I’m nearing the end of my first week back in my office after attending the NEH Institute in Salt Lake City, and, already, I feel myself sliding back into some bad writing habits. For one, I’ve had my browser window open all morning with the Dashboard of this blog as an attempt to remind myself that I should reflect on something that I learned or did today. It has taken me near to the end of the work day to muster up the willingness to actually sit here and put something in this window, even though I’ve been thinking about and doing plenty of work that I could easily be sharing my thoughts on. And yet, for most of the day, I’ve resisted the task of doing so, even though I know it will feel helpful and gratifying. There are some days when I know writing is not going to help – and I don’t shame myself for health breaks or otherwise – but today is the kind of today where I had no reason to hesitate about writing as much as I have been.
So, why? What is my attitude of resistance here and how I can keep moving my personal motivation needle closer to willingness to keep stretching, growing, and thinking creatively about what it means to write regularly? How do I return the fun to the practice?
Part of my resistance has something to do with the context I’m now in. I’m back to my regular routines, where I’m not necessarily being inundated with new conversations, ideas, and projects every single day. This is just real life, of course, but when I had a topic and a syllabus I was following along with every day, I had a lot of structure to my writing routine. I had something very new to comment on every single day! (Hence, writing every single day!)
But here, as I’ve been sitting and staring at this blank window, attempting to compose something here and not flit over to one of the many other tasks on my “to-do” list, I’m not even necessarily sure where to begin. Do I stay focused on my thoughts today about functional literacy, and my own reconciling with learning some new technical skills? Or do I move instead to reflecting on the value of synthesizing a class activity for an instructor so that the activity can be replicated in another context? Or do I join the fray over the latest controversial article published in Inside Higher Education? It’s almost as if there’s too much to say, a problem that requires I use this blog post space to curate which of those threads I want to follow.
So, to that end, I’m actually going to follow a thread that has helped clarify some of my feelings of reluctance today: how reading a book on learning today has helped me to understand why I’m struggling a bit to synthesize my own learning for this blog.
Some context first: I’m finally reading How Learning Works, a book written by teaching and learning researchers out of Carnegie Mellon University (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman) about “research-based principles” for teaching in higher education. This book has been on my radar for a long time, but I’ve only recently made some space to read it, and now that I’m a good portion of the way through, I wish I had read it sooner!
The book is helpfully organized into seven principles of teaching, which makes the book sound more didactic than it actually is. In fact, each principle is explored with immense nuance, clarity, and complexity. For example, in their discussion of the first principle – that student learning is impacted by the activation of prior knowledge – Ambrose and her co-authors clarify that student activation of prior knowledge can be either helpful OR harmful depending on the context. For example, it is important for students to bridge knowledge from a prior context if it is accurate and if it connects meaningfully with the new knowledge acquired, but prior knowledge may not necessarily be accurate and it may advance or reinforce stereotypes and misconceptions about particular topics. So, Ambrose and her co-authors acknowledge these limitations and offer solutions around framing activities, assignments, and interventions in ways that acknowledge what students might know before coming into a course, but that also directly confronts why students may maintain certain beliefs, ideas, or understandings of a particular topic.
That is a rather brief and superficial summary of a book altogether worth reading if you have any interest in what good teaching in a college class should look like, but I think what’s standing out to me most – and what I’m struggling to work through in my own conception of teaching and the uptake of literacy at large – is how we might help others organize what they learn in ways that might help them make meaningful connections and see relationships between ideas. Indeed, these thoughts are stemmed to Ambrose et. al’s Principle #2, which grapples with how students’ organization of knowledge might impact their learning. For example, it is one thing just to memorize facts and share them; that is but one way of acquiring knowledge. But it is another thing entirely to apply those facts, that knowledge, to see them within a larger framework, and to organize them within a particular schema to truly make sense of them and extrapolate new ideas.
See, I think this book made me realize that what I’m struggling with as a writer right now is knowledge organization: I’m holding on to a lot of different ideas for my project, from book history to learning science to composition studies and embodied cognition, and I’m not really sure what to do with all of them. This doesn’t mean I’m not learning, but I’m also not necessarily connecting the dots yet between these conversations and, as such, I’m not necessarily extrapolating an argument that might show evidence of what I’ve learned throughout, well, my many years of doctoral research and beyond. (Oof, that was a bleak sentence to write, but I mean it insofar as I know I’m struggling to communicate my ideas well).
In some ways, I feel frustrated with myself that I’m not organizing my own knowledge well. I can see myself reinforcing some bad habits too, convincing myself that in order to learn more about my topic, I just need to read more or I just need to remember certain facts. But deep down, I know that these habits aren’t really going to lead me anywhere. I know that the better thing for me to do is to start articulating how the ideas overlap. What are the interconnecting concepts exactly? How would I articulate what those interconnections are? What is the meaning of those interconnections? That’s truly where I need to go, and yet… I’m not quite there.
I sound a wee bit pessimistic here, but it’s actually rather helpful for me to see that this is part of the problem. In general, I think of myself as an organized person: I thrive off of a good plan, a clear task list, and labels. But when it comes to wrangling complicated ideas, to putting new things together that I’ve never considered in conversation before, my mind quickly becomes undisciplined and I can find myself tackling the cognitively simpler tasks before I attempt to untangle the more complicated ones. Knowledge organization takes immense discipline, after all, and time. So, pushing past this cognitive hurdle will remain a problem, but being able to put a name to this hurdle, and to say, “Ah, that’s where I’m stumbling” is helpful because that term gives me the basis to create a new plan and atomize what needs to come next.
Ah, it all sounds so simple when I write out these thoughts in this way, and part of what I’m tricking myself into as I write out these thoughts is the illusion of simplicity so that I can move forward with writing my manuscript without feeling so scared! Perhaps if I write something that seems simple, it may take on that feeling of simplicity? That may be wishful thinking, but progress is progress no matter what attitude it took me to get there.
I’d love to learn more about how other writers manage knowledge organization. How do you move to the point where you’re starting to see connections between disparate ideas? How do you facilitate that process? Let me know!