learning experiences inspired by un-cer-tain-ty
[ˌənˈsərtn(t)ē]: unpredictability; indefiniteness, hesitancy

Daily life can be unbearably regulated and prescribed.  Rise early, despite the research showing students do better waking up later. Make it to the bus on time or end up riding your bike to school. Get to homeroom on time or get a detention.  Make it to class on time or argue for a hall pass.  Finish your homework or get a bad grade. Get to bed early or suffer tomorrow. Plan your future or end up a bum. Our civilization conspires to reduce chance, to minimize uncertainty, to mitigate insecurity, and to insulate us from direct experience.  We minimize pain but seem to drain the life out of...life.

In this essay, I argue for Uncertainty, for achieving the exact mindsets necessary to make peace with and come to love “not knowing”. It is the opposite of what school does now, focused as it is on certainties, but that I believe that search for Uncertainty is teachable. It is a thirst for Adventure.

We extol the many benefits of risk-taking, especially in this entrepreneurial every-man-for-himself culture, but who extols the joy in its companion: uncertainty?  The Philosopher Alan Watts was one exception. In his essay The Wisdom of Uncertainty (Watts, 1951), he pointed out that change and uncertainty are the very essence of being, and that our efforts to categorize and constrain our world are symptoms of our collective and futile effort to catch and preserve wind in a box. The cost is losing our sense of the moment where life actually happens. We trap ourselves in a destructive and ultimately hopeless cycle, reliving the past and girding our loins for the future.  Watts’ prescription was to lose our sense of self as apart from the world by losing ourselves in our experience of the present. He encouraged us to open ourselves to experience instead of just describing it. This sounds exactly like Adventure.

Consider:

Does this sound like the experience of your students?

School generally teaches the opposite, does it not? It weaves a reassuring web of analysis, description, and causality, presenting it as Certainty. It defends students against Uncertainty, because to accept Uncertainty is to dance with Anxiety-that uncomfortable state of being that accompanies “not-knowing”. Uncertainty comes with perks! We gain freedom from determinist restriction and a potential for Creativity. A 2003 article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology by Kerry Gordon, executive director of the Program for New Paradigm Studies, offered some insights into Anxiety and Creativity:

Anxiety is not only natural, in other words, but integral to meaningful experience. Only by resisting it do we deny its potential, and so our own creative potential. In the face of Anxiety we have two possibilities: deny our creativity and retire from the field in Fear or embrace mystery, possibility and freedom as an Adventure. Gordon goes on to explain:

In other words, to teach Creativity we must nurture an appreciation for Uncertainty, and to nurture Wisdom we must cultivate Awe. What is awe? Surprise or amazement or even overwhelm, certainly, demanding some kind of accommodation. It is the entire point of going on an Adventure!

School minimizes uncertainty not just to reduce anxiety for the kids but to minimize risk to itself. We contain and protect kids until adolescence becomes penitentiary, and then wonder why they crave escape: into computer games, drugs, and fantasy. My own adventures have stemmed from an implacable need for freedom and a visceral craving for awe. I went to the Amazon Jungle, and the Sahara Desert and the Himalayas because to do so was to escape the noose of daily life. With Adventure, I both freed myself and lost myself. Abandoning what I “knew”, I stopped thinking about me and trained my thoughts outside myself, on the world around me, on the people around me, and to where I might make a difference.

Our students are indentured however, and a bit young for grand adventures. What we can offer them is regular confrontations with the unknown in an environment of few constraints. Adventure doesn’t require the Amazon, just experiences in which kids can free themselves and lose themselves. Henry David Thoreau wrote:

Consider:

No need for extravagant travels. Where do you find opportunities to offer your students freedom and complete absorption?

How can school incorporate Adventure and embrace uncertainty in the curriculum? In How We Learn, Benedict Carey (2014) suggests it may simply be “Interleaving”. This teaching strategy mixes different types of questions and problems in order to constantly re-contextualize knowledge and avoid the fallacy of mastery that comes with repetition.

Interleaving introduces uncertainty into learning, and so transforms the struggle to understand into a kind of adventure. I think however, that while useful to our students as thinkers, interleaving absent Awe barely scratches the emotional surface: it is Awe that ignites engagement and action.

In Science, uncertainty is well established and inherent to the scientific method, yet how often do we convey knowledge as tentative or as a crude approximation of experience? 

This statement is unremarkable, except the end, where symbol becomes burden. Science should be about seeking out new experiences first and foremost.  If it is only about explanation, then there is no risk, no adventure and no exploration. We are not embracing an experience, we are following recipes. Where is the uncertainty in a recipe?

Consider:

Laboratory sequences, especially in high school, presume to inject visceral experience into abstract modeling and calculation. How do you prevent this from becoming mired in recipes and techniques?

When do we teach writing as an adventure?  Surely it demands a dance with the unknown before we codify and organize and present? What is it that we ask students to write about?  For Nietzsche, it was all about Morality.

Instead of miring our schools in a prescriptive morality, can we not encourage our students to explore the opposite: to test the boundaries of our societal certainties? They will return from the adventure with newfound respect for the lessons we hope to convey. We cleanse our schools of controversies, wall off wells of engaging material, and make do with arid abstractions. Barry Kort at MIT posited a spiral of Insightful Learning, showing Knowledge becomes Wisdom by applying Values (Kort, n.d.), but how do kids come to understand Values without physically testing boundaries? By Writing!

Consider:

In this era of book banning and moral certitudes, does asking your students to honestly explore their values and beliefs feel dangerous or transgressive?

Then what? Do we cede the terrain?

Foreign language would be an adventure if schools focused on emotion as well as structure and offered experiences worth discussing before the verb conjugations to describe them. In her research on English/Russian bilinguals, Aneta Pavlenko (2002) highlights how English presents emotion passively, as something that happens to you, while Russian communicates emotion actively, as something you do. It seems in the USA that our very language promotes passivity!

That learned language shapes affect and invites new speakers into new emotions, is supported by research on French/English bilinguals (Ervin, 1964), which shows communication in French highlights striving for autonomy while communication in English highlights striving for achievement. Study participants reacted to stimulants differently depending on the language in which they were thinking. That a new language teaches new ways of being and offers new potential selves pushes language study into the exploration of emotions. This is a far more adventurous and uncertain place than a rote explication of structure and vocabulary.

Imagine:

Offering your students a regular opportunity to assume new identities through a second language!

Do you agree that this offers a potentially rich vein for student engagement?

When does History in school ever confront the uncertainty that gave it birth? Instead of just learning what happened, why not explore the consequences of deciding and acting differently? What better lesson on leadership than a lesson on the stakes and the risks? Democracy itself is a dance with uncertainty and emotion: what better way to appreciate the limits and benefits of it than to study systems more inclined to certainties? What better way to nurture thoughtful adults than to present the world as tentative and radically uncertain; to present it as an experiment?

Consider:

Government always offers surprising adventures in politics and policy-making. Do you regularly explore the uncertainties of politics, no matter the grade level?

Do you present the American experiment as an adventure and explore the risks as well as the rewards?

We teach Mathematics through high school as a certainty, but the experience of grappling with it can be rife with uncertainty. In Abstraction Anxiety: A Factor of Mathematics Anxiety, Ronald Ferguson (1986) identified grappling with abstractions as a unique source of stress. This was actually the source of one of my most disastrous misadventures. The psychological impact of abstraction unmoored from any physical reality unexpectedly overwhelmed me during a mathematics class at Cornell University, a class I assumed would build on my facility with calculus. Instead, in a week of visceral panic poignant 35 years later, my grasp of math collapsed so completely I couldn’t continue with school.  The symbols lost all connection to anything tangible, the result psychologically ruinous. Adventure, let there be no doubt, comes with risk.

Consider:

Do you explore with your students the differences between numeracy, problem-solving and mathematical exploration?

Do you lead them on mathematical adventures? Might you, in doing so, discover previously unimagined wells of engagement?

 
The examples are endless, but here is the point: the skyscrapers of learning we call math, science, social studies and language are daunting climbs.  If each step is not an adventure in itself, a visceral interaction with the universe at large, then the climb becomes about the past or the future, an abstract exercise that only focuses us on ourselves. We dwell then on our boredom, our impatience, our other plans, our struggle to understand, the university this gets me into, or the grade this will deliver.  We learn to accept these hollow symbols of life in expectation of something better in the future, only to discover that these symbols have prepared us not at all to live a deeply meaningful life. 

Consider:

Are you tempted to boil this down to employing word problems?

Is this not abstraction of a similar order?

How can you send your students on an actual adventure through your curriculum?

In adventure, in embracing uncertainty, lies the hope for a visceral, emotional, and physical experience of life in concert with symbol and abstraction.  This is a life that refuses to cleave understanding from experience, and that stays open to awe. Adventure teaches us not simply to think, but to experience each moment fully.  If we aspire to prepare our students for life, then surely we should teach them this: not just the symbols, but the thing itself.

References

Carey, B. (2014). How We Learn. Random House.

Ervin, S. M., (1964, June). Language and TAT content in bilinguals. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 68 (5). p. 500-507.

Ferguson, R. (1986, March). Abstraction Anxiety: A Factor of Mathematics Anxiety. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 17 (2), p. 145-150

Gordon, K. (2003). The impermanence of being: Toward a psychology of uncertainty. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 43(2), 96–117. 
https://doi-org.fgul.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0022167802250731

Kort, B. et al (n.d.). A Pedagogical Model for Teaching Scientific Domain Knowledge. M.I.T. Media Lab. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2545574_A_Pedagogical_Model_For_Teaching_Scientific_Domain_Knowledge

Nietzsche, F. (1956). The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack  (trans. Francis Golffing). Doubleday Anchor Books, pp. 155-156 (Preface, VII)

Pavlenko, A. (2002). Bilingualism and emotions. Multilingua 21. 4578. http://astro.temple.edu/~apavlenk/pdf/Pavlenko_Multilingua_2002a.pdf

Thoreau, H. D. (1854) Walden or, life in the woods. [website]
https://www.thoreau-online.org/walden.html

Watts, A. (1951). The Wisdom of Insecurity. Vintage Books.

Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!