Hi Jeremy,
Nice technique. As Chuck says, it helps students be aware of how they think.
Wondering whether this is enough, and even whether it is deeply unhelpful if
a bigger picture is taken...
It brings out a dilemma in terms of assisting the development of people
whose future focuses on creating (educating for 'creativity').
Neuro-biological research since the 80s seems to show that the key parts of
the processes of what people call 'thinking' and reflecting about
'thinking', are handled below what is available to self perception - it
simply doesn't happen in terms of the neurological 'images' that occur in
'thinking', or the perceptions of feelings.
Looked at another way, the bit we can see inside ourselves that we call
'thinking' is not the decision making process not is it the self (or sense
of self), or the emotions themselves. It is a superficial simplistic
opportunistically defined pseudo-story to ourselves. The decisions and
awareness that it is core to us as 'individuals that are making decisions
and doing things' happens elsewhere in our bodies and both predates our
thinking on a moment by moment basis and is different from it. In other
words, our bodies make decisions and do things and our thinking provides a
pseudo-illusion that it is the thinking that is initiating things.
For example, if I dig back to the point at which I decided to write this
sentence, there is a point where it just came into mind. But before that
happened, many body processes had already 'made' the decisions about writing
the sentence and what was going to be in it. The thought in mind is just the
superficial froth or, in its other role, a self interested lobbying
mechanism for shaping those underlying bodily decision making processes.
Either way, inspecting my thinking tells me little about why or how I
decided or did things - even though it gives me the illusion that it does!
All of this ties in with neuro-science findings and also with the
literatures on self deception and illusion in reflection and memory of self.
This then poses a bit of a serious dilemma in education for those proposing
self awareness and reflection as a path to improvement of 'creative'
activity.. The mechanics of the dilemma are to do with the problems of
reinforcement, falsehood and illusion in these 'creative' processes.
On one hand, it seems useful for us (and by implications useful to educate
students) to be aware of our thinking styles and biases, in spite of these
being superficial and not really connected to our decision-making processes.
(There's lots of literature going down this line and most of us academics
have been pretty well indoctrinated on it)
On the other hand, it is clearly unhelpful to reinforce a falsehood and to
encourage students to believe that their conscious thinking is a reliable
representation of their interaction with the world and that it is their
'self'. To do so discourages students form exploring more deeply about the
bodily reality of creative actions rather than thinking it is dues to their
'thinking'.
If we are not careful, as educators we will continue to propagate an
erroneous meme that has deep and potentially adverse implications for the
foundations of research and practice about how we educate individuals to
create a better world.
An underlying problems is that most of us educators have been indoctrinated
with the illusion that 'our thought is """ourself"""' and that 'our thinking
is our decisionmaking process'. This means it can feel deeply uncomfortable
to suggest that thinking and reflection on thinking is false and unhelpful.
Is this best seen as an either-or (reflection on thinking or not), or a
sequence of learning ( no reflection -> reflection -> going beyond the
illusion that thought is self...)? Which is better for educating design
students? Which is best as a basis for future design research into improving
how people create designs?
Best wishes,
Terry
===
Jeremy wrote:
It is a a bit of thought that i took from dewey's how we think. he
posited that very few people have ever sat back and tried to
experience and then articulate the experience of their own thought.
My exercise in this is generally to help people understand how their
minds work in relation to imagery and narrative. I show them an image
that they don't know, but it heavily embedded in myth or cultural
reference. I show them that and ask them to try to identify it. To
use their knowledge of their culture, or whatever they have
available. I ask them to identify the object as well as they can.
Then after that, i ask them to write about what they did mentally
while they were trying to figure out what the thing in the image was.
I ask them to remember and phenomenologically experience that mental
process and write it out. after all that i ask them to share that
experience. it is important that no one shares it before it is
written, or they will all write the same thing, which is usually just
what the first person says.
from this i've gathered that i generally have 3 types of thinkers more
or less, so far... and this is not research, this is just gathered
from student exercises.
there are textualists/narrativists, which are looking for reference
and story
there are conceptualists/analysts which are trying to understand
composition, relationships, and meaning, usually not using narratives,
but using conceptual analysis, such as logic, math, philosophy
there are imagery people, who think in images and attempt to match the
image, this is most interesting, because there are two sections
here.... one again is compositionalist, but the other.... describes a
process of matching or shuffling, which i'm fascinated by. one
student described it as flipping through his families picture books
and looking for matches, another one described it as watching movies
in her mind.
so... those are the modes of thinking that students have reported when
they are presented with an image that they could probably recognize if
they knew the right story.
the idea is to get them to think about the way that they think, as
dewey suggests we do, to push their phenomenological awareness of
their own minds.
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