Liquid Learning

The dangers of habit

Three linked ideas about seeing, the self, life and education. What is that moment when we suddenly notice something or have a moment of recognition - of a thing that has been there, in our line of sight, but has not yet registered, or maybe we saw once and now has faded and now again suddenly it leaps to the foreground of our conscious thought?

*filters* - we begin to recognise filters exist when we realise we can only ever possess a partial perspective on our lives and indeed the lives of others. There is what we 'see' and more importantly what we do *not* see. Filters, arguably, develop from:

*habit* - repetitive actions that brings about:

*desensitisation* - where certain emotions, visual stimuli, intellectualthought become the common place and commonsensical and eventually the unnoticed and in many ways the accepted and unquestioned. Ideologies by any other name.

Deleuze might say question everything, do not accept the obvious, yet do we really have the capacity to live this on a daily basis. If our social life, our existence, is so complicated with multiple possibilities then yes this complicatedness itself seems on the surface 'good' but how do we navigate and choose between these multiple possibilities that are constantly available. Choices in life do not exist on an even plane, they run like deep rivers and to swim against the seemingly natural flow or to strike a new course, against the tides that push us, then we need energy and to fight each 'barrier' to accomplish this and only in this fight do we begin to understand or find illuminated just how deeply embedded we have become in certain modes of being and thinking. Each battle erodes a part of our desire for a certain way of being, gradual compromise, for the sake of simplicity perhaps? Internally we reason these compromises, making calculations of effort versus worth, to leave enough energy for reaching goals that are in many ways undetermined and may exist simply as space for further possibility and that elusive sense of self-satisfaction. Herein, with time, we find that each of us has their own given, relative and culturally mediated sense of happiness.

So education must not simply be about learning to live mechanically in this world but surely to have the tools and abilities to create visions that can provide the possibility for thinking differently and in this, the means to visualise change and paths that might take us there. But this is two-sided in the sense that we need the capacity to deal with change and the challenges presented to our own sense of being becoming in this world. Ways of coping with the unforeseen and the unexpected. Our education, our learning is as much about creating change as it is with dealing with change and the nature of change itself.

In the zone

I asked myself a simple question. If I used the following phrases to describe how one might feel when  deeply involved in the process of learning, would I agree or disagree with this set of characteristics?

The learner, or I, am feeling:

• Physically relaxed
• Mentally calm
• Focused
• Alert
• Confident
• In control
• Positive
• Feeling enjoyment
• Feeling effortless
• On "automatic"
• Focussed on the present moment

On the surface these are descriptors present a positive sense of the emotional state that any learning process might aspire to create, yet they do not reflect my own experiences of learning. Or at least they do not reflect my own understanding of want it should feel like to be learning, in other words my own internal conscious reflection on whether I am actively involved in the learning process. I showed this list to a colleague and our immediate reaction was to come up with an almost oppositional list of our subjective sense of what we feel when we think we are learning:

• Anxious
• Uncomfortable
• Lacking in confidence
• Agitated
• Consciously exerting effort
• Painful
• Taking risks
• Seeking distraction

... and so on. Enjoyment did not not figure in this new list.

The first list is in fact a description of an athlete's inner state when performing at their peak. It was built by Donald Christiansen, a sports psychology consultant at the University of Washington, and conveys the moment when an athlete is "in the zone". What does this rather crude juxtaposition uncover? Well, yes we may see performance in learning and performance sports differently but also it is something about the nature of each in that the discourse of the process of learning (and the inner emotional indicators) seems to be one of suffering. For me it also provided some insight into the qualitative difference between formal and informal education processes. If I were to ask the same questions of informal learning then I think the characteristics of being 'in the zone' are far more pertinent. Finally, it seems key to address these issues if we see such descriptions of 'states of learning' as desirable goals for educational practice when motivation to learn is recognised as a major factor in academic performance. The engagement with and deployment of emerging technologies such as social software is one way forward. These are tools that can be used to provide informal spaces within formal educational settings and perhaps bring back emotional commitment and a sense of enjoyment to our own personal understandings of the process of learning.

[Photo credits: Running Man, Stanley Park, Vancouver taken by 'Bo2country'] 

Addendum

The affective state of being 'in the zone' finds resonance in the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and in particular his seminal book 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience'. Here he outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow which might be described as being completely immersed in the activity at hand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)