Arresting Pavlov

I am writing this at the Montshire Children’s Museum, a great spot for thinking about how —as the article said—to “spark our curiosity and sense of wonder.”  (Partner and toddler explore while I write.)

As I was reading through step IV of the “Research Cycle,”  I thought back to a professor I had in grad. school, Eleanor Duckworth, the author of The Having of Wonderful  Ideas:  And Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Teachers College Press, 1996).  Her whole “take” was experientially-based:  She had her students think about physical phenomena like planetary orbits/rotation, e.g., by watching and charting the phases of the moon.   I was 30 and had never really thought about it, believe it or not—so the a-ha! moment was perhaps all the more momentous.  I remember her introducing a Frost poem (“Design”) by asking us what we “noticed about the poem.”  Naturally I launched into a literary analysis—years of training had made it a totally Pavlovian response:  see poem; drool; analyze—but she stopped me cold.  That wasn’t what she wanted.  She wanted me to experience the poem in an immediate way, not to detach myself from it by using lingo and yammering on about its structure.

A-ha!

I still use this technique with my students, and find that it exacts an equally refreshing shift from them.  Just the other day in Mythology, we were talking about a poem by Emily Dickinson about Abraham and Isaac.  Dickinson’s work is a perfect vehicle for using this method because the idiosyncratic structure and punctuation can be alienating to kids, but if you start with “what they notice,” it allows them to see the discrete elements and then work their way toward the whole.

Now how to translate this thinking into research projects, using the “Research Cycle.”  I am thinking about the types of online, and other, research I have kids do, from looking into the spread of hate groups to Tolkien’s sources in Norse mythology in The Hobbit.  I can see how the steps advocated in the Cycle would work for many of the projects I assign, but can also see, having read (part of) the article, that I will have to re-frame my own thinking about these assignments:  I have approached my teaching, in this sense, in the same way I first approached the Frost poem, before Eleanor brought me up short.  Too often, I have a pre-determined set of things I want them to get to, which I then relentlessly guide them toward—without letting them frame their own “essential questions” and think about how to get to an end result that is meaningful to them.

As an example of a time when something totally unexpected and stunning happened during a research-assignment, I was having my students look at hate-group activity in general (numbers of groups, their locations, etc.) the morning after Obama won the election several years ago now…When all at once, all the white-supremacist sites they were on crashed.  We figured out that Obama’s victory had caused such a surge of fear among people who frequent those sites (or who might not have ever logged on previously, but harbored those beliefs) that the volume of their posts and activity downed the sites.  Talk about a real-life experience with what I was trying to teach!  I have to believe that those serendipitous occasions, the intersections of teaching and reality, could occur more often were I to let the students themselves be more generative—though perhaps not in the totally chilling way it happened that morning.

How about using hate-groups as a topic with my soon-to-be “unleveled” sophomores?  I often assign The Laramie Project in 10^th grade; though I have never taught it to levels other than Accelerated (Honors), I don’t see why the play couldn’t work even for kids who don’t think of themselves as readers—it is made up of snippets of speech and dialogue taken from real-life interviews and dialogue among people in Laramie after Matt Shephard was murdered.  The language is as stark as the topic, and I think most students will be able to handle the content.

A hate-group research project after reading the play raises certain other dilemmas, so how I frame it is of paramount importance:  It’s a look at the organized face of what happened more precipitously (and possibly less calculatedly, depending on whose version you believe)  in Laramie.  

When I think of central questions I myself would like them to get at, they include why hate groups exist, and what external events spark a surge in their membership; what the range of hate-groups is—who’s being targeted, and why;  where they are primarily located, etc. (The SPLC, if I remember correctly, had logged an entry on their watch-list about a group which existed fleetingly at our own high school, the NHRS—“N—ger-Hanging Redneck Society—their vigilance is pretty remarkable.  It was an eye-opener for the kids to see their own community listed on the site.) 

I am going to have to think a  lot more about how to make this work, but our sojourn at the Montshire is over now with an unanticipated toddler- temp. of 101.  So it goes.  As the authors say in Stage IV (“Stating Suppositions—Hypothesizing and Predicting”), “Why do you suppose that happened?  How will the evening go?  What, if any, sleep will you get?”