Month: February 2017

In this Blog, I attempt to introduce the importance of mindfulness in learning and how rote culture hinders the student’s potential.

Mindfulness to learning approaches knowledge with openness to new information and perspectives, and the freedom to consider more than a single solution or a single way to approach a matter. The concept of mindfulness was further studied by Ellen Langer, who introduces seven myths that undermine teaching. These myths are engrained in the rote culture and affect the student’s process of learning. Rote culture sustains the idea that rote memorization, for example, is necessary for education.

Ellen Langer argument is that “what we teach” may be less important than “how we teach it”. In other words, sparking the interest of students may not be all about the subject, because there will undeniably be students who are more interested in the subject than others, but the key lies in the ability of sparking the curiosity of students so that even if they don’t particularly enjoy the subject of the course, they still find it compelling and worthy of their attention.

Nevertheless, some of us do encounter or have experienced in the past the rote culture as a student and sometimes as an instructor as well. The expectation that results are more important to the students and the professors than the process of learning or the progress achieved throughout the learning journey.

The rote culture has shaped everything from performativity, schoolwork, and tests, discipline, obedience to authority, timeliness, from dress code to the code of silence, standardized testing, and the approach to knowledge. Rote culture is vividly criticized for focusing solely on assimilating information without putting any thoughts or reflection to the knowledge. Rote culture encourages passive learning for the simple aim of getting good grades. Grades and standardized tests are the metric to measure student’s production and performance. Rote culture, as stated by Agger and Shelton (2007), is “banishing utopia, theory, and daydreaming as legitimate approaches to knowledge”. Students must memorize and do not learn to theorize, they speculate about the nature of the world and restrict their imagination to dig beneath the surface of things. Positivism grounded in the rote culture put an emphasis on facts and numbers and leaves aside the study of prejudice, class, race, gender studies, and interdisciplinary. Rote culture is a poison to learning.

In response to the rote culture and the pressure it has on students, I think that it is an outstanding ability for instructors to cultivate their student’s imagination and idealism but at the same time, instructors can quickly fall into the pattern of concealing the harsh reality of the job market. Thus, I believe it is of great importance to find a balance between letting students express themselves freely and helping them cope with the reality of high demand and performance, without losing their freedom and creativity along the way.

An amusing anecdote reflecting on the literary meaning of “rote culture” and the word “rote” in particular, in French “rote” means burp. Rote culture metaphorically refers to a culture in which students are forced to swallow all information and knowledge that is already given to them, depriving them of the ability or possibility to reflect on it and digest it well. Indeed, language can be fascinating at times.

 

References:

• Agger, Ben, and Beth Anne Shelton. 2007. Fast families, virtual children: a critical sociology of families and schooling. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
• Langer, Ellen J. 1997. The power of mindful learning. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.

When we say “learning”, we have already put it into a context that this is an open process. The ways to learn new things can be numerous. One needs to choose the one that is mostly fit him/herself. In another word, there is no such a learning methodology that is suitable for everybody. Some people may learn fast by rote while others may feel miserable getting through the strict protocol. Mindful learning is a more flexible learning philosophy than traditional learning that requires the students to follow the instructions step by step. The essence of mindful learning is to let the students think critically on the content they are taught rather than accept all of them mindlessly. Obviously, this learning methodology is good for the students to build up their own learning systems and apply the skills they have learnt in a more intelligent way. For example, in an architecture design class, students are taught how to draw the outline of the buildings based on the classic works of the top designers in the world. Students who perfectly follow all the instructions in the class can definitely be a good architecture designer but cannot surpass the colleagues who they are learning from. However, students who can adjust the designing based on their own understanding or preference exhibit the potential to produce the most creative work. Mindful learning certainly does a lot of good to me while I am doing research. Although I keep the habit to read the latest papers in my research field, I never design my research exactly following somebody’s protocol. Instead, I will integrate my understanding into my research and apply all the approaches I can get in a comprehensive way.

While I agree mindful learning is vitally important in areas that require creativity, I cannot neglect the importance of repetitive training in some areas that require strict skills. One example is gymnastics, the players need to finish a set of extremely difficult movements in a certain period of time to win the gold medal in Olympics. Considering the timescale to finish the movements is very short, the players cannot incorporate their thought into the movements while they are doing it. Therefore, the top gymnastic players need the repetitive training every day to strengthen their ability to finish the movements without thinking, which I call “mindless training” here. Mindless training applies for all the areas that require people to finish sophisticated skills in a short time. That is no wonder why almost all the top sports stars need a large amount of training every day. I have to admit that they are highly talented. However, they cannot be successful without mindless training because every detail need to be strengthened and naturally internalized into their bodies. As a conclusion of this blog, I would say both “mindful learning” and “mindless training” are important. The former works primarily for creative jobs while the latter works primarily for jobs that require perfect details.