| Love this breakdown. And to josephg's post: When I was picking a dissertation topic I'd suggest things to my advisor and she'd say brightly, "Why don't you go do some research on that, come back in two weeks and tell me what you found?" I'd go off to the library for a couple of weeks, do the reading, come back and say, "You know I think X is a terrible topic, the scholarship on it all seems to drag." "Oh yes," she'd say, with a look that said this was the worst topic in the world. "So why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?" Then she'd get diplomatic. "You're young, maybe you see something that I don't!" I realised though that it wasn't just that. Had she told me my idea about topic X was a loser, I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity. I really had to figure out on my own how much the topic sucked. It had to come from my own discovery, not from her authority. Anyway, I do this now and it drives my students nuts, because they want me to hand them a paper topic, ideally tell them what books to read, and send them off so they can execute the steps. Meanwhile, I want them to spend time in the messy, difficult process of working things out. I think my process probably results in more failure (at least as far as the grades are concerned), but the good work is so much better. |
Thanks for sharing this story.
I think a lot of about potential impacts like this on students/learners. My goals when teaching are to nurture agency, autonomy, and a positive disposition towards what is being learned in addition to a student learning the content or practices/skills.
People often misconstrue this as wanting to make learning "fun" for students. For me it begins with inversion, look at how to crush a student's spirit, agency, and disposition towards a topic. Don't do that.
Then find ways to put them in situations where they can struggle productively, be creative, show ingenuity, and see the fruits of doing so. Sometimes students aren't aware of their own ingenuity, creativity, or their own productive struggle so that gives me an opportunity to go meta with them and help them see it.