GPS is a terrible teacher!

Those of us who assume that learning is a linear process, disconnected from senses, emotions and social interactions, tend to see knowledge as something that can be produced. “Industrial production of knowledge” (Robinson, 2016) is supposed to be effective and result in perfect products in shortest possible time. However, learners are usually humans, not machines.

To make it clear, I am not against machines. I use them all the time and I know that they can be helpful, but I deny being one. I am critical to the industrial production of knowledge and the illusion that learning can be “effective” with precise recipes for teaching. Neither students nor teachers should be compared to machines! Teachers have to be sensitive, attentive and flexible in order to meet each individual in specific contexts, care for them and appreciate their unique talents; Mutual trust has to be established between teachers and students, among other things because learning depends of emotions.

Thinking of analogies between learning and assembly line, and teachers as machines, makes me think about an incident where I trusted a digital device (a GPS with female voice), and when she betrayed me I learned something that makes is possible to empathize with students with bad experience from learning situations. I was on my way to Madrid airport and I followed the GPS’s instruction. The crowded, parallel and curvy lanes on the motorway kept my hands busy and my eyes focused on the road. I did not have time to look around, and I had to trust the GPS-voice. I thought I saw a sign for the airport. I was driving and driving and getting more confused with every minute. Why wasn’t I getting there? When the GPS sent me to circle around a roundabout, I knew something was wrong, but at that point, I had already lost my sense of direction and had no clue where I was. Like in step-by-step instructions (I remember a software course I once attended) I got lost if I misunderstood a tiny detail; There was no way back or possibility to find out where it went wrong. Blind following of instructions - turning off own thinking - can get one to quite unpleasant places. That is what I learned both from the from the GPS-incident, and from the software course. I learned to distrust and to get scared.

After circling around Madrid for one hour and 50 km in radius (I later found out that it was what the GPS was doing – sending me around Madrid because she did not like the address I had given her) I was desperately trying to get off the highway, but the moment I left one highway, I entered another one. There was no place to stop, no one to ask, no time to think. Caught in the traffic felt like being in a never-stopping carousel. The fear of being too late for the plane, mixed with all kinds of stress, discomfort and luck of confidence. I could not think clearly. I probably seemed quite foolish when I simply run of my car and stopped a taxi, hoping that the driver spoke English! The look on the taxi-driver’s face was unmistakably saying: “This woman is crazy”. Intelligence and madness can be quite contextual – we should be aware of that when we, teachers, stress, confuse or comfort our students.

In my view, trust and flexibility are necessary components of teaching and learning.


The GPS-incident has been haunting me for years. You might find my associations with teaching strange, but the emotional side of the experience has been so strong that it has really had impact on my understanding. Meaningfulness of what I learn comes to me when my understanding is connected to my our personal endeavors, choices and struggles – not when I am blindly following someone else’s instructions. Learning is a process of personal engagement!


We humans (teachers and learners alike) are sometimes slow, confused, scared and we sometimes act unreasonably, even stupid. We might not always be accountable, as we expect machines to be, but we are capable of contextual choices, improvisation and construction of meaning in the contexts where we are fully alive.


Robinson, K. (2016). Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That is Transforming Education. New York: Penguin Books.

In Widerberg’s and Munch’s Footsteps

Each of us has a unique view on the reality. Each individual’s view is connected to real events, thus how the reality affects us depends on many personal factors… on our senses, attention, imagination, interests, emotions, experiences... Education usually pays more attention to facts from the “real world” than to students’ perceptions of it (Robinson, 2016); fortunately, this is not the case in arts education.

My research builds on the claim that each person makes/constructs/negotiates personal understandings on the behalf of embodied experiences from past and present. Motivation for learning, creating or exploring, can come from experiencing some kind of similarity between a past and a present experience. Here are examples where famous paintings matched students’ personal experiences; in the first example the students were young pre-school children age 3-5; the second example is from early childhood teacher education.

In a research project, few years ago, I accompanied a group of children to a beach. The children played in the fine sand and shallow water.  Some of the teachers took pictures and I later selected photos to show to the children later in order to help them recall their experiences. The plan was to motivate the children to paint. For that purpose examples from a Norwegian painter Frans Widerberg were to be used as inspiration, however, while I was looking through an museum catalogue for Widerberg’s exhibition the children had recently visited, I saw extraordinary resemblance between the photos and the paintings. The motives as well as compositions were identical! I was amazed! When the paintings and the photos were shown to the children one after another on a big screen, it seemed like Widerberg painted the children that day – as if he was on the beach with us (see some of the paintings here: https://www.artsy.net/show/kunstverket-galleri-frans-widerberg ). The children’s experiences of the real world merged with their art experiences. This was magic! The children could instantly sense that art can mean something to them. They experienced that art can talk directly to them and were motivated to explore their own ways of expressing through this this wordless language. Additionally, their own experiences suddenly seemed more important to themselves … since thy seemed to be important to a painter who put them on canvas in powerful colors.

In another educational setting, where I was responsible for a group of teacher students (with minimal art experience), another famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was to inspire the students. Actually it was another way around: the students’ own activity of drawing was to be experienced first, and Munch’s paintings were to recall their personal experiences.

We are fortunate that our campus (University College of Southeast Norway, campus Vestfold) is situated close by Åsgårdstrand, a small city where Munch used to spend his summers. His summerhouse is still there, as well is the beach visible on many of his paintings (see https://www.artsy.net/artist/edvard-munch ). The students spent a day of drawing on the beach – just like that, without any introduction to Munch, however I had first told them about the project with children and Widerberg’s painting. I wanted them to experience the place with their own senses first. The drawing assignment was a form of slowing time, allowing focused attention, dwelling and engagement of senses. Their interest for Munch paintings evolved from the fact that they literally walked in Munch’s footsteps. Their feet touched the same sandy ground… though 100 years later. The new experience – the one from art – could resonate their own multisensory embodied experiences. The past and present experiences could meet in personal, emotionally loaded insights, meaningful because they concerned them, and were not only a piece of art history to be memorized.

Munch's summer house in Åsgårdstrand

http://www.munchshus.no/en/

Robinson, K. (2016). Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education. New York: Penguin Books.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/edvard-munch     
https://www.artsy.net/show/kunstverket-galleri-frans-widerberg

Learning to Learn

I recently wrote an article about learning through first-hand-experience. The paper is to be presented at Design + Research + Society DRS2016 conference in Brighton in the end of June. It is available for reading here: http://www.drs2016.org/103

Here is the abstract: A child cannot be taught how to walk – it has to sense the balance of its body, the smoothness of the floor, the strength of its muscles, and respond appropriately. The author argues that the process of learning depends on embodied functions and subjective experiences of the one who is learning. This paper discusses the first-hand perspective in the process of material transformation. During such a process, the acting person has to be attentive and make innumerable adaptive choices. Examples from a doctoral study focusing on young children (3 year olds), illustrate how the children’s first-person experiences related to their learning. The author proposes that similar processes take place at all ages and that experience of learning through material transformation is an arena for learning how to learn. The paper initiates discussion about interactive relationships between the senses, attention, emotional engagement, responsibility, mastery, self-confidence and learning during material transformations.

Teaching and Trust

Can teaching ever be neutral and objective? I don't thinks so. The way you look at your students, the way you make them feel - everything matters for their personal growth and emerging understanding. My colleagues Anne Lise Nordbø and Fatima Cruz and I studied our own teaching in a project where we asked our students (early childhood teacher education) to improvise in performative events with 0-2 year old children. We learned that trust was essential for our students' abilities to develope their improvisational skills. We tecahers first had to earn the students' trust, before they were able to embrase the challenges we exposed them to.

Our article "Trust me, you will learn something! - Challenge and confidence in teaching improvisation" is now published in the book "Education as Jazz: Interdisciplinary Sketches on a New Metaphor", edited by Marina Santi and Eleonora Zorzi.
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/education-as-jazz

What could a Serbian donkey teach Norwegian students?

Students of teacher education at University College of Southeast Norway were exposed to an extraordinary challenge when they were asked to help a donkey with her health troubles. Maza-donkey had traveled far away from home in Serbia, over seven mountains and seven seas, to a place in Norway where grass was greener… dangerously greener. The change of climate and food did not do her well, she got laminitis (horse disease caused by too much sugar and proteins in food) and she desperately needed help to keep her dissolving hooves dry during the long Norwegian winter.

The fall after Maza got sick I was responsible for visual art teaching in a wonderful group of 17 students of teacher education. Their excitement inspired me to come up with an idea that they could design a shelter for Maza. That would be a realistic problem for them to solve – with pedagogical capacity to engage them, make them learn though experience and get inspired how they could plan their future teaching of school children.

A large cage-like construction was occasionally standing just outside the art department. It was a rest from reconstruction of the building. It needed to be removed anyway, and we saw possibilities how to transform it into a castle for Maza - who we imagined was a donkey princess. The students designed square applications in water-proof textile to fill the windows in the metal frame. Maza herself inspired the designs: some of the motives were her hairy ears, happy tail and mystical cross on her back. The students that were inspired by a story about “princess Maza” gave her diamonds and other things a princess should have in her castle. Some students made landscapes to remind her of her beloved home county. One student even made an applique of Serbian national fruit plum, unaware of the fact that Maza once upon the time actually lived in a plum garden…

Maza taught the students about empathy and designing for specific purpose and needs. She taught them about the importance of imagination in learning and teaching, and how meaningfulness comes from feeling of being of value for someone else… event if (or exactly because?) that someone else is a little helpless donkey. There is so much mastery and joy in the experience that out efforts matter to someone. 

Thanks to Henning, Terje and Thomas who helped with transporting of the “cage-construction” from University College of Southeast Norway to the stables at Holt, Stokke, and to Marianne and Roger that allowed us to place it on their property.

This story has also been edited and published at the web-page of Norwegian embassy in Serbia:   http://www.norveska.org.rs/News_and_events/News-and-events1/What-could-a-Serbian-donkey-teach-Norwegian-students/#.Vsi3RWf2bIU

A hen without head and a dragon

While I am filming my three years old niece play with playdough, she is explaining what she is doing. She presses small pieces of the material together and says that it is important to make them stick. Then she cuts playdough with a knife in many small pieces. I ask her what she is going to do with so many pieces. She says that this is the right way to do it – and her voice is very convincing.

 

At one point, she starts laughing and pointing at the lump in front of her: "Look!"
I do not understand what she is trying to show me.

She tries again: "See? The hen does not have a head!", she laughs. She is right, I can not see any head. I can not see a hen, either! - but I laugh together with her. Along with our playful laughter, I sense how she is becoming even more confident in his actions. She now turns the invisible hen around and announces with surprise in her voice: "Oh! Now it became a dragon!" The tail of the chicken without a head, became a head for a dragon. She starts taking pieces of playdough, pressing them between her thumbs and forefingers and making flat chips to shape a kind of armor for the dragon. I wonder what thas is, and she says that the dragon needs protection from rain.

I am curious about her ideas and I ask her where she had seen such a dragon: “Have you may be seen it in books, on TV, or somewhere else?”

She responds: “No! I have not seen it anywhere. I made it!”

I try again to identify the source of her inspiration: "Perhaps such dragons exist in fairy tales?"
But she is determined: "No, no! It does not exist anywhere else, but here!!!”
She is the proud creator of the unique dragon that was born from a hen with no tail – and she knows it! I could almost hear and smell her increasing self-confidence.