I’m giving a the weekly public seminar in my own physics department on Wednesday. 1 This talk is particularly hard for me to construct, in large part because I haven’t figured out what it’s about. I’m using the presentation itself to think through what I need to conclude. It’s like designing a suspension bridge as you’re walking out on its unfinished scaffold, looking across some chasm for where you might end up. Except maybe more daunting. I’ll be in front of physicists, after all, my colleagues; and also it’s a public talk with a welcome invitation to all comers, near and far. I feel obligated to the audience, but also to myself. What if I get this wrong? I’m standing on the edge of this incomplete construction, feeling the breeze out here in open space and wondering how I got here; and I’ve just made the poor decision to peer down into the depths of the ravine.
This morning, though, I think I recognized an anchor on the other side, an idea to attach the rest of this. It might be narcissistic, but I think the answer is in my own band.2 For good measure (i.e., distraction), I’ll also pull out some photos of a puppy and some backpacking treks.
Anyway, the idea, in summary: I’m making the case that we too often, without realizing it, reduce learning down to something much less than what we really expect from it. So much of our current pandemic schooling dilemma—whether to keep buildings open or not, what to expect out of virtual spaces, how to and how much to get students to collaborate, what to expect from a learning space at home, etc.—is orbiting around all that we expect out of schools. We say that students should “learn” in school. But what does that really mean? How far does it go? Or, put another way, why is it that we’re so disappointed with so many of our schooling options?
Although I haven’t finished preparing the presentation nor all the ideas within, here’s a graphic I’m working on to make sense of where I’m landing:
I’ve planted this one in my psyche and I’ll figure out later if it’s a weed or something to cultivate further. For now it’s the placeholder for my idea that learning is comprised of the typical “knowing stuff” and the only slightly less obvious “doing stuff.” These two, by themselves, make up what we often presume education is about—at least in the context of reports and tests and qualifiers of how well any educational machine is running. But what we also expect, inherently but not explicitly, from the best schooling (or what we’ve come to cherish most when we say “that was a great class”) is on the “becoming”—who we figure out we are—and the braiding of ourselves with a bigger community or environment, what I’m calling “communing.” These two are sitting there, sometimes in the background, but always there whether they’re paid attention to or not. We feel cheated when we don’t get to have those as part of our learning.
In the talk, I’ll give examples of what I mean, both in schools and out, real and imagined. Education, our schooling system in particular, is an invention, so we should have an obligation to reinvent or at least provide tuneups. The trick is to recognize that obligation and opportunity.
For now, I wanted to provide this particular example, the rationale for why I’m bringing in the band. When I get to play, it’s not just about knowing progressions and practicing riffs, though that’s all critical. Yet I wouldn’t want to be in a band if that were all there is to it; I wouldn’t miss playing together right now if it weren’t for the other two pieces. In the ensemble, I get to figure out something that’s core to me and I get to continue to develop that self. And, I get to be a part of something bigger, and there’s something more in that ensemble than even the sum of the parts.
Here’s a video we made that shows some of this. I suppose an outsider might not see this as clearly as I do, but you could get a taste for all the subtle ways that things get pieced together, how it’s not at all obvious until we are together that there’s something there. And what’s not at all obvious is that I often don’t know exactly what I’m going to play until the other three are there, talking through what we’ve imagined and playing their own bits:
I think the context of band rehearsal and performance provides an example of an ideal learning space. As Bill Evans wrote on the liner notes for Kind of Blue:
Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result.
It seems to me that this response to a human need, that sympathetic and coherent thinking, is what learning is all about.
Or, maybe this is all an excuse to post videos of me rehearsing with the band. That’s fine, too.
- As someone with a scholarly focus and background in education, I’ve always been grateful that I have a community of physicists that has welcomed not just my role but my ideas. So not only do I have a job where I get to work with both future teachers and future scientists, I get to take a one-hour slot traditionally dedicated to research in materials science and astrophysics and make the focus on the squishiness of learning. Everyone is on board with this. I work in a remarkable place. ↩
- I’m self-conscious about jumping to “did you know I was in a band?” a little too quickly. It’s not in my nature to reveal that much, and generally it would be completely non-sequitur. “Here’s some stuff about what we know about cognition, the philosophy of education, and some typical misconceptions about science … and now some footage of me playing piano on a stage back when there wasn’t a pandemic and we had more ability to do these kinds of things on a regular basis.” It could be awkward. ↩
