Adventures in Being a Complete Novice

Yesterday I failed miserably. I was frustrated, a tiny bit embarrassed, and delighted. I was delighted because one of my personal goals for my sabbatical is to learn something completely new from scratch. I want to feel like a complete novice, so I can improve my empathy for what my students may be going through when they join my class. The phenomenon called the hindsight bias or curse of knowledge basically means that once we know something it’s really difficult to imagine what it’s like to not know that thing. Imagine not knowing what the traffic lights or temperature mean. Imagine not knowing how to decode what these letters that form this sentence mean. Weird, eh? The challenge is, it’s my job as a teacher to imagine what it’s like to not know about psychology (or some aspect of it), and then try to teach that topic to people who actually do not know (as much) about it. What makes this action trickier is that the longer I do my job, the more I know about psychology, which makes it harder and harder to imagine what it’s like to be in my students’ chairs. I try to get around this challenge in a few ways, including talking with my students about their thoughts. But let’s be honest: it’s been a while since I’ve had a pure experience of complete and utter lack of understanding.

Enter: Pottery class.

Yesterday morning I wandered down to a studio I’ve passed a million times but never entered. I was excited to embark on a new learning adventure! I was going to create something! It might not be beautiful, but I could create! I was the second person to arrive, out of a class of 10. I met my teacher, she used our names to introduce us to each other. I felt welcome. Someone said she had done this before and I didn’t think much of it until later. (For the record, my only foray into art was a single class in high school that was half history, and included zero pottery.) The teacher showed us around the facility. I was trying to absorb all the information. The keywords I remember, in no particular order, include: kiln, bisque firing (as opposed to another kind of firing I forget), plug, glaze, members only shelf, don’t touch, student shelf, slip, washroom, clay, silicate, wheel, clean, wedge, centering. Soon, my brain was full of terms, but I was still excited. Read: without some sort of handout or way to take notes, jargon became a jumbled mass quickly… but maybe that’s ok as I don’t really need to know all this right.

It felt like an eternity until we finally got our clay! Read: all I wanted to do was *DO* the discipline of pottery, which made it difficult for me to concentrate fully on the orientation. The teacher demonstrated wedging, which is kind of like kneading dough and is essential for a strong final product. I measured exactly 2 pounds of clay from my large block (instant success!). My wedged clay looked reasonably good for a first try. Great! With confidence I prepared my wheel station. I watched the teacher’s demonstrations carefully, and tried to emulate her precise hand and body actions. Things were going reasonably well until suddenly half my clay came off in my hand! I made do for a while, and then I tried to make a cylinder, carefully watching the steps and trying to follow with a half portion of clay. After trying to be so careful with it, my cylinder fully collapsed in on itself. It was such a disappointment. I suddenly felt frustrated, especially when I looked over at the person who had done it before. Hers looked just like the teacher’s. Read: social comparison framed my feeling of disappointment and pushed it into failure, but also motivation to make another one.

I stayed an extra half an hour because of a fierce desire to make SOMETHING, ANYTHING that didn’t resemble a pile of grey mush. I tried three times and couldn’t even get the clay to stick to the wheel. It kept slipping off! That most fundamental starting point eluded me, despite the careful attention I had paid to the demonstration, despite the fact that I’d successfully done it just an hour before when my teacher was there. Frustrating! I gave up — but only because I realized I had actual work I had to do and couldn’t just spend the rest of the day on pottery. Reluctantly, I left. All the way home I was frustrated and annoyed because I couldn’t get it. Slowly, I began to laugh at myself. I had taken one single class in a completely unfamiliar discipline and somehow I wasn’t a magical unicorn prodigy in pottery so I was frustrated by it. Ha! Later, I actually uttered the words, laughing, “Turns out I’m not a great potter!” and they made me pause. Really? Is it true that I don’t think I’m a great potter because I got one lesson and couldn’t make something? Of course not. Read: This reaction is consistent with something I’ve suspected for a long time. I tend to have a fixed mindset, and correct to growth when I notice it. I’m reminded of when my statistics students say “I’m no good at math” and I try to convince them otherwise. It takes time and practice and willingness to fail but not feel like a failure.

Scorecard: Pottery definitely won the day. I won insight about failing and a pile of clay covered in mud (called slip) that looked kind of like this (actually this is nicer than mine was):

When I searched for “Pottery cylinder collapse” this image from “Fine Mess Pottery” came up, in a post aptly titled “To that beginning student.”  Apparently I’m not alone.

Officially on Sabbatical!

As of 1 July 2016 I’m officially on Sabbatical! Instead of heading to the classroom this Fall, I’ll be on an extended summer until September 2017. Sabbatical is an amazing opportunity to spend a year working on big picture projects and deep thinking that don’t fit well in the hectic pace of the regular teaching terms. It’s also a chance to catch up on sleep, well-being, time with family and friends, and some travel.

Some projects I’ll be working on include a few papers to submit for publication to journals (3 of which already partially exist but need deep work), the International Program for the Scholarship of Educational Leadership: UBC Certificate on Curriculum and Pedagogy in Higher Education (http://international.educ.ubc.ca/soel/), overhauling my Psyc 101 and 102 courses, continuing to work on curriculum renewal for the BA Psychology degree, and a few other things here and there. I’m working on developing habits to keep me productive enough on these projects while also spending lots of time resting and re-energizing.

If you’re trying to reach me during this time, I’m generally going to be pretty terrible on email. I really hate email. It saps my life energy, which means it cannot be a priority for me during this sabbatical time. If you really need to reach me urgently, try a Tweet (@cdrawn) to grab my attention.

On Communicating Science

The amazing team at the Human Early Learning Partnership, led by Kim Shonert-Reichl spent the morning thinking about Knowledge Translation from various perspectives, and invited me to weigh in. To prepare, I pondered questions like “How can we use what we know about knowledge and memory in the effort to make social change?” Here’s the PowerPoint supplement to what I came up with. What would you say?

HELP Talk

On Using Peer Assessments

Jenny Wong and Jason Myers at Arts ISIT interviewed me about my TLEF-funded project and general use of peer assessment in my classes. Here’s what I had to say: http://isit.arts.ubc.ca/catherine-rawn-uses-peer-assessments-to-encourage-peer-based-learning/. IMHO the most interesting idea was this:

The more we move towards peer anything, the university is going to have to collectively rethink the message that we send to students regarding who holds knowledge, who’s allowed to hold knowledge and who holds the most valuable knowledge and that’s not always the professor.

SPSP Preconference 2016

Good morning! I’m delighted to report that I am the morning keynote speaker at SPSP’s Society for the Teaching of Psychology preconference!

My talk title is “How Would You Design a Social/Personality Psychology in Social Media Course? Bringing the Self into Focus” and it’s about how I answered that question for myself.

Here are some resources that might be of interest: