I am prone to the siren call of procrastination. I sat down with a snack, ready to get working on this labour of inquiring, but decided that I’d better keep my guacamole-covered hands away from the keyboard while snacking. So, as I often do when procrastinating, I put on a TED talk. I never expected to find a talk that would so fundamentally challenge my paradigmatic assumptions on choice and free will.

Dear reader, if you have a half an hour in which to do so, I encourage you to watch The Art of Choosing on TED by Sheena Iyengar. She discusses the cultural assumptions around choice. In Canada and the US we are very familiar with the value placed on choice. Choice is intricately wound up with the consumeristic, democratic, and “free” society that we enjoy. However, Iyengar discusses how these choices may not always be the best for us. As well, while one culture places great value on choice, it is not necessarily so across cultures. Iyengar discusses a study with three groups of children. In group A, students are given a choice of activities. In group B, students are told that Ms. Smith (the adult figure in the study) has chosen the activity for them. In group C, students are told that their mothers chose the activity. Students’ cultural backgrounds had a great effect on their perceptions of these different choice situations, which in turn had a great effect on their productivity in the different conditions. There are some touching, illustrative anecdotes mentioned in the talk, which you should definitely watch. Iyengar sums up one of the possible problems when considering what choice to include in the classroom, or in our lives in general in this following quote.

“Choice no longer offers opportunities but delivers constraints. It’s not a marker of liberation but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it.” – Sheena Iyengar

The availability of choice and the kinds of choices available clearly have social justice implications, given that cultural background may have a bearing on students’ likelihood to thrive in situations of choice. It is my philosophy that education of children should aim to guide students to be independent, critical individuals. It seems only natural that the way to accomplish this is by providing developmentally appropriate choices, and the scaffolding needed to become more competent decision makers. However, I am coming to realize how rooted this philosophy and method is in my own cultural bias. How can I reconcile this with the possibility that such practices are culturally intolerant? Is providing a choice to choose helpful, or is it just one more choice? Does choice still support autonomy if it is not an individual choice?

Perhaps it is a matter of providing meaningful choice, and not just “suffocation by meaningless minutiae”, but does that mean that it is good to allow students to choose a topic for an inquiry project, but give them direction in which pen to use (Iyengar, 2010)? I will speak from my own experience to answer this question. It seems to me that some students like to know which pen to use and to have the minutiae pre-determined for them. However, students who prefer this only prefer it when these decisions are made for the entire class. As well, students can tell when a teacher is giving them token, meaningless choices, and these choices are often perceived as not choices at all, or as unimportant choices. I believe that there is also a difference between explicit choices and implied choices. In a Montessori classroom in which students are planning their own work schedules to a large extent, choosing their task or their colour of pencil may not seem like a choice to them. It is implied. However, that same type of choice might be very differently received by a student from a very structured, traditional-style classroom. The culture of choice, then, may not simply be culturally based on a macro scale, but also between classroom cultures.

I wonder how these conflicting ideas of the value of choice fit into Anderman and Anderman’s collection of the types of choice. In their chapter on Autonomy, Anderman and Anderman claim that “student motivation is enhanced when students have opportunities to make choices during classes” (Anderman and Anderman, 2010, pg: 112). It would be interesting to explore this topic at much greater length… What are the cultural implications of choice? How do they play out in my specific classroom? Probably a lot of the implications from a classroom management, or social justice, or social-emotional perspective lean heavily on getting to know individual students. We can look at cultures and make assumptions and think in broad strokes, and while this is useful sometimes for identifying things to look out for, it seems to me that first and foremost it is best to get to know the individual needs and contexts of the students in the room.

I am reminded of an incident I observed in a Montessori classroom where a student was wandering aimlessly about the room. The teacher suggested a task that she knew the student needed to work on, but rather than demand that he do it, she simply suggested he work on that till he could think of something more interesting to do. In this way, the teacher was not removing the student’s choice, but she was acting as a guide, focussing the student back on his work. I believe this to be an exemplary illustration of the teacher guiding an individual student based on the needs of the individual student in a specific situation.