The original article is quite long, and well worth reading: the reflections of a journalist who just wrapped up spending a year with a Kindergarten class in a high poverty urban school.
I think about the fact that these are kids who deserve the best chance in life (just as all kids do). I think about the fact that these kids will be adults entering the workforce in 12-16 years, and hope they'll build the tools they need to do well. But mostly, I think about how in this school, and in any learning environment, the key is not the tools or technology, the vital ingredient is the people to support, encourage, and inspire the learners.
It's making me sit back and look at how I approach learning design.
It's also reminding me that I probably have some free time to offer to my local schools. There's a lot of potential out there, and it's exciting to be able to support it. Consider the little boy who had never had a book read to him until that first day of school. And the girl who gave a quizzical look when she was told to put her toys on a shelf. She didn't know what a shelf was. And the boy who was trying to put together a puzzle above his head -- in the air -- rather than on a flat surface. He'd never seen a puzzle before. |
You expect behavior problems. But in School 61's kindergarten, I heard children drop the F-bomb, use the N-word, bait the children next to them into a fight and threaten to kill someone across the room. |
I had been told that some of the children have parents who are in trouble. But then a little boy tells you his mother was arrested and put in jail the day before. It's two weeks before Christmas, and you wonder what his world must be like. And then he says, "She wasn't so bad. She was just a little tiny bad." Another boy missed the final two days of school to spend time with his dad -- who'd just been released from prison. |
I had been told there would be signs of neglect, even abuse. And then you see children who wear the same filthy clothes with the same stains for a week. You hear that a child has been abused. And you understand why some of these children behave as they do and struggle to concentrate on school. |
Still, there were signs of children blooming amid the thorns of chaos and heartbreak. |
There was Charles Elliott, who hasn't had the easiest life at home but is the most brilliant 5-year-old I've ever met, a child so curious he asked me to read him a book about dirt -- humus, clay, topsoil -- and soaked it up. |
Children showed up on their first day -- off the bus -- all by themselves. That includes one who came without a name tag, unable to communicate his name clearly to his teacher and seemingly unregistered. For three days, he was a child with no name. |
Two hours into his first day, the boy met the principal. They would become well acquainted. |
Yet, there was something about this boy -- and the melancholy expression he often wore -- that said, "I want to do well, but I need some help." |
For me, this boy was much more than his diagnosis or disciplinary record. In some ways he became a symbol of the challenge facing our city's schools. He's not incapable. That was evident from the reading and math assessments the children were given throughout the year. Even his disgust with Christmas was articulated in a way beyond his years. And teacher Shirley Chappell wound up giving him an award -- as her most improved student. |
It was about the trait shared most widely across kindergarten -- a profound, instinctual need for attention. In a class of 20 5-year-olds, there's only a limited amount their teacher can give. But this little guy's response makes you wonder what an army of volunteers could do. |
(The TL:DR version of a recent blogpost.)
Using the Dickensian notion of "Mooreeffoc" to design learning environments which allow participants to see the familiar in a new light, and then take that new awareness, and the creativity it fosters, back into the work or learning space... Mooreeffoc is taking the familiar but looking at it through a new angle, shining light into a cobweb laden, dusty corner, taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. Dickens makes reference to the term as coming to him when, abstractedly noting the words “Coffee Room”, backwards, on the wrong side of a glass door. It transformed the familiar and prosaic into something new and captivating. |
Mooreeffoc allows you see the same world through new eyes, it strips away the dulling film of paradigms and assumptions and lets you really see what is there. |
It is difficult to learn new things when the “space” or “subject” is one we’re quite at home with. The mental filters are up; one will only see what they ever and and always see… And in general will do what has always been done. We anticipate what comes next and are planning our responses well ahead, based on what we know. |
When building a learning environment, the trick is to not to have the situation so foreign that all of a participant’s mental energy is used up in managing/processing the environment but just foreign enough that it’s possible to see new details, form new connections, do things differently. Mooreeffoc. |
To do this, requires a learning environment that’s real enough that participants can immerse; if they can easily “see outside the walls” the illusion can quickly break down and the Mooreeffoc effect can lost before its done any good. It also helps if the environment allows discovery, not imposition or exposition of the discoveries of others. The flash of understanding that Dickens’ got from his coffee shop door was a very different experience to what you or I receive just reading about it. |
In a well designed Mooreeffoc space, you’ll not quite be able to take anything for granted; the moment you do you’ll be put off balance by the results or effects. It may be that building that habit of looking for the unexpected in the environment will waken us enough that even if we are not looking outside the walls, we can at least ask good questions about what we’re seeing inside of them; and transfer that knowledge beyond the walls later on. |
Done right, a learning environment will push us to look outside the walls, once we’ve enjoyed our time in Mooreeffoc. You can’t always be sitting inside the coffee room- at some point you need to step outside look at the world with fresh eyes and new ideas. |
 I remember very clearly the first time I read Alice in Wonderland; I was perhaps eight or nine years old, and the book was a bit of a revelation. By time I’d reached the Caucus Race in Chapter II, I had realized for the first time that prose could be more than just a vehicle to take me where I wanted to go. This was a very odd and new idea to me, and I was probably (briefly) a bit smug about this insight; but more than that it opened my eyes to a new use for prose.
This book was a game. A puzzle. A treasure hunt.
In later years, I found Dodgson/Carroll’s books Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic.
It is not difficult to connect the dots between the Alice stories and the Logic books- they're both about pulling people into the exercise with games and mysteries. It’s human nature to keep worrying after an unsolved puzzle: like a terrier after a rat, we obsessively pursue the answers until we have them.
There’s a lot of talk of Gamification in learning these days. It would be tough to find a better example of that than the work of Dodgson/Carroll.
A birthday sorite for the Rev. Mr. D:
No bad author writes an interesting book;
The Rev. Mr Dodgson’s prose contains surprises;
No book with surprises is uninteresting.
∴ (left as an exercise for the reader)
There are probably writers who work in a nice tidy sequential fashion. They have an idea, sit down, research it, write it, hit ‘save’ or ‘publish’ and move on. I’m not one of those writers.
Well, I used to be one of those writers, but I’m now solidly in the school of writers whose working process goes something like this:
“Start with a couple dozen open tabs on Firefox and a collection of journal articles spread out on the desk, add a few though provoking conversations, have the connections start pinging in the brain .... and next thing you know, there are the notes for 3 or 4 different posts and articles, but nothing actually written.”
At some point I realized that this is the blessing and the curse of living in this Web 2.0/SocialMedia world. An abundance of resources, an abundance of conversations to trigger ideas, and an overabundance of details to try to do something useful with.
I’m realizing more and more that the problem is not a lack of information structuring, nor of information filtering, it’s that I’ve needed to learn to keep my resources for a given piece of writing all in one place. My brain is more than willing to be distracted when I write, and it was an awful lot easier maintain a hint of discipline when the only things within my grasp were directly related to the work at hand. You know, Old School: at the big library table with references and note cards creating the only visual landscape; a wall of focused information blocking out the rest of the world.
So, I’m learning. Learning when to allow myself time to dig into research and go down those rabbit trails that lead to serendipitous connections. And learning to remember when it’s time to say “enough”. Just because one has nearly infinite access to resources doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to gorge on all of them. If I’ve missed an idea or a connection, I’ll find it later, on my own or through the comments of others. But if I don’t get it written in the first place, there’s nothing there to improve on, to criticize or to expand on. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard: sit down and write.
Now, it would be really great if I had the discipline to tune out the siren song of Google Scholar, and the persistent calls of Twitter. But it’s human nature, when you lift your head up from writing, to want to dig in and find “one more thing”. I needed to find a way to keep all the resources for a project in one virtual workspace so I wouldn’t drift off while tracking down references, mind maps, emails, and notes that I’d collected.
For me this ultimately meant finding a software solution; I started using Scrivener. It allows me to recreate that giant library table of references and notes, removing the need to wander off to Google (or Mindmeister, or iStockphoto) to finish a project.
Writing is more that words. It’s words fueled by ideas, challenging conversations, striking images, or problems to be solved. Creating a virtual library table can make it possible for a writer to step back from the conversation long enough to actually produce something that contributes to the conversation.
There was a recent conversation on Twitter regarding the value of children learning to read an analog clock - one person classed it as an irrelevant skill, right along there with using slide rules. It was the sort of side discussion that almost looks like a trivial bit of chit-chat, when it really is something quite important. The crux of the conversation was: “we have a newer, more efficient tool (digital clock) so the old tool (analog clock) is irrelevant”.
But there’s something missing from that picture - we are not digital beings, we live and move and think in an physical world - we are physical people who happen to use digital tools. Analog tools are exactly “what it says on the tin”: they are analogs, physical analogies, representations rooted in the world in which we live. We connect to analog - it models physical realities or even complex abstractions. Finding the meaning of abstractions represented digitally is a different game altogether - they might be a shortcut of expression, but they are not physically analogous representations; they add an extra layer of symbolism for the brain to process.
For this reason it probably takes most people a few seconds to figure out the joke:
Q. Why do computer scientists get Halloween and Christmas confused?
A. Because Dec 25 = Oct 31.
(If you don’t spend a fair amount of time in the Math or CS playground, it may takes an extra step or two of mental translation to get this one. Hint: Dec = base 10, Oct = base 8)
Time, in and of itself, is an analog tool: taking the day and breaking it into equal chunks for purposes of planning and communication.
The nature of non-digital gives us something we can naturally connect to.
The analog clock is a beautifully simple illustration of this. It is an analog reference to an analog concept - a physical representation of the turning of the earth, if you like; mapping an abstraction (time and its passage) into a tangible, touchable model. Roitblat and Meyer describe it this way:
“The time representations in an analog clock directly reflect the similarities between times rather than symbolically describing them. For example, on a digital clock, the representations of 9:58 and 9:59 share quite a few features relative to those represented by 9:59 and 10:00, but those times differ by exactly one minute. In an analog clock, on the other hand the similarity between 9:58 and 9:59 is exactly the same as the similarity between 9:59 and 10:00. An analog clock is a nonsymbolic (in the sense described here) representation that preserves the correspondence between the event to be represented and the characteristics of the representation.”
Beyond that, the analog clock is something learners can touch and feel and play with - see the mechanics and how the gear ratios drive the motion, grasp spatial and numeric relations based on something real and tangible that users experience everyday. It is a tool that is understood experientially, not merely a classroom lesson, so it can provide a meaningful schema for complex and abstract concepts beyond telling time. Supplanting analog totally with digital (replacing physical representation with symbolic) might lead to faster reading of clocks, but not necessarily a faster grasp of the relation between different times (which is a significant part of the value of clocks). It also, incidentally, removes a tool that gives grounding to abstract concepts such as ratios, through meaningful everyday experience.
If I were obliged to provide an analogy for analog clocks in the realm of mathematics tools, it would be closer to manipulatives in a math class than to a slide rule. (I would hope that I need not argue the case for students benefitting from understanding the meaning of mathematical operations, as opposed to merely memorizing the appropriate algorithms).
Symbolism has it’s place, and its merits, but generally these are after the learner has a real understanding of the concepts. And understanding of complex or abstract topics often comes from use of representation. It is not “either-or”, it is “both-and”.
As learning professionals, at the end of the day, our evaluation of tools and methods must directly correspond to how humans actually think and interact with the world. Unfortunately, wholesale, or careless, dismissal of tools and methods that are out of vogue is not an uncommon situation; and this leads to a more difficult question.
The deeper issue ties back how we evaluate evolving tools. If we’re going to assess the relative merits of tools, and their relevance, we have to take into account not merely their objective use, but how they actually used; as an example an interesting post by @hypergogue considers the “affordances”, or qualities, of digital and paper documents in the sphere of knowledge work. Paper documents, messy and tangible and shuffle-able, allow a for different kind of off-loading process for our brains than digital ones. Neither digital nor paper documents are inherently useful or relevant (nor inherently un-useful or irrelevant) - relevance for learning is tied to use, cognition and meaning. It is our task (among other things) to weigh tools well and use them wisely on their own merits and within this framework. To do this requires a shockingly old fashioned tool-set: knowledge, logic, objective evaluation (the same tools needed for the dying art of discourse). To acquire and apply that tool set requires something even rarer in this modern age than discourse; what it requires is Time.
The question is: Are we willing to find that Time?
@sahana2802 had a beautiful post about they eye-opening opportunity she had to see tigers in their real habitat.
I'm almost irrationally fond of tigers (and appreciate Sahana's writing) so I was enthusiastically settling in to read her blog; but the first couple paragraphs took my mind in a direction far beyond panthera tigris and their preservation (although the blog is worth reading in full for that reason alone).
I recall having to recite Blake's "Tyger" in my high school literature class; and like Sahana, my first image was of restive tigers pacing, confined, in the zoo. Most of them with eyes dull with resignation, a few with eyes still piercing, looking, hunting for something beyond their enclosure. It took a tremendous stretch of the imagination to picture these creatures slipping soundlessly through the forest, to conceive of what they must be in the real world. I think most of us would do fine, encountering a tiger that is merely an exhibit, but we might not fare so well meeting a real tiger along a deserted road at night. (Having lived for a number of years in bear country, I can speak with some certainty regarding the difference between standing a short distance from a "zoo bear" as opposed to a "free range bear”.)
That got me thinking about what is offered to students (or learners, if you prefer). “Caged tigers” or “wild tigers”, free, where they really live? Granted when you first encounter a wild tiger (or bear), it can be helpful to have an expert nearby, to make sure you don't wander off in the wrong direction, but eventually, if you're going to live in the jungle, you need to develop the knowledge and the judgment to handle things on your own. So it is in learning, if we're not guiding students in the jungles of the real world, then all they'll know how to manage is “caged tigers". Learning "in the wild" requires more effort both for the instructional designer and the learner, but equipping learners for successful encounters with the real "tigers" of their work is a much more compelling and effective exercise. Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? ~ William Blake
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We read this poem in school where our teachers tried to explain the significance to the best of her/his ability. And my mind would conjure up visions of a tiger in a zoo, and the essence of the poem was lost to me. |
But now I know that I never understood the essence of the poem, never really visualized the power, the strength, and the grace of a tiger as it truly is till the 27th of November. Yes, I can be that precise because I know the exact moment when the poem hummed through my mind. |
Sure enough, the king of beasts, the largest cat of the jungle emerged, barely ten feet away from where we stood. I know I almost forgot to breathe. To see this magnificent animal in his natural surroundings--proud, graceful, charismatic--was a miracle. This is one experience I know for certain I will carry with me till I die. Read more at idreflections.blogspot.com |
There must be something going on in the hive-mind that is the internet. I’ve run across a half dozen references to skepticism in the past half hour. All of which reminded me of something I wrote a while back.
It’s not any easy thing to be a skeptic. It’s quite common for someone to express skepticism about something new, and then find themselves in a hailstorm of irate responses along the lines of: “Oh, they’re just hidebound old fogies who can’t accept innovations or new ideas.” Maybe, though, there’s a reason they are skeptics. Maybe they are all for innovation, but are simply asking the right questions because they are just a little better and faster at analysis than the average bear.
People like new ideas (or even old ideas that have been dressed up in bright new clothes). There is always that hope that there is that magic solution, that the “next great and wonderful thing” will actually live up to it’s promise and transform the world, or at least the workplace.
So “New” sells. It sells books and products, it generates prestige... And those who are clever enough to say “yeah, this is great in concept, but how are you going to handle...?” tend to be dismissed as too old fashioned or resistant to change simply because it is human nature to want that new solution to be perfect; we like the fantasy (or cling to the hope) that somewhere there is a ‘silver bullet’ solution.
This is a big problem, because it removes the opportunity to address those potential pitfalls at an early point of adoption, often preventing bigger issues downstream. We’ve all seen the “next great thing” fail to live up to it’s promise in the workplace, in education, in technology. And some of those failed initiatives need not have failed, perhaps would not have failed, had both the proponents and the skeptics sorted through issues at the front end instead of writing each other off as unrealistically naive and cynical respectively.
All of which begs the question: When did phrases like “Can you give me some data?”, “How does this really work”, or “There are some issues that need to be addressed”, start being heard as wholesale rejection of an idea? When did human minds become so narrow (or egos so fragile to criticism) that the standard response is that anything but absolute acceptance is deemed as condemnation?
It points to a larger problem - the end of discourse.
Fingers could be pointed a lot of ways in this.
Educational systems that purport that they want students to “learn how to learn” but don’t teach them logic or rhetoric or any of those other old fashioned topics that allow for examination and conversation around all angles of a situation?
The business world, where the model has shifted from building businesses that will last and thrive for years to come, to merely seeking to make the best possible numbers for this quarter. In this situation people want a quick win; there is no time for, and no interest in, real long-term viable solutions. This model is not only systematically starving and killing off the flock of geese that lay the golden eggs, it also effectively puts employees in a perpetually defensive posture where opposing views or mention of flaws are viewed as threats to one’s career.
Regardless the origins, this is a problem that needs to be addressed because it is bigger than “Is [insert innovation here] good or bad or neutral?” If we can’t ask real questions, it’s going to be pretty tough to distinguish between “snake oil” and a good idea that needs refinement. A lot of good ideas are going to get lost in the shuffle if there is not room to ask the hard questions that will take those ideas beyond the initial burst of enthusiasm to a point where they can reach their full potential.
One of my favorite colleagues is now on Amplify, I'd like you to #meet @mdeffron
I was reading a post by Bob Marshall, nodding in agreement with much of what he wrote. I’m not in the software development business, but I often see the same problems that he describes relating to good work: [those who] "know how but can't anyway because of where they work, who they work for and because of all the monkey-wrenches being lobbed into their daily routines…” He was speaking of the software industry, but what he describes is not an uncommon issue, in any field.
I’ve run into similar scenarios, and one common factor among them is the general perception that every solution, every process, every approach, ought to "scale". Since, in most business circles, continuous growth is viewed as not just good, but essential, the desire for universal (and infinite) scalability of processes and procedures is understandable from the standpoint of efficiency. Scaling may well streamline administrative functions (legal, HR, finance), but it is important to recognize that if certain aspects of a business are readily scalable, others (e.g. Operations, R&D), perhaps, are not. This non-scalability may not indicate a problem to solve, but a natural attribute of how human beings and communities really work.
Companies see themselves as a single expansive entity (and therfore embrace the model that universal, one-size-fits-all procedures are beneficial to organizational effectiveness), when in fact they are often effectively a bunch of boutique organizations welded together in a common enterprise. If you talk with people in different functional groups of an organization, you know this; each group sounds like it works for a completely different company than the others. What are often called silos are really the front doorsteps of the different small communities. And how one group learns or produces will not translate directly to how another group does.
Whether the boutique (or community) model is most “efficient” on an algorithmic scale, isn’t the point. The point is that it is how human beings actually interact. No matter how much you scale up an organization there will always be points of functional disconnect between groups in their specializations and one-size-fits all codification of the larger organization. Humans will continue to interact in small connected groups and build their own, most effective approaches. Universally scaled-up practices, while efficient, will not necessarily prove effective with respect to quality or productivity within the smaller, organically formed segments of an organization.
Maybe the key to bypassing the “monkey-wrenches” that stifle good work is to recognize that learning design or software design (or any other business activity) should not be presumed to be infinitely scalable. It’s always going to be a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. So keep the uniform approaches in the arenas where efficiency matters, but also determine where effectiveness is the greater goal than efficiency, and shape the policies to match how the work really happens.
Rigour is a popular term in learning and training environments. It gets trotted out a lot in marketing materials as well. But the problem is that a lot of what get posited as “rigourous” is actually not. In an elementary school textbook, a work place learning module, or a keynote presentation, you’ll find things that look like rigour, but that doesn’t guarantee that they are.
Someone who really knows a topic will spot false rigour in an instant - much as adults may chuckle indudgently (or cringe) at adolescents who attempt to pose as being much older. So, maybe the first question is ‘how do I spot an expert?’, because they are the quickest, easiest path to spotting false rigour. A real expert is often easily identified by their ability to accurately reduce a complex concept into layman’s terms without losing the fundamental meaning. Of course it might take a real expert to recognize that was done properly - so that’s getting you into a worthless ‘infinite loop.’
Leaving us with a conundrum of the first order: it is very difficult to accurately call out artificial rigour without sufficient expertise.
So, what’s a non-expert to do?
My first instinct was to look at the problem from the perspective fields like math and science (simply due to my own background).
In classroom texts it is not uncommon to find a sort of artificial rigor that was created to meet a list of criteria, as opposed to lessons rooted in true fundamental understanding and applicability. The focus is not on a meaningful “why”, a reason we want students to learn something; it is rooted in lists and box-checking, which are themselves rooted in standards that have as much basis in perception and political agendas as they do in actual learning.
Box-checking driven learning has a high probability of being guilty of false rigour. So that’s one warning signal, easily found, but it’s only a starting point.
What else comes into play?
We may not be experts on a given topic, but we can take what we know about expertise and use it as a guide.
A while back I wrote:
"If I’m really, really good at, let’s say, math, then I may not have to stop and think about quadratic equations because I intuitively grasp them; but if asked, I clearly explain (in simple terms) why they have the solutions they have. If I am merely good at arithmetic, I can show you how to solve the equations (just by plugging numbers into the formulas) which might look like expertise to a novice, but is really just mechanics; in that case I know it works but don’t fully grasp why or how. A lot of false rigour works the same way."
Simon Bostock countered these thoughts with the insight that being able to break concepts down into their component parts may (will) not work for all domains:
"I’m not sure true experts can always unpick and unpick. I think it depends, rather, on the domain.
Maths and physics are inherently unpickable, and the reputation of Feynman as a teacher, therefore, shines. Science depends on the principles of proof and peer-review so being a teacher (ie explaining stuff and testing that it’s been understood) is essentially the same as science. [Warning: massive over-simplification!!!]
But things like medicine, art and computer programming just have to work. We don’t necessarily care how the surgeon genius or the does-the-work-of-a-hundred programmer work. And we certainly don’t trouble them to explain themselves. In many cases, they probably couldn’t because it’s doubtful they’re aware of how they do it themselves – my feeling is that they’re drawing from as-yet-unnamed disciplines, and you can’t unpick things you can’t name"
And he’s absolutely right about this…
Different fields having differing degrees of inherent “unpickability”. I can see in the case of, say, a violinist - they can ‘unpick’ the details of technique and tone production, but as far as (for lack of a better word) artistry - well that’s a personal thing, that’s not so readily broken down. But then again, in that case, I would put the expectations of instructional rigor on the technical aspects, and not assign it to the area of personal expression or artistry. But we still do need to look at what constitutes rigour (or at least expertise) in topics that are not inherently disectable.
The Role of Narratives
I was helping someone with a technical problem which they were grinding through it rather mechanically, without any real understanding (I could recognize this as I’ve been in the same situation). I took a comparable problem and broke it down into logical components, but did so within the context of a narrative about the physical reality which the equations were describing. The same person later was able to discuss another problem with me in terms of meaning, rather than mere mechanics. They had crossed a threshold, perhaps not into expertise, but at least onto the path that leads there.
Expertise goes beyond merely breaking down a problem into component parts, it’s deeply tied into a narrative. Real rigour has a narrative rooted in truth; artificial rigour’s narrative is not entirely so - it looks almost like the truth, but on closer examination the narrative of artificial rigour is either rooted in superficial function, not understanding; or is rooted in fallacy.
We see artificial rigour in this guise in a lot of modern math curricula where elementary texts proclaim sub-sections to be “Algebra” when, in fact, the students do not have sufficient intuitive grasp of numeric relations for there to be any meaning to the work. It looks like 8 year olds are ‘grokking’ algebraic concepts, but they do not truly do so because their mind is so filled with painful, tedious mechanics that they haven’t the mental energy left to grasp the intuitive connections.
The real narrative is one that shows mastery (and rigour), describing not “what is done”, but “what it means”.
For non-techinical areas, like Simon’s examples of music or surgery, there are two layers. There is the mechanical aspect of the work, and then there is, for lack of a better word, “artistry’. If I am a reasonably capable technical musician, I can follow along and imitate styles and variations by talented musicians, but I don’t have the internal grasp to create my own riffs. To an outsider on the right day from the right angle I might look like I know a bit, but really i’m just a reflection of those who do. An expert would know that pretty much right off, for someone else it might take some closer scrutiny over a bit of time to realize I can’t really improv like a pro. A non-expert might not be sufficiently interested to notice.
For ‘unpickables’ (to use SImon’s term), expertise and rigour reveal themselves not imitation but in creation. The expert surgeon does not exactly mimic his peers, nor does Itzhak Perlman imitate other violinists; they may learn and absorb what other experts do on a technical level, but from that understanding, they can create. So the teacher of these subjects does not provide rigour through mere mechanics, but through fostering the learner’s innate understanding, challenging it, stretching it.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It seems virtually impossible to separate a discussion of rigour from a discussion of expertise. But it is possible for a non-expert in the field to keep a weather eye out for warning signs.
Artificial rigour tends to lean on the smoke and mirrors of a quick grind through the mechanical motions; this is a common feature of learning based on box-checking agendas.
Box-checking as a concept provides a bit of a compass star to to another indicator - the antithesis to box checking is understanding, and understanding often reveals itself in meaningful narratives (as opposed to snake-oil style narratives; substance rather than a sales pitch). Real experts can create meaningful illustrations, applications, and narrative; false rigour can only ape what it has heard or seen.
Another measure of artificial rigor is that it tends to make one “feel” good (accomplished, affirmed….). It is very appealing. Real rigour requires hard work. A bit like climbing a mountain: it may be pleasing in a deep gut level, but it doesn’t come easily or quickly.
I would love to have found a simple check-list (you know, like the box-checking discussed above) to help a novice identify real rigour when they see it. But then again maybe that’s the point: if you are a novice it’s time to start asking around and finding experts.
The best I can offer is an invitation to continue the discussion. I still have a lot to learn.
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