How Teaching Changed My Views on Learning
(Thanks to LXD)
Art and technology are two fields perceived to be diametrically opposite, but that was something I sought to change for 32 students this past spring! I was lucky enough to be able to teach CMSC388E: Creative Approaches to Computing: Arts and Tech to hopefully show students that art and tech are not mutually exclusive.
The University of Maryland’s Student Initiated Courses (STICs) program helps students to share their passions by enabling students to create their own one-credit course. I was lucky enough to co-teach with two other facilitators, the lovely Sana Shah and amazing Amy Zhao, and under the guidance of the inspiring Dr. Roger Eastman.
The class uses Processing, a visual-coding language for artists, to explore computer science through the lens of art. Oftentimes, engineering and computer science students declare that they are not creative or artistic, but that’s completely untrue. Everyone is endowed with creativity, but you can easily become rusty when you aren’t actively engaging and strengthening that skill.
We went into our first week feeling prepared, ready to tackle the adventure of teaching our own content. All of us had teaching experience in one way or another, but as the semester went on, we realized how much goes into crafting a valuable learning experience. Though I won’t speak for my fellow facilitators, I can pretty confidently say that all of us have grown as teachers and people throughout the semester. Out of all of the things that I learned, the thing that surprised me the most was how teaching (and a handy little pedagogy class!) changed my perspective on the process of learning.
1. There is a lot of nuance that goes into crafting a learning experience.
I was fortunate enough to take IDEA489 : Learning Experience Design Studio (LXD), a STIC under the tutelage of the insightful Meenu Singh, Tianxin Chen, and Ishaan Parikh. The class took a very human-centered approach to learning; it was designed by STIC facilitators to help STIC facilitators better understand their students’ aspirations and to deliver experiences that encourage students towards those goals. Through fun sticker sheets and sometimes laughably uncomfortable activities, we examined the different levers and knobs of a learning experience.
As it turns out, there are quite a few variables in your control, but the one we really honed in on was “Culture”. More than anything else, we wanted to show our students that creativity was innate, a deliverable that is hard to achieve through a mere syllabus and slidedeck. LXD gave us the tools to craft more subtle learning experiences that are just as effective as traditional ones.
A perfect example of this were buttons! Inspired by sense of satisfaction we got from receiving Meenu’s stickered notes, Sana came up with the idea of giving buttons to our students after every project that they complete. Like Scout badges, we created 4 buttons for their composition, data visualization, user-interaction, and iterative projects: “I composed with code”, “I dazzled with data”, “I input interaction”, and “I became an artist”. The buttons reinforced the fact that every completed project is a milestone. Having a physical manifestation of their mastery and creative progress is a fun expression of the growth yet to come! The buttons thus became more than just a trinket, but became a powerful teaching tool to reinforce the culture, goals, and norms of the class.
If you had asked me a semester ago whether the humble button could be just as valid of a teaching tool as slides or worksheets, I would have thought you were crazy! LXD actively demonstrated that the learning happens not only through homework and assignments, but also in subtle ways.
2. In that way, learning is a LOT less straightforward than I had thought.
Sana, Amy and I knew coming into the semester that we wanted our class to be different. Most of the courses we had taken were the traditional model of “Professor teaches, students listen”. It’s an easy pattern to follow because it’s the one we are most familiar with; the litany of slide decks and demonstrations is a comfortable way of delivering information, but not the most exciting. We wanted to strike that balance, but even on our first day we noticed how our initial content was focused around the traditional instructor-focused paradigm. Though we had a more (what we thought to be) active-learning style through live-coding, there were still a fair amount of glazed eyes and mindless typing.
We quickly realized that learning can’t be boiled down to a simple formula of listening and watching. I can watch as many Youtube videos of Alex Honnold as I want, but it doesn’t make me any closer to being a world-class rock-climber. Learning comes from doing, and so we had to adjust our teaching style. LXD swooped into the rescue with a class on productive struggle and the value of having your students struggle through intentionally difficult activities to better understand the concepts you are trying to teach.
That’s where a lot of our class activities came in. We revised a lot of our art-theory activities to introduce a form of constraint that our students had to overcome. For example, in order to teach the elements of composition, we had our students create a collage from magazines graciously donated by all of the nail and hair salons near campus. However, we randomly assigned students to create a collage that exemplified a certain element of composition, be that color, rhythm, movement or more. Especially because different elements of composition often work together, collaborating to create a piece that illustrates a specific one is not easy for seasoned artists, let alone students who got an overview of those compositional elements not 10 minutes before. The process of struggling and collaborating led to a more meaningful learning experience though, for as one student later wrote on their anonymous feedback, “being restricted in one way allowed for more creativity in another”.
Another example is our gallery walks. We had originally intended for our students to showcase their projects in a gallery-like format, but we realized that they had potential to be another learn via struggle moment. Critiques are an important venue to assess the effectiveness of your piece as a communicative form, just as code reviews are an important way to gain feedback on your coding practices. Giving actually constructive feedback was something that our students initially struggled with, but by the end of the semester, their ability to assess their own art improved drastically! They developed the critical eye needed to better their own artistic abilities.
In that way, I learned that key concepts could sometimes be more effectively taught through a smidgen of struggle.
3. At the end of the day, the best way to teach is to remember how you learnt in Kindergarten.
A lot of our course was heavily inspired by a 6 part video series called “Learning Creative Learning”. Developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten team at the MIT Media Lab, the class explores the ways that teaching can be more interactive and engaging than the traditional models that higher education often adopt. They talk about the creative process being an endless cycle of imagining, creating, playing, sharing, reflecting and repeating, and we strove to integrate that pattern into our own teaching. Through class activities like Cards against Artists and Massive Pictionary, we included the fun of play and exploring new ideas even through challenges and constraints. Through gallery walks we honed in on the idea of reflection and iteration, especially in the wake of our final project which itself is an iteration on their previous project.
The playful and explorative nature of kindergarten directed how we taught our class, and through that I realized how stagnant my own learning process has become. Whereas I once drew schematics, planned routes, actively tried and actively failed, I’ve largely become passive. I sit and I take notes and I try to read the textbook instead of taking the plunge of finding practice problems and actively testing my understanding. There should be a lot more experimenting, a lot more doing, a lot more trying and a lot less fear of failure. Somewhere in the gulf between kindergarten and college, I became a stagnant learner. Teaching helped me to re-evaluate the ways in which I actually learn, rather than the ways I’ve been forcing myself to. In other words, we should learn to be kindergarteners again. That style of active learning and active engagement is crucial to lifelong learning.
TL ; DR
If I have to sum up all that I learned into one somewhat coherent thought, it would be that learning is something that we all expect of our students (and of ourselves), but don’t really know how elusive it can be. We have these passive models of learning ingrained into us, but in reality, learning can be explorative, engaging, and honestly fun!
Teaching this past spring has been a transformative experience. I not only learned to be a better teacher but to be a better learner, and I have my fellow facilitators, my students, STICS and LXD to thank for that!
