Supplement to Chapter 10: Intellectual Challenge - Activating Curiosity and Problem Solving
Insert for Page 183
There are two problems lurking in the details of designing intellectual challenges into our experiences. The first is that of exciting an authentic sense of wonder and curiosity within our experiencers, and the second is combining that curiosity and wonder with critical thought and rigorous skepticism.
This echoes what the astronomer Carl Sagan dubbed “the marriage of skepticism with wonder,” as the source of scientific innovation. By skepticism here, I am referring to critical thinking — a stance of asking tough questions and demanding thorough answers. This design challenge requires that we root our reasons for intellectual learning deeply into our experience narratives. How can we best facilitate this in our designs?
Early in my career, I worked for years on the psychology of STEM learning (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). It was often said in the STEM education community that “children are natural scientists.” I don’t believe that is true. Children are the very embodiment of wonder and curiosity, no doubt. But skeptical skills must be learned, developed, and sharpened. Otherwise, skepticism is a trait emerging only later in adulthood (if at all), after life has knocked us around a bit, and then often falsely co-mingled with the negativity of simple cynicism.
Many people will conflate skepticism (a stance of inquiry) and cynicism (a stance of ignorance and pessimism). Unfortunately, in the course of growing up, we often trade in our youthful wonder and curiosity for a completely skeptical point of view, as if they were mutually exclusive. Our astonishment and all-consuming fascination with the world around us is the price, it often seems, for eating the bitter fruit of the “formal education tree” as it squeezes every last drop of enthusiasm for learning out of us. Sagan’s magical marriage of wonder and skepticism remains elusive.
It has been suggested by some that this is the reason why young scientists and innovators, those who yet have their sense of wonder intact, accomplish the most breakthroughs. Reflecting upon his “miracle year” in 1905 of his numerous historic scientific breakthroughs, Einstein remarked:
“I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.” (Clark 1984, pp. 27–28).
When wonder and curiosity can be preserved and not only co-exist with the skills of skepticism, but mutually drive each other to grow, then an intellectually curious and skeptically equipped thinker is born. And this is the sweet spot we must strive for in our experience designs.
But rather than focus our designs on the intellectual challenges of the task at hand, the content to be learned, or the problem to be solved (if we are corporate leaders), or the proper education standards and proper ages of instruction and the like (if we are educators) — we should place a higher priority on how to spark, nurture, and enhance wonder and curiosity in concert with critical inquiry. Such an approach strikes right to heart of why we engage in learning about our world and ourselves in the first place. Therefore, it treads heavily on philosophical and even metaphysical ground, and is a subject not often deeply explored by leaders, teachers, parents, or other experience designers.
In his acclaimed book, The End of Education, author Neil Postman offers a simple yet profound opening that speaks directly to our design task of incorporating intellectual challenges into experiences with the potential to transform identities:
“[We must] address the issues of where and when things will be done, and, of course, how learning is supposed to occur... But to become a different person because of something you have learned – to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered – that is a different matter. For that to happen, you need a reason.: (1995, p.1)
Beyond the well-researched psychology of learning, Postman calls for articulating a reason behind our intellectual engagement in any endeavor (school or corporate) in the form of narrative — narratives powerful enough to speak to us of our origins, our future, our ideals, our conduct, the sources of authority, and above all our continuity and purpose. In short, narratives credible and complex enough to organize one’s life around — identity narratives that root our intellectual engagement deeply within ourselves for any given experience.
Insert for Page 188: Emergence in Intellectual Challenge
In their excellent book, The Power of Making Thinking Visible, Harvard researcher Ron Ritchhart and educator Mark Church point out that the idea of making experiencers’ thinking visible to themselves and each other rejects more traditional transmission forms of learning, “in favor of a more transformative model” where experiencers “are engaged in deep learning that supports identity formation as a learner who has the power to create, implement, and engage.”
For whatever method of intellectual challenge you include in your designs, whether Experiential Inquiry-Based Learning, problem-solving, innovation, discovery, or something else entirely… designing for intellectual challenges that raise experiencers to conscious and highly visible levels of collaboration and struggle is a best practice.
When we do this, undesigned-for benefits emerge within the experience. These include stronger cohort cohesion and positive cohort effects, increased belongingness and confidence in the face of risk-decisions, sense of greater control and internal permission during the experience, enriched meaning making and narrative translation, and identity impacts. And although the seven elements of ELVIS are intertwined, this single practice has the potential to strongly affect every other ELVIS element in positive ways.
Insert for Page 188: Emergence in Intellectual Challenge
In their excellent book, The Power of Making Thinking Visible, Harvard researcher Ron Ritchhart and educator Mark Church point out that the idea of making experiencers’ thinking visible to themselves and each other rejects more traditional transmission forms of learning, “in favor of a more transformative model” where experiencers “are engaged in deep learning supports identity formation as a learner who has the power to create, implement, and engage.”
For whatever method of intellectual challenge you include in your designs, whether Experiential Inquiry-Based Learning, problem-solving, innovation, discovery, or something else entirely… designing in Intellectual Challenges that raise experiencers to conscious and highly visible levels of collaboration and struggle is a best practice. When we do this, undesigned-for benefits emerge within the experience.
These include stronger cohort cohesion and positive cohort effects, increased belongingness and confidence in the face of risk-decisions, sense of greater control and internal permission during the experience, enriched meaning making and narrative translation, and identity impacts. And although the seven elements of ELVIS are intertwined, this single practice has the potential to strongly affect every other ELVIS element in positive ways.