Jennifer W. Shewmaker's Blog

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Athletic Training and Nursing students learn together in an IPE simulation at ACU.

An Abundant Systems mindset is about looking for connectedness. I like to think about this in terms of looking for opportunities to expand networks and ask questions that connect rather than compete. Questions like, in what ways do the goals of my University/College/Department align with the goals of community partners or others within my own system? How might we work together to achieve our shared goals? How might we help each other achieve even more if we work together?

In the EconTalk segment linked here, Teppo Felin talks about what he calls the fallacy of obviousness. In the talk and in his article in Aeon on the topic, Felin references the Selective Attention Task . In this task, people are told to count how many times a certain uniformed team passes a basketball. In doing so, subjects will focus so much on counting passes that they completely miss the person dressed as a gorilla who walks right through the frame of the video. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman talks about this experiment as highlighting that humans are “blind to the obvious” and even to our own blindness. But Felin has an alternative explanation. He says that it’s not that humans are blind to the obvious, but that obviousness is dependent upon what we find relevant for a particular question or task.

So, we notice the things that answer the questions that we are asking. Felin states that “there are not neutral observations. The world doesn’t tell us what is relevant. Instead, it responds to questions.” Felin argues that in our daily lives, just as in the experiment, we are bombarded by stimuli, so we have to screen out that stimuli that isn’t relevant, attending to what is “meaningful and useful.”

This idea of the fallacy of obviousness is important when thinking about higher education. In Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From he talks about the idea of the adjacent possible. He says, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” The idea is that at any moment the world is “capable of extraordinary change” and that the “strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries.” In the same vein, Ed Catmull’s Unmade Future in Creativity, Inc. is “a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens.”

Putting all of these pieces together makes me wonder if there is a strange and beautiful truth for higher education in an adjacent possible or unmade future that we’re missing because we’re asking the wrong questions.

Considering the Abundant Systems framework and the incredible benefits that using it has brought to my College, my proposal is that we begin to focus on questions of connection. Connection is a central tenet of learning. Learning is not just an act of the mind. It is also an act of the heart. This mindset requires courage, because it is often stepping into a way of thinking that may be new for your institution. As Seth Godin says in his blog post Toward Abundant Systems, “The more people who know something, the more it can be worth, because knowledge permits interoperability and forward motion. Knowledge creates more productivity, more connection and then, more knowledge.”

One of my favorite outcomes of adopting the Abundant Systems mindset has been the development of our College Interprofessional Education Initiative. As we piloted the IPE Initiative this past academic year, we served approximately 250 students through experiential learning and curricular activities across Allied Health and Teacher Education programs in the College and the School of Nursing. The IPE Initiative provided students with expanded opportunities to build skills in teamwork, communication and flexible problem solving to increase world readiness. These are transformative outcomes that grew out of asking questions about potential for connectedness.

What if, in higher education leadership, instead of asking questions like, “How do we use technology to teach students more economically?” or “How do we increase efficiencies to lower the cost of education?” we asked, “How do we best promote growth and discovery? What are our shared goals? How do we best build relationships across units that nurture students in their growth and discovery? What partnerships might we build in our communities to increase transformational learning opportunities?” I believe the answers to the second group of questions would likely also result in the efficiencies we seek in the first group.

Is it possible that there is a gorilla in our midst that we are not seeing because we need to ask different questions? If we start asking questions about connection rather than competition in higher education, I wonder what strange and beautiful truths we would discover. For me, the IPE Initiative is a perfect example of this. What else is waiting out there for us to discover?

Catmull, E. E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, Inc. : overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. New York : Random House, [2014].

Felin, Teppo (retrieved 2018). The fallacy of obviousness. Aeon Essays.https://aeon.co/essays/are-humans-really-blind-to-the-gorilla-on-the-basketball-court

JOHNSON, S. (2010). WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INNOVATION. Riverhead Books.

In the past couple of years I’ve presented several times about the concept of social media and identity, with the focus on wholeness in a connected world. In particular, these presentations have focused on spiritual wholeness, asking, what are the challenges and benefits that connectedness can present to emotional and spiritual wholeness?

If you’d like to listen, here’s a recording of my presentation at ACU’s Summit called Social media and identity: Developing wholeness in a connected world.

“…I don’t want to be an accuser …I want to be an advocate for whatever I find is healthy or good. I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.”

Fred Rogers, quoted by Laskas, 2019

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a good neighbor, and what part neighborliness plays in the life of the university. This past semester I had the privilege of walking alongside a group of new students at our university. The course I taught is one that all new students take as a part of their core liberal arts requirement, and the idea is to spend time together wrestling with big ideas and big questions and different ways of knowing. We want our students to struggle and think and begin to own their own learning.

The theme for our particular course was: What does it mean to be a good neighbor? I chose this theme because I see how students are struggling to know how to live in a world that is so full of divisive rhetoric while also entering into a university whose mission is to love and serve the world. They don’t see a lot of examples on the national stage of love, mercy, and service. Being the mother of two college aged students, I know that these students are asking themselves questions like: What does it mean to actually live in love and service in our world today? How does this play out in political conversations with those with whom I both agree and disagree? What does it mean for my life at work? How does the concept of love and service influence the way I live my life as a college student? 

And so my class and I waded into this theme of being a good neighbor, with a primary reading being I think You’re Wrong, but I’m Listening, (Silvers & Holland, 2019) about how to have political conversations with grace. The course reading and viewing list was filled with readings like the story of the Good Samaritan in the Bible along with work from Martin Luther King Jr., Malala Yousafzai, Parker Palmer, and Fred Rogers. 

Connection is a central tenet of learning. Learning is not just an act of the mind. It is also an act of the heart and of identity. Our students encounter new information and questions in the context of the self. In Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks writes, “School was the place of ecstasy—pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone” (p. 3). Parker Palmer echoes this view in The Courage to Teach (1998/2007), discussing the fear of both teachers and students of encountering ideas and perspectives that challenge strongly held beliefs and perspectives of our own.

So how then do we live into the discomfort of learning? How do we help our students face that fear and learn from those who have different ideas or perspectives from their own? Love, guided by practice of hospitality, is a powerful component of creating an environment that builds the type of community that allows for real connection to explore and learn together. hooks (1994) talks about what she called “engaged pedagogy.” One of hooks’ top priorities in her work is allowing each voice within the community to be heard. Welcoming and respecting and even inviting differing student voices allows the practice of freedom for the learning community. In particular, hooks advocates for hearing the voices of those students who may be reluctant to speak, those whose voices have been marginalized through systematic racism, sexism, and so forth. In the same way, Palmer proposes that a connected learning community can engage in “thinking the world together” by approaching the many paradoxes we face when we encounter differences of beliefs and lived experiences through “embrace(ing) a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole.” (Palmer, 1998/2007; pg. 69). 

This is no easy task, and when faculty are truly committed to nurturing this kind of community, there will be moments of discomfort. Embracing the idea that connection is vital for true learning allows the classroom to become a collaborative space of learning, one that values the ideas and voice of each member. To truly engage with students in this collaboration requires love, so that we look at the members of our learning community with hearts that are open to learning about and from one another, even in the midst of the fear of letting go of some of our own preconceptions, even through the discomfort.  

For some ideas on how to support students in responding to fear of learning effectively, see my article, When Students are Afraid of Learning in the Teaching Professor or my blog post in the Creativity:edu series titled Learning as the Demogorgon.

References

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress : Education as the practice of freedom. New York : Routledge, 1994.

Laskas, J.M. (2019). The Mister Rogers No One Saw, The New York Times Magazine, November 24, 2019. 

Palmer, Parker J. (2007). The courage to teach : exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco, Calif. :Jossey-Bass. (Original work published 1998)

Silvers, B.A. & Holland, S.S. (2019). I think you’re wrong but I’m listening: A guide to grace-filled political conversations. Thorndike.

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Over the past two years, I was responsible for implementing our university’s strategic plan. One of the cornerstones of that plan was experiential learning. So, I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about experiential learning over the past two years. As I’ve also been thinking about the future of higher education, one of the things that I become increasingly more convinced of is how very important experiential learning will be to grow the kind of human skills that I’ve been talking about in this series. Creativity, courage and connection grow out of application, and as Aoun says in Robot-Proof, “Students acquire content knowledge…in the classroom. They integrate them through controlled assignments…,completing projects, or conducting laboratory experiments. But when they apply them to a novel context, they actually achieve mastery. This is where experiential learning comes into play.”

Aoun also shares some interesting data about what employers are looking for in our graduates. He says that 96% see integrating practical experiences into our educational programming as important and in a separate study 85% of respondents believe that experiential learning (through Northeastern’s coop model in particular) helps students be better prepared for the job market. At my own university, we’ve seen feedback from both potential students and current students that they specifically want experiential learning opportunities. They want to get out of the classroom and apply their knowledge and skills in the world in an academic structure that gives them the support that they need to be successful in learning and growing.

And yet, I also see that our traditional higher education structure often gets in the way of students taking advantage of these opportunities. Our accrediting agreements, degree and course hour structure, even semester or quarter structure when combined with degree plans can put students in such restrictive, lock step programming that they have no flexibility to seek out experiential learning. Another challenge that we have at my institution that I don’t think is an isolated issue is that we have worked to build such a strong “campus culture” that our students often voice the fear of leaving campus in case they miss out on something exciting.

In my mind there are some key solutions to these problems. First, we need to take a hard look at the curriculum and structure that we’ve designed. As Davidson argues in The New Education, hours per course, degree plans and so forth were all developed for a different age and different needs. Our accrediting bodies need to recognize this as well, and we all need to begin to think about how to use all levels of instruction and assessment to aid in the development of student learning rather than constricting it.

We also need to consider how we might build experiential learning into degree plans and provide funding opportunities for students to participate. For example, internships and applied research experiences, even when required, are often unpaid. We know the high value of these experiences in providing students with opportunities to apply their knowledge in a real world setting. Study abroad experiences can become prohibitively expensive unless the institution prioritizes such experiences and finds ways to off set costs for students. And yet, in this increasingly connected, global society, cultural competency and agility are incredibly valuable. Let’s work to find ways to provide funds that allow all students to participate in some way.

From a cultural perspective, we need to think about how we build experiential learning  into the expectations of our students. Rather than fearing missing out, we need to consider how to give students opportunities to share what they’ve learned when they come back and continue to build on the community and/or skills and knowledge that they were able to begin while in their experiential learning activity. Unless we’re intentional in addressing these issues of curriculum, cost and culture, we will struggle to integrate experiential learning into our student experience. Those institutions that do that integration well have figured it out, and so can the rest of us.

Experiential learning provides that final step in learning, giving students the chance to take what they’ve learned and apply it in real world, messy situations that require them to problem solve creatively, demonstrate cognitive flexibility, and think critically. I believe that experiential learning is the key answer to some of the questions I’ve been proposing we consider in this series. To be clear, by experiential learning I don’t mean active learning opportunities in the classroom, which I use frequently myself and believe are beneficial. I mean opportunities to apply classroom learning in the real world through experiences like internships, research or creative activities and study abroad. What we’re looking for with experiential learning is the chance to, as Miss Frizzle would say in The Magic School Bus, “take chances, make mistakes and get messy.” If our institutions aren’t intentionally, actively providing students with these kinds of opportunities, we are not preparing them for world readiness. If we want to move into the unmade future that produces creative, flexible problem solvers who can make real change happen in the world, we must provide students with planned academic experiential learning opportunities. And, we must re-evaluate our culture, curriculum and the cost to the student so that experiential learning is a congruent part of the comprehensive academic student experience at our institutions. When we are able to do that, we’ll be moving into an exciting future for higher education.

Aoun, J. (2017). Robot-proof : higher education in the age of artificial intelligence. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017].

Catmull, E. E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, Inc. : overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. New York : Random House, [2014]

Davidson, C. N. (2017). The new education : how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux. New York : Basic Books, [2017].

JOHNSON STEVEN. (2010). Where Good Ideas Come from the Natural History of Innovation. Riverhead Books.

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In my last post I talked about the importance of helping students in higher education build skills like critical thinking, creativity, and empathy. As technology continues to develop in leaps and bounds, I believe that the human skills like these will best prepare our students to go into the world and not only get jobs, but be prepared to be difference makers, creators, and problem solvers.

In order to do this, I go back to Brene Brown’s and bell hooks’ work on vulnerability. We, as teachers and administrators, have to be willing to be vulnerable ourselves in order to facilitate it in our classrooms and on our campuses. I was recently talking with a college student about vulnerability, and I said, “It takes courage.” She said, “Yeah. It feels like nausea.” Exactly! And that can be what gets in the way for those of us who are leading in higher education. If we believe that we have to be perfect, have all of the answers, be better than everyone else, never admit that we were wrong or look to others for guidance, then we will find it impossible to be vulnerable. But until we are willing to do be vulnerable, we can never lead our students or our institutions into the beautiful future that awaits.

Leaders in higher education must be willing to look at our institutions and be honest about what is working, what is not, and what has the potential to help our students build the necessary skills to be world ready. If we train our students to be experts in one field, but not good, creative problem solvers, then we have let them down. We have lost the opportunity to help our students grow to be people who can make a difference in the world around them, who can help solve big social problems and find new solutions to our biggest social issues.

What does courage look like for leaders in higher education today? It means being willing to re-evaluate the real purpose of higher education, which today is the training of creative problem solvers who can work just as well with people as they do along side and with technology. It means thinking about how we can help our students develop cognitive and creative flexibility, so that they graduate with knowledge and skills, but also with the ability to think critically, to be comfortable with ambiguity, and the willingness to explore new and different ways of doing things.

Courage in leadership for the future of higher education also means being willing and able to look outside of yourself to find thought leaders and experts who can help you solve problems. The age of the my way or the highway, dictatorial leader is past. In a world where boundaries of time and place have been broken down and technological changes are happening all the time, leaders need to be flexible, creative thinkers who know how to gather the very best ideas, weigh them, and make informed decisions. Top down leadership that doesn’t use the vast resources of expertise and creativity within a college or university is an incredible waste of talent, and doesn’t benefit the institution.

It takes courage for leaders in higher education to think about shaking things up, to think about hanging our hats on creativity and connection rather than on technology. While we can and should use technology well, it won’t be what moves us into the next great age of higher education. A lot of the questions that we’ve been asking in higher education hang on that “fallacy of obviousness” of looking for our future in technology. We’ve spent so much time asking how technology can shape higher education that we’ve sometimes forgotten to ask how human traits like connection, creativity, and courage can shape it. Courageous leaders can ask: How do uniquely human strengths work with the developments in technology, and the global connections that arise from them, to foster the next great leap in higher education? Might innovation mean nurturing contemplative and creative skills along with technology skills? How do we give our students opportunities to build skills in collaboration and cultural competency and agility? How do we help students learn to lean into failure in their quest for discovery? How can leaders in higher education make the most of the expertise and love of learning that exists on their campus? We must constantly be challenging ourselves, asking if we are asking the questions that will lead us into the brightest unmade future or adjacent possible. If the way seems impossible, it may be because we need to ask new questions. What questions about the future of higher education are you asking right now?

Despite frequent calls to consider return on investment, higher education is not just about preparing people for certain jobs. Yes, job readiness and skill and knowledge building are important. But just as important is the building of cognitive flexibility, creative thinking and problem solving. As Cathy N. Davidson says in her book The New Education, “The goal of higher education is greater than work-force readiness. It’s world readiness.” In this highly engaged, connected, global world, how do we train our students to be world ready?

In the book Robot-Proof, Joseph E. Aoun argues that “instead of training laborers, a robot-proof education trains creators.” Aoun says that training creators requires some new literacies, including data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy.

I want to spend some time unpacking the concept of human literacy. Here’s one thing to understand when developing human literacy: Human beings need to belong. In fact, in her book Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown says that “belonging is the innate human desire to be a part of something larger than us. True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world.” In order to create what we truly need in the future of higher education, we have to have the courage to think about how we will build true belonging within our classrooms, on our campuses, in our faculty and staff meetings, and with our parents and alums.

Let’s consider the four elements of true belonging that Brown discusses in her book.

These principles can be applied across the university. When we think as an institution about training creators, we need to think about how we will help our students learn to approach others with courage and engage effectively. When we think as a teacher about training creators, we need to think about how to foster an atmosphere conducive to courage and belonging in our classrooms. When we think as an administrator, we need to think about how to encourage courage and creativity in our faculty and staff.

From the institutional point of view, it is imperative that we become comfortable with the concept that we are training students for world readiness, not just job readiness. There will be pieces of the higher education experience that will cost more to do them well, and we must be prepared to make a case to our boards of trustees or regents as to why those are imperative components of a modern education. I’m thinking here about experiential learning, such as studying abroad that will build cultural competency and agility. We also have to be willing to practice new forms of leadership, as discussed in my post  Creativity, edu:Leadership and Creativity. Being open to the ideas of others, finding expertise and allowing it to flourish create a distributed leadership model that encourages flexibility for an organization.

When preparing our classrooms, we need to think in terms of helping our students acquire the ability to listen to and share with those with whom they disagree. Rather than steering clear of controversial topics or lighting a fire to see how hot the disagreement will become, it takes courage and creativity to construct classroom activities and discussions that allow students to authentically engage with one another. One of my favorite techniques is the “I wonder” question. When a student makes a blanket statement “All people who do/think x are y,” I say, “I wonder what you would learn if you asked that person to explain why they do/think that?” Quite often in my experience, another student will jump in to share their own thoughts, which are often different from the first students. This practice allows us to approach one another with curiosity. When we can say, “Help me understand your perspective,” we invite others to share with us rather than dehumanizing and thinking that they are “less than” us due to our disagreements.

Seeking to nurture creators takes courage. Seeking to find a successful approach to higher education in this new world takes courage. But I believe we have the resources to be successful in doing both.

-bell hoooks, Teaching to Transgress

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Our work is to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. Our work, our work as college faculty. When I read these words by bell hooks, I was challenged. Of course I knew it was my work to help my students grow intellectually. And, having taught for the past 17 years in Christian higher education, my daily work does include the consideration of my students’ spiritual growth. But hooks is talking about all college faculty, from every discipline and type of institution. She claims that there is a sacred component of our work that cannot be overlooked if we are to fully engage with our students and help them move forward in their growth as both scholars and human beings. Her perspective calls us to consider the personal growth of our students, putting their intellectual growth in perspective of the whole of their person.

As I’ve thought about this, I keep coming back to the idea of learning as Hero’s Journey, discussed in this post on Learning as Storytelling. In order to call our students to consider their own learning as sacred, and to remind us of the beauty of the work that we do everyday, it’s important to frame learning appropriately. For me, the Hero’s Journey does just that. It allows me to call students to action and, from the very beginning, to name the fear and challenges that the student and even the class as a whole will face as we learn together. When we collectively acknowledge that our goal is to gain knowledge and that requires struggle, then we are prepared to work together through the challenges we face.

hooks’ quote also reminds me of what I discussed in the post The Future of Higher Ed: Isn’t it Obvious. As we consider the future of Higher Education, what questions are we asking? For example, are we asking, “What skills do students need in this highly engaged, connected, global world?” I’ve just started reading The New Education by Cathy N. Davidson and Robot-Proof by Joseph E. Aoun. Both of these books focus on considering what kinds of skills and insights students need in the world of today and the future, and how modern higher education might best serve them in gaining those. Although bell hooks wrote Teaching to Transgress  in the mid-90’s, this is just the kind of thing that she’s talking about as well. Our students are graduating and going into a world that will demand much of them, and it benefits all of us if we are considering how to help them build not just knowledge but critical thinking skills, creative problem-solving skills, communication skills and empathy. Creating higher education programming that is active, experiential and developmentally appropriate for the students’ level of knowledge will aid us in doing this.

Approaching learning as sacred and communal requires courage. Any teacher who has stood in front of a classroom full of new students knows that. Any student who has dared to share a different perspective in a full classroom knows that. Any administrator in today’s higher education landscape knows that. In the next few posts I’ll talk about strategies for creating a classroom and university environment that promotes courage.

Aoun, J. (2017). Robot-proof : higher education in the age of artificial intelligence. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017].

Davidson, C. N. (2017). The new education : how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux. New York : Basic Books, [2017].

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom. New York : Routledge, 1994.

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It seems like everywhere we look these days, there are people yelling at one another, disagreeing vehemently, and sometimes violently, over everything from politics to gun control to health care ethics. On cable television hosts rant angrily against those with differing opinions, and when guests with different perspectives are brought on, they yell over one another so that no single voice is heard. In fact, in a poll earlier this year, it was found that even across the widening chasm of political party lines, Americans are “generally united in the belief that uncivil behavior is rampant and having profound and negative effects on our democracy.” In this environment, it can be difficult to foster civil discourse within our classrooms.

In my almost twenty years in the field of education, I’ve learned that civil discourse must be intentionally promoted, rather than assumed. There are three key avenues to encouraging it within the classroom. These are through the use of curiosity, courage, and caring. Let’s take a look at each avenue and think about the kinds of strategies that can be used to encourage each one. 

In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks says, “School was the place of ecstasy – pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone.” In order to help our students navigate this danger zone, hooks introduces what she calls “engaged pedagogy,” which allows us to educate “as the practice of freedom.”I like to think of the classroom as a connected community, one that values the ideas and voice of each member. To truly engage with our students in this requires curiosity, courage and caring on our part, as well as a call to those things on the part of the student.

The first step to building this kind of connected community is to see the classroom as communal. hooks says, “Seeing the classroom as a communal place enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community.” By a communal place, she means a few specifics things. Within a communal classroom everyone contributes to learning, we connect the will to know with the will to become, we value student expression, everyone shares including the professor, and in fact the professor takes the first risk in being vulnerable.

What might it look like in our classrooms to model community? Here are a few ideas shared with me by my colleagues. One faculty member makes sure that, sometime near the beginning of the semester, she shares her own experiences of tokenism, and how it has affected her throughout her life. She models vulnerability by sharing the story of being told at a young age that she only received an honor because of her race. She talks to the students about how she felt in that moment, and the questions of value that haunted her into adulthood, and how she’s learned to cope with those. In the face of this kind of vulnerability, this professor has found that it’s very important to set ground rules at the beginning to allow students to share, ask questions of her and one another, and not be afraid to seek clarity when they have differences. She says that she doesn’t ask students to agree with one another, but to learn to listen respectfully to one another and acknowledge their differences.

A professor of Teacher Education said that she regularly shares stories with her students about her own failings as a teacher. Her goal is to give them permission to try new things in their teaching, not expect perfection of themselves, and to have the courage to fail and try again.

In order to establish a communal classroom, we as teachers must be willing to risk sharing ourselves with our students. This can be hard for some of us, it may feel like it goes against your desire to be seen as an expert. hooks admits from the outset that engaged pedagogy is more demanding than others, asking teachers to be “actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes…well-being” in both themselves and in their students. In fact, this sounds a lot like Brene Brown’s call to vulnerability, to really sharing our authentic selves with our students and inviting them to do the same. That is a very different thing than focusing primarily on teaching information. In fact, this approach asks us not to just be experts in our fields, but to strive to be authentic human beings working in relationship with others to seek the greatest learning and well-being for all of us.

I wonder, for faculty in higher education, what are the challenges and the benefits of such an approach? What scares you about it? What excites you about it?

Brown, B. (2013). Daring greatly. [text(large print)] : how the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Thorndike, Me. : Center Point Large Print, 2013, c2012.

Brown, B. (2017). Braving the wilderness : the quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone. New York : Random House, 2017.

Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom. New York : Routledge, 1994.

In the EconTalk segment linked above, Teppo Felin talks about what he calls the fallacy of obviousness. In the talk and in his article in Aeon on the topic, Felin references the Selective Attention Task . In this task, people are told to count how many times a certain uniformed team passes a basketball. In doing so, subjects will focus so much on counting passes that they completely miss the person dressed as a gorilla who walks right through the frame of the video. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman talks about this experiment as highlighting that humans are “blind to the obvious” and even to our own blindness. But Felin has an alternative explanation. He says that it’s not that humans are blind to the obvious, but that obviousness is dependent upon what we find relevant for a particular question or task.

In fact we are looking for specific items or actions that are relevant to the question we’re asking. In the case of the experiment, we ask how many passes the team in the white jerseys make. Thus, we do not attend to anything that’s not relevant for answering that question. So, we notice the things that answer the questions that we are asking. Felin states that “there are not neutral observations. The world doesn’t tell us what is relevant. Instead, it responds to questions.” Felin argues that in our daily lives, just as in the experiment, we are bombarded by stimuli, so we have to screen out that stimuli that isn’t relevant, attending to what is “meaningful and useful.” In psychology we call this “selective attention,” meaning that we focus on or attend to those aspects of our environment that are relevant and ignore those that aren’t.

This idea of the fallacy of obviousness is important when thinking about higher education, especially in this age of increasing pressure to innovate.

I’ve been reading Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From, and in this book he talks about the idea of the adjacent possible. He says, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” Johnson claims that the idea of the adjacent possible is that at any moment the world is “capable of extraordinary change” and that the “strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries.” In the same vein, Catmull’s Unmade Future in Creativity, Inc. is “a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens.”

Thinking about these ideas in the context of higher education, I’ve been wondering about the push for innovation. Those of us in higher education are constantly hearing the call to come up with new ways to serve students. Out of this has come mobile learning, MOOCs, online learning, and new products and modes that continue to evolve. I’m not against any of these developments themselves. But, reading Felin’s piece and listening to the podcast did make me wonder if the ideas that we’re coming up with for the future of higher education are due to the specific questions we’re asking right now. I wonder if there is a strange and beautiful truth in an adjacent possible or unmade future that we’re missing because we’re asking the wrong questions.

My proposal is this. We’ve been asking questions like, “How do we use technology to teach students more economically?” or “How do we increase efficiencies to lower the cost of education?” What if, instead, we asked, “How do we best promote growth and discovery? How do we best build relationships that nurture students in their growth and discovery?” Is it possible that there is a gorilla in our midst that we are not seeing because we need to ask different questions? If we start asking new questions of higher education, I wonder what strange and beautiful truths we would discover. 

Catmull, E. E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, Inc. : overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. New York : Random House, [2014].

Felin, Teppo (retrieved 2018). The fallacy of obviousness. Aeon Essays.https://aeon.co/essays/are-humans-really-blind-to-the-gorilla-on-the-basketball-court

JOHNSON, S. (2010). WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INNOVATION. Riverhead Books.

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I woke early today, mostly due to the pesky thunderstorm raging outside. But also because my head is full of thoughts and my heart is full of feelings. You see, my oldest daughter is a senior in high school this year. We’re getting ready to say goodbye, not goodbye to her being our daughter, but to this stage of both her life and our lives. 

We just came back from a college tour, and we both loved this place. It’s full of the kinds of students we can imagine her being friends with, professors we can imagine mentoring her, activities we can imagine her getting involved in. But, and here’s the part that woke me up this morning, it’s so far from home. 

I still remember so vividly the thrill when I found out that we were expecting our oldest. For her first two years, she and I spent almost every moment together, exploring the city of Budapest, where she was born and we lived as expatriates at the time. She was my buddy, my fellow adventurer. 

When first one younger sister, then another, came along, she became something new: an older sibling, a guide, a leader. I’ve watched how her sisters watch her, how she sets a good example, how she advises them. 

I’ve seen her wrestle with life’s challenges, learning and growing, losing and winning. I’ve seen her grace and thoughtfulness grow as she has cried in disappointment and laughed in victory. I believe in her, and I trust the young woman she is and who she is becoming.

And yet, I sit here crying at 7am on a Sunday morning. Because I love her more than words can say. Because I want the world for her, but that’s not something I can give. Because I know that for her to flourish in the ways both she and I long for, I have to let her go. 

So, like many parents at many different stages, I’m getting ready to say goodbye. Not to my amazing daughter, but to this stage of childhood, to this part of our journey together. I know, in my heart and mind, that there are more adventures to be had and shared, both together and apart. And yet, ah, the pain of letting go, of moving out of one stage and into another. It still holds me. 

So, I’ll let myself feel it, this bittersweet feeling of joy and loss all rolled up together. I won’t stay too busy to acknowledge it, I won’t stuff it away or ignore it. And I hope, in choosing that, I can teach my daughter one more lesson: that life is to be lived, fully. That both joy and pain have a place in our hearts, and allowing ourselves to just be where we are at the moment, to feel what we feel, to not hide from hard feelings, that is part of a healthy life. And she’s going to need those kinds of skills as she moves forward, onward, into this new adventure.