[MD] 42

[Dan Glover]

Arlo,

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 11:29 AM, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu>
wrote:
>
> [Dan]
> I have a a few questions. Does academic schooling tend to breed out
creativity in students?
>
> [Arlo]
> This is (as I see it) actually two separate questions. (1) Does the
current model of education in practice in most schools breed out creativity
in students? and (2) Does academic schooling 'ipso facto' breed out
creativity in students?
>
> That is, is 'schooling' itself the issue, or is it the 'way we school'?
IMHO, the answer to the first is most assuredly "yes", and study after
study shows this to be case. This is starting to change, mostly because
post-industrial economies require original/creative thinking whereas
industrial economies (on which our current educational model still follows)
not only de-emphasized creativity and critical thinking but deliberately
and actively moved to squelch them.
>
> My answer to the second is "no", schooling (or learning, or instruction,
or education) is not anti-creativity. Bourdieu has suggested that all forms
of 'enculturation' were a form of symbolic violence. But, of course,
enculturation was also necessary for agency. The extreme idea of a lone
person who matures in isolation on a desert island may not have any forms
of symbolic violence exerted against her/him, but will have very little
agency to act in the world.
>
> You give a child a toy car, you've just coerced them (enculturated them)
into seeing the world a certain way.
>
> The key to this (again, IMHO) is the shift Pirsig made (as an
instructor). He didn't abolish the teaching of rhetorical 'structure'
(outlines, authoritative references, footnotes, etc.) but taught these
structures as ways of increasing learner agency in their writing. In this
light, what we need is not to abolish the teaching of structure, but to
contain that in a larger system where these structures can be evaluated as
to how good they serve an intended purpose.

Dan:
Interesting... from what I understand, what Pirsig did was to actively
engage the students in evaluating their own work. He sought to show them
that they already knew the good from the bad rather than telling them.

Show vs tell seems to work as a two-way street whereby both instructor and
student become more cognizant of the lesson. From the Freshman Paper on
Quality:

"During one assignment I included a paper of my own so that I could discuss
its
superior points. To my chagrin three different sections rated it second. "

Dan comments:

All of a sudden the instructor finds himself playing the student. Of course
such circumstances would annoy a person since they've been trained to be
the teacher. The paper he presented should have rated head and shoulders
above the others. Who has learned what?

>
> [Dan]
> Arlo's talk of accessing the student's development and moving it along
seems to indicate there are pre-designated parameters at work. Are these
parameters based upon the individual students or are they cookie-cutter
style textbook learning exercises designed to mimic rather than open new
vistas?
>
> [Arlo]
> Of course there are 'pre-designated' parameters, education presupposes
that at point A there is something a person can not do, you have the
educational intervention, and then at point B they can do it. The
instructor should know what is necessary to make this transition and help
the student take the steps they need to bridge this gap. A skilled guitar
instructor will see what you can do, where you struggle, and keep your
activities oriented to keep challenging you, build upon what you know, and
offer strategies for overcoming deficiencies.

Dan:
Does this method work within a group setting, like a classroom, as well as
in one-on-one instruction? You seem to be indicating the later in your
answer while from what I gather, most classroom instruction is done using
the group method.

Creativity, if I understand it at all, is more of an individual endeavor.
The nature of the classroom seems to seek conformity rather than individual
expression. But that could just be my own experience talking.

For example: in one-on-one instruction, the instructor learns right along
with the student. They progress together as the lesson evolves according to
the student's needs and the instructor's capacity to teach. In a group
setting, there is no real one on one exchange. The instructor is the
expert, the student is the novice, and thus the lesson is one-sided.

What I was asking is: what are the advantages to using pre-designated
parameters in a group setting when it comes to the upper echelon students
vs the middle and lower? Obviously, one size does not fit all. Do the
parameters change in that case? In my experience, they did not. How can the
instructor tailor the lessons in light of individuality?

>[Arlo]
> Of course I'm not suggesting a "cookie-cutter style", that is exactly the
opposite of why Vygotsky described the ZPD. I've actually used Pirsig's
example of the student writing about the brick as an example of a ZPD
intervention. Pirsig (the 'expert') was able to determine where the student
(the 'novice') was, and suggest specific opportunities for her to grow
(between stagnating and failing). He was able to help her find that
specific point where she had the prior knowledge but could extend her
knowledge into doing something  she previously could not do.


Dan:

I don't know... something tells me there was more going on than the
'expert' teaching the 'novice' how to be creative. Going back and reading
that section, it appears the novice might be inadvertently teaching the
expert. Check it out:

"He was furious. "You’re not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his
own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every
fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you
see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.

"He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the
main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand
brick."

"Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the
next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on
the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat
in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing
about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it
all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they
kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it."

"Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought
about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of
blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was
blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had
already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he
had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about
Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating.
She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself,
as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The
narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so
obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing." [ZMM]

Dan comments:

Note the "neither did he" when it came to understanding how Pirsig 'helped'
the girl break out of her funk. Note also that he was angry with her for
her inability to follow the assignment. He threw out the brick almost like
a knee jerk reaction to his anger. And it worked.

So, how was he able to help the girl find her creativity? He had no idea.
It was only later, after she came to him with a 5000 word essay, that he
realized he had helped her. Even then, he didn't know how he'd accomplished
it. After mulling it over while walking it finally dawned on him that
evidently she was suffering the same type of blockage that had stopped him.

He didn't teach her so much as he got her to wake up. And even then he
didn't know what he had done nor why he did it. It seems to me that it was
one of those Dynamic moments that unfold every once in a while and if we're
lucky we take advantage of them. But it had nothing to do with formal
education other than the fact it took place within that setting.

>
>
> [Dan]
> Can creativity be taught? Or is the foundation of learning rooted in a
kind of monkey-see monkey-do?
>
> [Arlo]
> This question presupposes creativity is either innate or learned. I tend
to see it interwoven between these two 'poles'. Maybe something like the
capacity for creativity is innate, but the ability to create is learned.
And, I'd argue that this ability to create (agency) is inherently tied to
the appropriation of structure (whether learned formally or informally,
structured education or trial-and-error learning).

Dan:
I guess the nature vs nurture argument always rang a bit hollow to me. It
is sort of like asking: is knowledge objective or subjective? If creativity
is innate, then why aren't we all Picassos and Rembrandts? If it is
learned, then why aren't schools pumping out thousands of Einsteins?

I'm thinking the MOQ would say that creativity is something like the code
of art. It arises from the source of intellectual quality values set free
of their cultural confines. Creativity is both innate and learned and
neither innate or learned.

Thank you,

Dan

http://www.danglover.com