Awe
Photo: Mattana, Cloister, Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln, England (modified)
“When we try in good faith
to believe in materialism,
in the exclusive reality
of the physical,
we are asking
ourselves to
step aside;
we are disavowing
the very realm
where we exist
and where all
things precious
are kept –
the realm
of emotion
and conscience;
of memory
and intention
and sensation.”
Table of Contents:
1. Awe and Excellence
2. Awe and Art
3. Awe and Understanding
4. Awe and Perspective
5. Awe and Magic
6. Awe and Experience
1. Awe and Excellence
Don’t we all seek to experience awe? Our mistake lies in the passivity of our approach. We look for it in nature or in religion, or we adjust our expectations and exhort ourselves to “be open” to it, but rarely do we systematically set out to make wonder happen. Too often, we settle for mere excellence.
Excellence! What school doesn’t promote it? What student doesn’t seek it? What a triumph to get a paper or test back as a child, a gold star highlighting the cheerful word “Excellent” (exclamation point)! This perspective trains us to settle for right answers, or to worship perfection. It trains us to think small. No wonder school feels like a grind: all it trains us to strive for is an abstract “A”. There is rarely any wonder in it.
“In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear is a little studied emotion-Awe.”
Dr. Gayle Privette (1985) posited that self-realization happens at the intersection of peak experience and peak performance. Demanding peak performance without offering a peak experience, according to Privette, is a recipe for misery and depression. This frames the stakes starkly. What is Peak Experience, but Awe?
It may be worth considering:
What is awesome in the curriculum you teach?
How could you use awe to inspire your students?
How do you feel about this statement: It is the school’s responsibility to inspire and the student’s responsibility to strive?
2. Awe and Art
For lessons in Awe, Art offers prescriptions. What is Art at its most successful but an effort to surprise, subvert, or surmount our preconceptions? Is this not how it helps us to see anew? This strikes at the very heart of awe: expectations subverted. Art will mess with your head! There is economy in that goal, a sense that anything extra will just diminish the experience and kill the magic. In this, Art counters more common claims to magic, the kind we hear from places like Disneyland. “Welcome to the Magic” invites us at Disney to a commodified realm offering plenty of excess but very little wonder. We do not leave there with new perspectives, only lighter wallets.
Art gets confused with technique, however. Critics compound this problem when they emphasize the mechanics of creation over the psychology and emotion of an artistic experience. Teachers do the same when they teach technique and not purpose. This is the difference between Craft and Art: the first seeks Excellence, the second Wonder.
It may be worth considering:
What would “mess with your student’s heads”?
What is there in your curriculum to inspire awe?
How could you use awe to inspire excellence?
3. Awe and Understanding
It is not an either/or proposition. Technique, beauty, craft, and detail: these are all pathways to appreciation, no less than an “A”—a part of the journey perhaps, but not the entire expedition. This is the unhappy result of testing and grading, unfortunately: it abandons inspiration for understanding. I don’t deny the virtue of understanding, but it will not lift the spirit with Awe. Awe depends on not understanding. It is an invitation to ask and answer the question, “How is this even possible”?
There is Awe to be found outside of Art, of course: other ways to be overwhelmed. Achievement itself can be truly awe-some: losers made winners, miles run faster, men in space, the Internet. Scale can be awe-some: to witness the sublime, to confront infinity in the night sky, to abandon our ego in the presence of forces or entities that mock our pretensions to importance. So, too, disasters: global warming, Titanics, earthquakes. Endurance is awe-some: Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to the South Pole for example, or Apollo 13. Anything that amazes us and surprises us can offer us Awe.
It may be worth considering:
What can you do to offer your students an experience that makes them ask: how is this even possible?
4. Awe and Perspective
Experiencing awe may simply require us to adjust our perspective. Pointillism, cubism, surrealism, dadaism or any art that subverts our preconceptions—they show us the world differently just as the telescope, microscope, X-ray, CAT scan, and MRI offer us new ways to see the universe. That both pointillism and physics view the world as a cloud of particles is arresting. That your students could view their world as a cloud of particles is tantalizing. This is all presented in school as an intellectual exercise, however. It is too often unwrapped of its raw, emotional potential. Instead, let us start wide-eyed with simple questions like “What if...“?
We revere “the life of the mind”, but it makes observers and data manipulators and arm-chair critics of us. Where, in this life of the mind, is there enough power and vastness to offer awe? Instead, why don’t we revere....”life”?
I’m reminded of that image of a huge lecture hall blackboard easily 24 feet long and 8 feet high covered end to end in abstract mathematical equations, and think about how that could be unfurled on the first day of math class. I’m reminded of that movie Amelie, which will make you believe in magic. I’m reminded of that study demonstrating that speaking in a foreign language makes you think differently. Something that benign, and may I say it . . . boring . . . as learning a second language can turn you into someone else. Not so boring after all.
It may be worth considering:
What is it about your life and your students’ lives that just needs to be viewed differently to be amazing?
Are there experiences pregnant with the potential for awe that you might offer your students?
How can you overwhelm your students with something they can’t possibly understand, and engage them in powerful learning?
5. Awe and Magic
School could teach Awe by introducing students to profound experiences, by teaching them to see and to seek new perspectives, by building imagination and the skills to create something amazing, and by simply raising expectations. Most of all, we could make a huge difference by focusing on surprise and constantly surprising our students. This is the meaning of Magic.
This essay is definitely not about card tricks and disappearing rabbits, but there is something we can learn from traditional magic. Magic subverts expectations: it shows how just enough attention to the audience can transform a wonderful idea into a memorable experience. Only when the theatrical becomes the experience, any substantive idea withered or absent, do we leave with disappointment instead of Awe.
This essay is not about fantasy, although it certainly embraces imagination. Fantasy evokes experiences that can never be, and so it touches our emotions with glancing force. Awe comes from actual experience, not stories about fake experiences, and it strikes us directly in the solar plexus.
It may be worth considering:
How much insight do you have into the experience of your students?
With the curriculum as your tool, how can you surprise the heck out of them?
6. Awe and Experience
As a writer, I cannot diminish the possibility of transporting readers with the written word, but when I seek out true Wonder, I get on a bicycle to cross the Sahara or go for a walk outside: I don’t look for a book about it. This is the crux of the issue, is it not? How can the moratorium of school, in which student safety and budget limitations weigh heavily, possibly offer anything but facsimiles and approximations and representations of experience? Sending everyone to the Sahara doesn’t scale.
It surprised me, therefore, to read a study (Bai et al., 2017) that suggested that awe is commonplace. Researchers working in China and the United States asked 83 people in each country to keep a daily diary for 2 weeks, documenting their experiences of awe and joy. This study included 804 experiences of awe among those 166 people in just 14 days. That is an experience of awe every three days or so. No Sahara required.
That awe might be too much to ask of school, too rare, too unusual, this is simply no excuse. Awe is not rare. Awe is everywhere. Everywhere.
It may be worth considering:
The last 50 times you experienced awe—perhaps you could commit that list to paper.
How might you share those experiences with your students?
Are they an opportunity to communicate the emotional reasons you teach what you teach?
Rather than just talk about them, can you recreate those experiences for your students?
References
Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., Chen, S., Gordon, A. M., Stellar, J. E., McNeil, G. D., Peng, K. & Keltner, D. (2017). Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement: Universals and cultural variations in the small self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2), 185-209. doi: http://dx.doi.org.fgul.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/pspa0000087
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 17(2), 297-314.
Privette, G. (1985). Experience as a component of personality theory. Psychological Reports (56), 263-266.
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!