive extra credit this semester if I __ or Will we be downgraded if the MLA isn’t perfect?

As an educator, passionate about the content I’m teaching, when asked these questions—especially when asked in the middle of a lesson—I’m thrown off, I squint my eyes, I study the context, I self-question, I…I’m like…what?

Okay, okay. I can’t fault my students. I, too, am a recovering perfectionist and can strongly empathize with students’ fear over missing a detail. I’ve had teachers who’ve downgraded me for not adjusting my page-number font to Times New Roman and who’ve threatened to not accept a paper if it were a minute late. Those are misinformed, troubling and dangerous methods of “teaching.” Who are those practices helping?

In his talk, Robinson credits the No Child Left Behind Act for being part of the problem in teachers’ and students’ conforming approach to education. How, after all, are teachers and students going to teach and learn creatively when existing within a system of conformity that calls for standardized testing, for narrowing the focus on STEM disciplines rather than teach them in conjunction with a broad curriculum that includes and fosters talents in arts, humanities and physical education as well? How can we foster curiosity when teachers are not supported to teach creatively? When our system is set up for the antithesis of individualized teaching and learning? When we’re not attributing a high status to the teaching profession? When we’re giving the power to call the shots to legislators without any education in the field of education?

Again, to feed curiosity, we must teach creatively, and in order to teach creatively, we must support our teachers. After all, as Robinson says, teachers are “the lifeblood of the success of schools.” But, as we know, teachers don’t receive the treatment they’re due.

What especially troubles me now as a GTA and student is to see this system play out at the college level. Growing up with my father as a middle-school teacher who received low pay, who had to purchase his own supplies for his classroom, who brought breakfast to feed his kids (many of whom were below the poverty line and, likewise, not being properly supported), who protested in the state capitol when our governor (who does not even have a bachelor’s degree, himself, and who later felt empowered enough to attempt to run for president) decided to gut (and succeeded in gutting) teachers’ unions in Wisconsin, I was raised with the expectation that our public school teachers would continue to be treated like dirt (because, apparently, they can be), and assumed that helpless children would continue to be subject to the repercussions of the government’s mistreatment of teachers.

College educators, though…their conditions couldn’t be the same. We’re in places of higher education. Campuses saturated with knowledge and respect for those that promote it.  

Nope. Look at the number of GTAs who are thrown into teaching without being given any support beforehand. Look at the GTAs, like me, with 2-2 teaching loads, entire responsibility of classes’ syllabi constructions, of creating daily calendars, of giving daily class instruction, of grading, of corresponding with and supporting students…and, oh, who also have to take a full load of classes and publish and write theses and dissertations.

I am part of the norm. And while, comparatively, I should be grateful for my stipend that lets me cautiously live, I should also point out that this treatment—for me, for any GTA, for any teacher at any level—does not encourage best teaching practices. Quite the opposite. It’s burnout.

I can’t help but connect Robinson’s talk to Ellen J Langer’s The Power of Mindful Learning in which she discusses our culture of “mindlessness”—of entrapment in old categories. That’s what’s happening in education, no? In our treatment of educators? Of students? Our education system as of now is one that does not encourage alternatives, that does not open itself to continuous creation of new categories, openness to new information, and implicit awareness of more than one perspective. In a world marked by doubt and difference, why are we not teaching in a conditional, context-dependent way that values uncertainty? Or, the better way to ask this, as Langer teaches, is to ask: How can we teach in a conditional, context-dependent way that values uncertainty?

“Mindless learning,” Langer states, “ensures mediocrity.” Instead of keeping to this system, we must rebel against education myths that currently rule our system, that “undermine our true learning…stifle our creativity, silence our questions, and diminish our self-esteem.”

I’m standing by my will to teach my students the art of rebellion.

A student of mine said to me last week that, even though the author we were reading used four exclamation marks for one sentence, she, of course, couldn’t do the same in her own writing for class. In response, I asked, “Why not?” to which she responded nonverbally, cocking her head in a BUT GRAMMAR RULES! look of confusion. “Keep playing with your piece,” I said. “I can be convinced that four exclamation marks can be appropriate sometimes.”

I’m sticking by my message. I won’t standardize my students, just like I won’t passively allow for keeping our system of education—at all levels of learning—at its current state.

GRAD 5114 – Engaging Mindfulness in Learning Environments

Two main things were on my mind while I read this week’s written works (here’s the link to Langer 2000) and watched Ken Robinson’s TED talk on Mindful Learning throughout this week.

  1. A question: Is this mindfulness as I know it?
    &
  2. A class I’ve just started: Communicating Science

These two things were on my mind because I have quite a bit of experience with the concepts of mindfulness from practicing yoga in some capacity for the last 14 years of my life and because the course, which first met on Thursday, actively asked us to be mindful of our bodies, thoughts, and feelings during class.

paddleboard_yoga
In a classic mindfulness activity “paying attention” is taking note of distractions, discomforts, and unrelated thoughts and then letting them go, like watching a passing train.

The way mindfulness is being employed in Communicating Science (coincidentally, the third class of the same certificate I’ve been blogging in classes for so far) is certainly mindfulness as I know it. It is taking stock of your condition mentally and physically to engage fully in the activities of the class. This was facilitated in our first meeting by writing out these checks on an index card throughout class when we did new activities and when we were informed we’d be on the spot to speak to the whole class about our research. I found this application of mindfulness in a learning environment very pleasant and helpful, and I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on whether this application of mindfulness fits into the concept of mindful learning discussed in our readings.

I think that what Langer and the others mean by “mindful learning” was a bit different, but fits well with mindfulness as I know it. The idea of mindfulness in learning here is, essentially, enhancing the learning experience by stimulating questioning. In many of Langer’s studies, the research team sought to avoid absolutes and encourage students to actively consider “exceptions to the rules” in the content they were consuming.

The herbivory example, block quoted below, stuck with me because this is so common in biology. I recall in Comparative Chordate Anatomy in undergrad (a ridiculously fun class) we talked about mammalian vertebral counts, and a statement along the lines of ‘almost all mammals have 7 cervical vertebrae’ grabbed my attention. I immediately wanted to know which ones DON’T have seven, and can say with some considerable certainty that most of them have 7 years later (yes, this includes humans AND giraffes). This certainty of a possibly hard to remember little fact becomes much simpler because of manatees flooping about with only 6 and sloths not being able to make up their minds for the world on how many they should have.

So mindfulness in a learning environment seems to be managing the environment so that curiosity is roused.

“Facts are typically presented as closed packages, without attention to perspective. Scientists know that research results in findings that are probably true given the context in which the work was tested (e.g., most of the time, under the stated circumstances, horses are herbivorous). When these findings are reported by teachers or in textbooks, they are translated from probabilities into absolute statements (e.g., horses are herbivorous) that hide the uncertainty.”
 – Langer, E.J. 2000. “Mindful Learning.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 220–223. (JSTOR link above)

What does it mean to learn in a “mindless context”?

Image result for mindless learning

When I was doing my master’s degree at VT, I had to conduct a real experiment on the Smart Road at VTTI. The experiment was intended to evaluate the human-vehicle interaction when driving an autonomous vehicle. We had 32 participants that they had to drive the autonomous car several times, passing a signalized intersection. The autonomous vehicle has the ability to manage and communicate with the traffic signal without any input from the driver and thus the vehicle will decelerate, stop, and accelerate by its self. All the participants were told to not react when getting close to the intersection. Interestingly, I had a participant who had a hard time to interact with the autonomous vehicle. Many times, she presses the break when seeing the traffic signal is red although she was required to not touch the break nor the gas peddles. Of course, when the participant presses the gas or break paddles, our experiment would collapse, and we had to repeat it. It took her a while to break this habit and start passing the signalized intersection when it’s red without touching either the break nor the gas peddles.

Think about the previous example and try to generalize it to many things we have learned in our life On a daily basis, we do many tasks without a second thought. We have become computers that are controlled by codes and behave in a predefined way.

In the educational system, this approach of learning leaves no room for accommodating any new change that might happen in the future. Even worse, students get criticized if they deviate from the traditional way and come up with their own approach. Even if their own approach seems to be longer or non-optimal, they should be appreciated for thinking out of the box and come with a different way, they should be appreciated for taking the brave and confidence and think differently.

Back in the 1990s, there was a woman who is very professional in cooking fish. One day, she was asked by one of her friends to teach her cooking, so she went ahead and started grabbing the ingredients and her friend was watching. At the first step of preparing the fish for marinating, she cut the head and tail of the fish and put them together into one plate. Quickly, her friend interrupted her, asking why did you do that? Simply, she said: “I don’t know! This is how I was told!” Then, her friend asked her who told you? She replied: my mom. Then, her friend insisted to go and ask her mom! they went together to her mom and asked the same question: could you please cook fish for us? She welcomed them and started preparing the fish and likewise, she cut the fish into three pieces as her daughter did. Now, both of them asked her: why did you do this? She replied: “This is how I learned from my mom (the grandmother of the daughter)”. This makes all of them eager to know the hidden reason! They were excited to figure out how it related in making it delicious fish. Three of them decided to go and ask their grandmother. They knocked on the door and found her sleeping on her bed. They gently asked her to cook for the fish, and the grandmother was surprised by this unexpected request but she had no choice but to do it. She did the same thing by cutting the fish into three pieces: head, tail, and the rest. Now, all of them asked her: why did you do this? She simply replied: “my plate is too small and cannot fit the whole fish so I had to cut it into three pieces”!!

Now, let’s think, how many times we were taught things/steps that are not part of the learning process? How many times the lack of tools in the class forced and boxed us into a single view? How much time we could have saved if we go on our own way and find the optimal path?

Personally, I think the problem happens because of the way that teachers approach.  In undergrad school, teachers intend to teach in detail, leaving no room for students to show their creativity or individual differences.  They teach in a way makes them think this is the only way to solve this problem. As grad students, when writing a paper and submit for a peer-reviewed journal or conference, we usually get criticized for using an “absolute language” but when we read books, we find they are written in a way that enforces us to believe them without a single doubt! How could we accept to publish books in an absolute language but not journals or conference papers?! Why do we think books are more trustable than papers although these scientific papers could be published as a book chapter? How could we build a fairer educational and research system that doesn’t favorite some people over others?

Mindful Learning in Today’s Academia

As a caveat, I apologize for the cynical and ranty nature of the following post, but I think that the issue of improving how administrations approach education is often overlooked and important.

It’s easy enough to look at drop-out rates, standardized test scores, and percentages of our population achieving degrees above the undergraduate level and say, “something is wrong with our educational system.” And, it is simple enough to say, “well, what we need are more individualized teaching experiences and a more mindful approach to education in general.” What is not easy is convincing a stagnant, research grant-motivated (a.k.a. financial) based bottom line academic system to support educators so that they can provide individualistically aimed lesson plans and dynamic teaching environments.

Academia today is a business, plain and simple. Publications and grants are the currency of that business, and the celebrated movers and shakers in academia are those that get multi-million dollar grants and publish in the most prestigious journals. For many institutions, the motivation for providing educational courses has become less about providing diverse and unique educational experiences and more about attracting as many tuition-paying students as possible.

These are all well-known and common concerns, but when one discusses these issues the recurring theme of how to improve education is extremely teacher based. Yes, teachers need to learn to teach in a more dynamic, organic and mindful (e.g. not strictly black and white, fact-based) manner, and there is no doubt that if teachers improve how they teach then students will benefit. But institutions, and our academic culture as a whole, need to buy into the idea that colleges and universities need to be focused first and foremost on education so that educators can feel and be supported in their goals.

To do this there are a couple of things that need to change. First, professors and teachers need to be given fewer ancillary responsibilities, so that they may focus on staying up-to-date in their fields and have the time to continually adapt their teaching materials to new ideas and discoveries. As an example, my master’s advisor was the chair of two university committees, sat on three more and was a member of 16 graduate student committees, multiple of which were not even in his department. On top of this, he was expected to keep up an active research program (publishing every year), mentor three graduate students and act as the graduate student coordinator for his department. When was he supposed to find time to adapt his four graduate-level courses to reflect the most up-to-date material and teaching methods? It is unrealistic and sadistic of an administration to expect its professors to give up what little personal and family time they have to work on teaching when it is hardly weighed as importantly in their annual reviews as research. I, for one, want my teachers to be happy and healthy.

And the teaching hurts for it. I took multiple courses in Entomology where the professors, who were very animated and excited individuals, clearly interested in their subject material, were teaching inaccurate and outdated facts, like Homoptera (cicadas, aphids, etc.) and Heteroptera (stinkbugs, assassin bugs, etc.) as distinct orders, when they were combined in 1995(!) into one order, Hemiptera.

Secondly, there needs to be a shift in the academic culture towards a greater appreciation of teaching, and those that decide to teach. When I bring these issues up to the professors in my department, they say “well, just teach at a small, liberal arts university where they value education more than research.” And, fingers crossed, I probably will. But there exists a powerful, and often not so subtle, underlying belief that by teaching at a liberal arts institution you are accepting a lower-quality position, and that you are admitting that you just cannot handle the rigors of a “publish or perish” tier one research institution. Choosing to focus on education is seen as a lesser pursuit than that of research, as though they are, or should be, at odds.  As an aside, I feel that rather than “admitting defeat,” I respect myself, and my family, too much to sacrifice what little personal time I have for the “incredible opportunity” to live to work.

I really love the concept of teaching in a more mindful manner, and presenting students with facts with the caveat that all things can change, and that we must keep an open mind whenever we are presented with hard fast “truths.”  I look forward to implementing mindful teaching, and gameification, into my curricula, but I should be able to do so without sacrificing time with my family, and without being looked down upon by my academic peers.

POST 3: How do we avoid education’s “death valley” if we are already there?

In listening to Sir Ken Robinson‘s TEDTalk on how our current education system works in the United States and it’s limiting factors, I could not help but feel extremely motivated. Robinson’s mixture of humor and shear logic in explaining the way in which human beings operate makes it easy to feel compelled to go make changes in the world. It was as if Robinson took all of my (and I’m assuming many other people’s) thoughts on education, sifted through them, organized them, and then put them into a cohesive and well-thought out argument.

However, in the same breath, I also could not help but feel very overwhelmed and almost helpless at the same time. While the points he made were valid and as noted, logical, they also seemed far-fetched and unrealistic. In a way, it feels a bit too little too late.

When I think about our current education system, I am also pressed to think about how our education system mirrors many aspects of our daily lives. While I could go on and on about this, I will use the workplace as an example here. For instance, much like standardized testing, when it comes to the workplace, you must also complete certain tasks in order to move forward with the company. Students and employees are motivated by grade increases and raises or bonuses. In addition, there is an established hierarchy within the workplace that is also evident in the education systems. 

Keeping this in mind, the trouble I have with what Sir Ken Robinson proposes is not the idea itself, but more so the realistic-ness of it. If we are to reform schools, does this mean a complete reformation to other institutions, such as the workplace? And if so, how?

It is clear that change is needed, even if it is just one state at a time like Robinson explains. I also believe that it is this change that could be crucial to the overall success of our nation and the future lives of our children. By removing the pressure to pass standardized tests and creating an environment where students feel inspired, as opposed to forced, to learn, we can create that change.

However, while this is easy to envision and even easier to say, it is a tall task to actually accomplish. Beyond the fact that it is a timely and meticulous operation, it is my honest belief that it is hard to avoid the education “death valley” that Robinson speaks of because we are already there.

Mindful learning in the Sciences

Reading Ellen Langer’s works on mindful learning got me thinking about how science is taught, and specifically how soil science and microbiology are taught. For context, both soil science and microbiology are relatively new fields, and microbiology especially is a rapidly changing field. The work that I do now would have been entirely inconceivable 15 years ago, and possible but prohibitively expensive even 10 years ago. Even the software that I use to process my data is constantly in flux. Every year a new database with updated taxonomy for microbial organisms is released, and the changes between database versions are significant. “The basics” aren’t even a guaranteed thing as the development of technology allows for better analyses of the microscopic organisms.

How do you teach microbiology when what we think we know can change from one semester to the next? This is where mindful learning comes in. Prefacing every lesson with “This is what we currently think we know, but we may be completely wrong” seems like a good place to start. Is it enough though? Are there other ways to encourage mindful learning in the sciences? I occasionally feel disappointed that when I took Environmental Microbiology only 4 years ago, the lab portion of the class is completely outdated. We mostly worked by culturing organisms, which is relatively cheap and more fun, because students can see things under a microscope. However, to date, none of my research has come close to doing anything similar. We simply don’t work with cultures, because we now know (believe) that only about 10% of organisms can be grown in lab cultures. I still believe that lab classes are very important in the sciences to give hands-on learning and provide another way to teach information that is difficult to convey in a lecture. Is there a way that we can teach labs with mindful learning when we know the skills we are teaching will most likely be soon outdated?

Un-expecting the Expected

This semester, I’m teaching a class called Principles of New Media. It’s part of a cluster of three courses prescribed to all incoming freshmen who wish to pursue a major within the school of visual arts. One of the goals of PONM is to establish a baseline proficiency in several computer programs that are used extensively in upper level art and design courses.

As technologies are apt to do, these programs are in a constant state of mutability. From year to year, changes are implemented to update their functionality and interface in pursuit of optimization. This creates a learning environment analogous to the description provided by Thomas and Seely Brown in Chapter 3 of A New Culture of Learning. As an educator, it’s challenging to introduce students to these tools knowing that their imminent restructuring is liable to render the specifics of my lessons obsolete. To best prepare my students to use this software in the future, I must be mindful in how I teach them in the present. It requires an approach that acknowledges the fluid nature of digital tools. Teaching with this in mind de-emphasizes the need to master a specific tool and places more importance on cultivating students’ ability to determine what it is they want to do. For example, rather than motivating an assignment through mastery of the specific functionality of a program, instead prioritize the students’ ability to think through the goals of their project, identify the skills and tools they will need to realize those goals, and use my lessons help them feel comfortable working with technology. Importantly, that comfortability must transcend the specifics of any particular tool or method that I demonstrate in the classroom. The reading by Langer showed how something as simple as the language I use to describe and explain these tools can have this effect. Using mindful language can open the door to finding creative solutions and facilitate students’ ability to adapt to changing technologies. Going forward, their ability to do that is much more important to their success than any particular mastery they could gain from my class.

Another challenge centers around expectation – specifically my expectations as a teacher. There is implicit bias in the programs that we use on computers and other devices, built in to their functionality and interface by the people that created them (despite whatever efforts may have been made otherwise). Similarly, as a person who is (in theory) familiar with the capabilities these tools, when I assign a project that requires the use of a particular software, I inherently hold an expectation for what the result of that assignment will be. Undoubtedly, this informs the way I teach, regardless of whether I consciously acknowledge this preconception or not. So, how do we as teachers disengage from our expectations in a way that is still dutiful to our obligation to share our knowledge without impinging on our students’ creativity? Once more, I think the article by Langer is useful in addressing this question. Being mindful of how I teach digital tools directly affects how creative students are when they use them. Teaching students how to use tools in a mindless manner will lead to work that meets expectations but will never generate work that is unexpected.

In some fields, expected results may be a good thing, but in art, the opposite is generally true. Art that shows us something we don’t expect tends to hold our attention longer. It changes our perspective by subverting something familiar and providing it with new context. I believe that this is more important than mastery of any particular skill or technique and imparting this idea to my students likely begins with how I approach my lessons.

Week 3: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Ironically, many are unhappy with an educational experience that has only rewarded them… These students have all been tested, tried, and found to be worthy of extreme praise. What does it mean when such an intelligent person gives the wrong answer?”

-Ellen Langer

 

So… when Ellen Langer listed music lessons as one of the places where limiting, hobbling mindsets are cultivated, I was a little piqued. I’d taken music lessons for years and felt a certain time-tested loyalty to The Music Lesson as pedagogical practice: I was accustomed to the rigor, rigidity, and self-discipline (or unhelpful, unhealthy self-criticism), the type-A personalities, the minefields of politics regarding everything from where one sat in an orchestra to how the music was played, and I paused for a moment and realized that this is precisely what Dr. Langer was talking about in her book, The Power of Mindful Learning.

In this book, Dr. Langer pushes back against conventional wisdom about education as well as conventional wisdom itself. Despite the fact that I have learned a great deal about imagining things, places, and people complexly, and despite my rigorous humanities training and the strong emphasis it placed on multiple perspectives, ambiguities and, iconoclastic takedowns of master narratives and Eurocentric models of everything from history to art to music to education, I am still trapped by what Dr. Langer refers to as mindless learning. Both in and out of the practice room, I do things every day simply because “that’s the way they’re done”, or “every other way is wrong”. This is especially ingrained in music: there’s only one correct way to hold a cello bow–all other ways are not only wrong, but could trigger a career-ending injury and subject yourself to a lifetime of “bad habits” (If I had a nickel for every time I heard that phrase in my lessons, I’d be a wealthy woman); the best way to learn technically-demanding passages in a piece is to drill-drill-drill until it’s branded onto your brain and you can play it without a second thought.

Let’s re-examine that, shall we? The goal is to “play it… without a second thought.” As a traditionalist, I can safely admit that I agree with a lot of the conventional wisdom offered by my many teachers (even the ones whose harsh critiques made me cry and quit playing for years at a time), but I do worry about the future of music practice and education when the goal is to learn for the sole purpose of not having to think about it ever again. Just think about the implications of that for a second, and you’ll be concerned, too.

The Duality of Mindful and Mindless Learning

When we talk of learning, what exactly is it that we talk about? There may be many things that one may draw reference to, nonetheless, there is a likelihood that amongst other things, knowledge and the process of acquiring the same would come through as being common. These two can be understood from many divergent ontological and epistemological viewpoints. The commonality remains in the fundamental structure of learning – let there be knowledge and a pathway to it.

When one engages in the act of learning, they come with an expectation to go through some process that culminates into the acquisition of knowledge. They come to seek the unconcealment. This expectation is their way of acknowledging their knowledge of their lack of it. This acknowledgement can take either form of being voluntary or involuntary. The act of learning is an attempt to unlearn their lack of knowledge in order for them to obtain it, synonymous with an attempt to deconstruct before construction. The process of unlearning the lack of knowledge can be a conscious one such as when one embarks on a journey to learn a particular subject. It could also be a subconscious one under which most natural learning takes place such as learning to breathe. The process could also be experiential, a duality of both the conscious and subconscious processes such as when one, in the course of learning a particular subject, ends up learning the medium of instruction too. The conscious process is a function of rational thought while the subconscious is beyond the scope of control being second to nature. One must either deliberately commit their rational self to the learning process or circumstances will enforce the learning. Either way, learning occurs.

Ellen Langer in her ‘Mindful Learning’ paper sets forth the concept of mindful learning which she distinguishes from mindless learning. She describes mindful learning as being characterized by open, uninhibited responses to contextual stimuli. This, she sets aside from mindless learning, the kind of which is routine-based and akin to programmed responses to stimuli. Accordingly, when one learns that 1+1 must equal to 2, they have mindlessly learnt and the result of this operation becomes second to nature. On the other hand, when one learns that 1+1 could equal to 2, they have mindfully learnt as this operation could take on a wide range of values depending on the context.

It is clear, at this point, that Langer’s distinction is drawn from the process aspect of learning, particularly, the availability of control and lack thereof in the mindful and mindless learning processes respectively.

Under mindless learning, when one decides to go and learn what 1+1 yields and not what subject-verb agreement means, it needs to be pointed out that, clearly, they are in control. However, as the learnt knowledge becomes second to nature when 1+1 must equal to 2 at all times, the scope of control yields in to the subconscious. This can be seen to demonstrate that mindless learning could be a blend of both the conscious and subconscious processes. On the other hand, the mindful learning process can be seen to be a predominantly conscious undertaking.  This seems to suggest that the classification of learning into either mindful or mindless ignores the existence of a third kind of classification, namely, the purely subconscious learning.

The symbiotic relationship between the conscious and subconscious as demonstrated in the mindless learning process seems to suggest the existence of a totality whose essence can not remain the same if the entity is broken.

It is important to note that the presence of control to initiate the mindless learning process seems to remotely suggest there being some mindful learning at play. Further, the mindful learning process seems to have subtle elements of ‘second to nature’ mindless learning such as the addition operation in the 1+1 learning example. Much as the individual values of 1 could be contextual, the addition operation may not. This begs the question; is mindful and mindless learning not a duality? Mindful learning seems to make possible mindless learning in much the same way that the latter sets forth the former.

 

 

 

Anti-Teaching / Mindful Learning

Anti-teaching is usually described as standardized and test-centered education, but I would like to clarify the definition further. Without this clarification, I think that changing current education systems could be a great risk, since throwing out the old without a new plan would cause chaos. Schools could become isolationists, refusing students from other schools and not forming community-wide plans to increase education. One school could completely disregard the achievements of students from other schools if they didn’t meet a set of vague standards. Would the ‘educational heritage’ and background of a student become even more impactful than their achievements? Even Ken Robinson in his talk [2] mentioned that testing is useful as a diagnostic tool, and the harm it causes today is from our over-reliance on it. This is a future of education that is not pretty, even if standardized testing is thrown out.

So what should standardized testing be replaced with? This is the question answered by the other readings of week, which have one thing in common: an inclusive and strong social connection with empowered students. A very real and practical example I have heard of this happening in classrooms at the very moment is a short “Good Times” moment at the beginning of class. In the Capturing Kids Hearts initiative, these moments are for teachers to simply ask the students to share with everyone the good things that they experienced in the past couple days. Several teachers [1] have talked about how it leads to students that are more inspired and focused on accomplishments. So a single student’s goal becomes a shared victory and a moment to inspire their peers to extend the success. I think that there is a great dual benefit though because it lets teachers understand what is happening to the students outside of the classroom. This is a true connection that lets teachers know what the students care about and to empathize with them, rather than a teacher-versus-students environment where the teacher separates themselves from the students. The role of a shepherd guiding a direction-less flock should never match up to what is happening in classrooms. Teachers that view themselves as the students’ student, as part of the community, strengthen that meaningful connection to students.

[1] Quillen, Ian. “’Capturing Kids’ Hearts’ Initiative Focuses on Relationship Building.” Educational Week, Edweek.org, 17 Oct. 2011, www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2011/10/19/01conversionside-relationships.h05.html.

[2] TED. YouTube, TED, 10 May 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc&feature=youtu.be.

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