Conference Meditations
An essay…
There are many things I could share on this post about the SECAC conference. If I did, it would make for a very large and dense reading. There was however, one overall theme that kept popping up on most talks. Usually conferences have an overarching theme and then the categories on which that theme is discussed. Nonetheless a theme always seems to emerge from the different talks. This time, it was twofold: the need to create spaces for students to play. Inherent to play is the concept of touch.
Touching things is such an ubiquitous activity that we rarely think or meditate on how much we rely on it. We touch to understand. We touch to play. We touch to make. The talks in the conference made me realize how vital touch specifically is to the creative process. And now that I have been thinking about it, it feels obvious. Kind of like waking up to something. Yet, I knew this. I had encountered this in the Montessori schools my children attended. The Montessori method relies on tactile experiences to learn abstract concepts. I often said that if I had learned math the way they did, by actually moving objects, math would have been easier for me.
For a long time I have been thinking about the relationships in the creative process of each area: dancing, fine arts, typography, sculpture, etc. Even though the final form of each media is different, the starting point is often a drawing, a sketch, or a playful tactile manipulation of materials. There are shapes that could only be drawn after tactile manipulation of materials. The errors or mess ups that happen when putting x with y are part of an organic experimentation and often leads to unexpected ideas. Making things is often the answer to many questions regarding the “how do I or what do I…?”
As I walked from panel to panel listening to each talk, it seemed that the unspoken rule we were all hailing was that physical experiences are indispensable to effectively and creatively succeed in digital formats. It would then seem that there is a need to make space for those experiences as much as there is a need for the students to learn the software. In fact, the effectiveness and assertiveness of a design solution in a digital format can only come from previous physical experimentation. In general the richer projects come from those students who are willing to go beyond, to try things literally outside the box the laptop is, cut and glue things together, and simply experiment.
This realization makes me wonder and ponder. We graduate students who need to be proficient on the basic software and ready to tackle any job at their level. Technology, as we know, is constantly changing and evolving often at a pace that we can’t match. It begs the question then, what do we teach and how do we teach it?
On the other hand, the emotional and human aspect of college learning are as important. Dr. Maithreyi Gopalan, associate professor at the University of Oregon conducted a five year study asserting that “a sense of belonging has been identified as a universal and fundamental motivation”. It is the one factor that determines someone’s success. We tend to go above and beyond when we feel we are part of something. It is no accident colleges spend a lot of money in providing experiences that cultivate a sense of shared experiences and activities. Hence the jerseys, the chants, the mascots, and the alumni idea of family.
It seems then that we have the following areas to consider when it comes to teaching:
A sense of belonging
Play
Touch
Digital proficiency
When I attended college, no such thing as a syllabus existed. There were no online content management systems. There was no attendance taken. There was no software to be learned, at least in my concentration. Institutionally, less effort was spent on tools or devices to access materials but a lot of effort was put into challenging us to digest the content. Today, we perhaps make things too easily available that there is no sense of victory because there is no challenge, no sense of belonging because there is no time, no time to play because the project takes too much time on the computer, and no time to touch because they do not want to print.
In my utopia world, there would be a college where there would be time and space to cover those four: a sense of belonging, time to play, time to touch, and digital proficiency. For now, I need to keep thinking about how to make space for them in my classes.
My notes from the conference below.
