Category: Week 3 – Anti-Teaching / Mindful Learning

mind·ful·ness

ˈmīn(d)f(ə)lnəs/

noun

1. the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something, “their mindfulness of the wider cinematic tradition.”

2. a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique. 

Thanks, Obama.

(Kidding, kidding. Thanks, Google.)

I wanted to start with a definition of mindfulness (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) because I am repeatedly told I should be more mindful and that I should practice mindfulness for my own wellbeing. And boy oh boy, did (do) I find that irritating.

The first time I heard this, I felt that I paid plenty of mind to my body, thank you very much. I did yoga. (Don’t do a desk job if you hate that.) I did physical therapy. (Don’t break your pelvis if you’re not into that either.) I loved all the doggles and sought to keep them active. (Don’t think a fenced in yard is a substitute for the quality bonding time of walking your dog. It’s not; it’s just a bonus for your dog.)

And I think the issue for me here is that I associated this with the whole mind/body connection, and I (believed that I) accepted my bodily sensations. Many of these sensations involved pain, from working desk jobs and recovering from past injuries – not to mention… keeping up with the dogs dashing on. (I know, bad pun, I know, but I couldn’t help it. They run around the yard like maniacs. There’s a connection there, right?)

It’s the “calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts” part that I’m not so great at, I guess, but that’s a story for another post. For this post, I want to talk about mindfulness in teaching. Ellen Langer’s article “Mindful Learning” emphasizes just how much existing methods of teaching can render students mindless, immobile in their own boredom, locked away from the parts of their minds that would build creativity and critical thinking skills. (If we’re being honest, this was me for the better part of my K-12 educational experience. I was intelligent enough to do well, and without paying much attention to the subjects I didn’t particularly care for.)

Where boredom could have run rampant, I liked school enough to try and push toward the creativity on my own… as long as it was a subject that interested me. If not, I merely attempted to perform well enough for a good grade. So my experience with a mindful education was hit and miss, I’d say. I still enjoy reading and writing, but don’t hold your breath if you want me to draw anything better than a stick figure. Don’t even ask me to do any math. (What a snoooooozefest that was for me. Alas! We have much work to do if we want to engage our students.)

By the time I got to college, I realized I was disconnected from some opportunities in my higher education experience because I hadn’t embraced technology fast enough. (How was I to know that the Facebook posts and Tweets that I derided as time-wasters would end up being qualities desired for some positions?) This was, in part, because I completed my undergraduate education during a time in which professors were often getting on board with (often imperfect) technologies themselves. We didn’t get a computer until I was 12, which wasn’t bad given that it was 1998, but my parents lacked the skills necessary to really give me any ideas about how it would be useful. I wouldn’t really encounter this until graduate school. (Now, Canvas is my life. It’s my favorite LMS that I have so far encountered, whether as student or as a teacher.)

Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk also touched on this in some ways, and it particularly resonated with me when he said “Teaching properly conceived is not a delivery system.” This is true. I also thought he was spot on when he reminded us that “Education is a human system.” These are two things we as educators certainly claim to know, two ideas our pedagogies are supposed to embody. Despite that, however, we live in a world of mass testing and curriculum objectives identical for all students, no matter their individual interests or needs. (No wonder 60% of students drop out of high school in some parts of the US, as Robinson notes in his TED Talk.) Somehow we’re supposed to just “take it all in.”

Thinking about this “human system” that now often seems as obstructed by technology as it is advanced by it, I want to go back to the Langer piece to address a comment she makes near her conclusion:

“The simple process of mindful learning, of actively drawing distinctions and noticing new things, seeing the familiar in the novel and the novel in the familiar is a way to ensure that our minds are active, that we are involved, and that we are situated in the present. The result is that we are then able to avert the danger not yet arisen and take advantage of opportunities that may present themselves. Teaching mindfully not only sets students up for these advantages, but has advantages for teachers as well.”

Here, I know she’s speaking in the context of education, but as education affects one’s whole life, I would assert she’s making a much larger connection overall. Being mindful, being situated in the present, provides opportunities in all sorts of contexts. The key is representing this by demonstrating it to students through better pedagogical practices, in addition to showing them the ways that being engaged improves other aspects of their lives.

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.

I realize the title statement isn’t always the case. Sometimes the more you expect, the more you get disappointed or the more you expect, the more pressure you apply which could lead to a negative result.

But I am referring to the positive outcomes that result from people who have the fortune to have someone who believes in them and expects them to do better and eventually master a certain skill. Sir Ken Robinson mentions it in his TED talk when he says “there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don’t”. Oftentimes we see students who drop out, as people who are giving up, instead of considering that for them it may be deciding to leave a system that has given up on them. I read an article on how Teacher’s Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform which led me to reevaluate my school years (primary to high school) and the role that my teachers’, classmates’, and my parents’ expectations of me played in my overall performance. I was at the top of my class and I do remember feeling a sense of responsibility to maintain the high level of achievement that was expected of me. In contrast, some of my friends who did not receive this kind of support and expectation from our teachers or their parents, felt very disengaged during classes and were not motivated to do the work assigned for after school either. Fast forward a few years to my move to Virginia to attend graduate school where I was perceived very differently based on my gender and ethnicity and confronted with the idea of whether that has an effect on my capabilities. I am still discovering how or if that kind of questioning affected or affects my performance. While revisiting all this, it also made me question what happens first: does the expectation lead a student to do well? or is a student who performs well early on then expected to continue on the same path? How strong is the impact of external factors such as other people’s perceptions on your capabilities?

In the study mentioned in the article above, they suggest that a change in teachers’ behaviors can also lead to a change in their expectations which in turn affects their students’ performance. This seems to emphasize what Sir Ken Robinson mentioned about the importance of increasing the support and professional development of teachers in the United States if we hope to decrease the drop-out numbers and increase a sense of satisfaction through education and learning. By implementing what Ellen J. Langer calls mindful learning, there seems to be a shift in the focus from the information at hand back to the individual–the person doing the learning as well as the one facilitating it. It all comes back to the people, but people are very diverse. Therefore, too much standardization can leave out great numbers of students to our collective disadvantage where we are all deprived of their individual talents.

Perhaps Ken Robinson best captures a common problem that also concerns Wesch and Langer; a dominant culture of education in the U.S. that is targeted toward conformity and compliance. He states that we hold a mechanistic model of education, treating it as an industrial process that can be improved with more data; more data from standardized tests that can accurately measure improvements in student learning. Langer’s version of this is that we’ve bought into the myths of learning that involve memorization, deference to authority, and breaking down a task into discrete elements, each of which can then be practiced and mastered. So things become second nature and automatic; mindless. This leads to a performer of some sort that is technically proficient, but who’s actions have a mechanistic quality to them. The problem Wesch sees is that the structures of higher education classrooms and courses are oblivious to the individuality of students, seeing them as soulless containers that will be filled with facts and information. No wonder, then, that students become bored and unmotivated when we educate them not to genuinely think, but rather for “low grade clerical work.”

Instead, they argue that real learning involves seeing human beings as radically diverse, each with their own questions about “who am I,” and “what am I going to do”? Robinson argues education must involve a culture of creativity, based on the concept of education as an organic system, not mechanistic. Langer argues for teaching that fosters mindfulness; “teaching in a conditional way [that] sets the stage for doubt and an awareness of how different situations call for subtle differences in what we bring to them” (16). Wesch gets to this more humanistic model of education by creating learning environments in which a student’s unique “gifts” and talents can be engaged as a source of motivation and learning. He speaks to environments that can recognize the heroic dimensions of each student that also fosters compassion and “to build a life worth living,” resources to get us through the dark night of the soul.

So I think these arguments are all quite important. My primary concern is that they are silent on the broader social and political forces that are institutionalizing industrial forms of education. To be fair, Robinson comes close to this broader problem when he invokes the mechanistic model of education, as an industrial process. He also speaks to the need for a broader curriculum, including the arts and humanities. But beyond this, the solutions they offer seem to be premised on the problem that teachers need better teaching methods. This may be true, but it leaves unchallenged the structures that have perpetuated Langer’s mindless myths, Wesch’s abysmal classrooms, and Robinson’s “culture of compliance.” What about the notion of politicizing their audience? To urge them toward at least some collective action to challenge the corporatization of higher education? Don’t we need to speak at much more loudly to the broader structures and ideologies that are creating a generation of students that are left with small answers to small questions?

My first reaction to this week’s topics was not very promising. The term “anti-teaching” elicited an unspoken “What?” in my head. The phrase “mindful learning” was also confusing to me – can one really learn anything mindlessly? Of course I had not done any reading at this point, and I had to remind myself to keep an open mind.

After all was said and done, I have to admit that there were still ideas and pronouncements that I found difficult to wrap my head around, but at the same time, I appreciate the passion and advocacy of Michael Wesch and Ellen Langer, because I share the same commitment to fostering student success. If anything, I found that their heart is in the right place, and their ideas provide great starting points for reflection and discourse.

I agree with Michael Wesch that it is important for students to “find meaning and significance in their education.” As someone who was also a student at one point in time, I can certainly see how it can be easy to fall into a cycle of merely trying to “survive,” of, for example, desperately trying to remember which formulas to use for what type of problem – at least until after the test is done. It is when one finds the “so what?” and sees what role today will play in the future that deep and meaningful learning can occur.

That being said, I found it difficult to relate to the notion that “teaching can be a hindrance to learning.” While I do see where Wesch is coming from, I found myself arguing that maybe there is only a certain context ascribed to teaching that may end up detrimental to student learning. Maybe if we thought of teaching as more of an act of facilitating learning as opposed to talking at students, it would not be such a hindrance to the learning process, at least when hindrance is taken in the context of what Michael Wesch was talking about. For this concept, I find Barr and Tagg’s (1995) article on the shift to the Learning Paradigm particularly interesting and informative.

I also found it hard to read that learning “the basics” so that they become “second nature” as a “myth.” When I read Langer’s Mindful Learning, I began to associate the concept with intentional learning as discussed by Jeanne Ormrod (2012) in her book Human Learning. While I also see where Langer is coming from, I believe that there is value in learning certain things to automaticity, to a point where they become second nature; if anything, it is because we have learned some things to automaticity that we are able to learn in a mindful and intentional manner, because it is at that point where we have the luxury of focusing on what truly matters.

This topic has really opened my eyes not just to how I should be teaching once I become a professor but also how I am currently learning as a student. As I was reading about the difference between mindful learning and mindless learning I realized that I may be more prone to mindless learning which is something that I will now actively try to fix. I feel that my learning and study habits have actually gotten worse since being in grad school. This is most likely because I am so focused on my research projects that I don’t leave enough time to focus on my course work (for example I left writing this blog post until the very last minute again this week). This is something that I will really strive to work on in my last few semesters as a student. I think that if become a mindful learner it will help me to become a better professor, who can hopefully instill the importance of mindful learning onto my students. I definitely think that I have gotten caught in the habit of doing my assignments just to get them done and studying the material that I think will most likely be on an exam rather than trying to really understand and absorb the material. This is a major issue that I didn’t even realize I had and I am really glad that this topic came up so early on in the semester so that I can attempt to change my habits now.

A while ago, I read in Virginia Tech news that to facilitate interactive and technology-driven learning, Virginia Tech spends $42 million to have a brand-new building with state-of-the-art classrooms. These classrooms have moveable furnishings, wall-mounted writing spaces, and multiple screens for sharing students’ work. Besides, some classrooms are specifically designed for team-work and active learning. Although I have not been to any of these classrooms, I hope that these facilities can increase students’ interaction and then learn better.

I think students come to class because they want to learn something. Even with this good goal or motivation, it is not hard to find students, who look bored, disengaged, or even fall asleep in classrooms. Traditional classroom setup (with desks in straight rows facing the front of the classroom where the teacher stands or sits) limits interaction between students and teachers and students with each other, which limits students’ relational involvement and connection, leading to students’ disengagement. Studies showed changing desks in different patterns, decorating the classroom, or changing light and temperature of classrooms could significantly improve the learning environment, therefore the student’s engagement. Luckily, these changes have been seen in many classrooms. I have talked to other students and agreed that students now want more interactions in the classroom environment. Students want a stronger relationship with teachers, with peers; want teachers know their background and learning style; and want their teachers to establish an environment to promote interdependent relationship and a culture of learning. With support of technology, connection and communication are getting easier and faster than ever.

Therefore, I have reasons to believe that the classroom environment plays an important role in students’ learning experiences. A classroom with interactive and technology facilities will support students to learn, apply their learning, and turn it into their knowledge. Of course, a modern classroom is not enough; teaching technique, learning activities, and method of assessment to name a few are also needed.