Teaching for Uncertainty

Adapting to new academic realities during a global pandemic and how it changes not just HOW we teach but WHAT we teach

Over the last few years, in many conversations with students, parents, designers, and educators, I’ve been using the word uncertainty quite a lot. Colleagues of mine have used the acronym VUCA over and over, which stands for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity”. For many of us, this has been a guiding parameter for framing the way we teach. Seen in a larger perspective, it frames how we prepare young people for a future professional life.

The biggest problem I’ve experienced with many existing academic curricula is that they work from a fixed set of knowledge and skills that the professional world presumably expects from a young graduate. That knowledge base and skill set are often addressing concerns of the now, and sometimes even worse, of the past.

I’ve always maintained that this is a mistake. What’s the point of preparing students for the future by using skills and knowledge designed for the past? Or the present? And even if one is forward-thinking, it’s still a mistake to assume that the future is something that can be predicted with any degree of certainty. Even five years from now. Even two years from now.

Heck, even a few months from now. Look at our current situation in March 2020, in which we face a crisis of global proportions that no one predicted a few short months ago (well, predicted by a few, but not in this time, in this way, or in this form). The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has shoved aside all other crises in in conversations around the world. Everyone has been talking about a good number of different crises lately — climate change, extreme politics, misinformation, inequality, gender rights, safety of women, air pollution, and so on. All of these things have been overwhelmed and even subsumed by a crisis that no one expected, that has impacted everyone on the planet, every single country, every demographic group, every industry, every sector. It has disrupted healthcare, education, the workplace, and all kinds of social interaction. And if what they say is right, it’s going to have an even deeper impact economically, and very likely not for the better.

In the education sector alone, the disruption caused by this pandemic is forcing us to change the way we’re teaching. I remember several years ago when my institution gave us a mandate to shift 30% of our teaching to hybrid-blended online mode. Back then we had lots of conversations about how we would do this, and why we should do this. There were intense arguments and debates, and some of us were resistant to the idea, not necessarily in theory, but in application. “Sure, you can teach accounting online, but not design! You can’t remove physical contact! What about the design studio?!”

Much of the skepticism was from thinking that this was just something that our business-side colleagues were proposing to reduce costs and increase profits. Even I was skeptical about some of it, who already had significant experience in Distance Learning:

• In the mid-1990s, I had a part-time job working in the Distance Education office, making Powerpoint slides for tech-unsavvy professors.
• In 2006, I completed a one-year PG Diploma in Theology entirely in distance mode (offered by an Indian university, while I studying in New Jersey).
• In 2012–13, when I was pursuing my Masters and simultaneously teaching, I was using Moodle both as a teacher AND as a student.
• In 2010 my wife was working in the Distance Learning office for her university, helping facilitate learning for 75+ learning centers all over India, and she teaches at three of those centers even today.

So, even someone like me, a clear Distance Learning advocate, was wary of trying to make design education overly ‘remote’.

Yet here I am, sitting at home, grading assignments and giving feedback to students on Google Classroom. Why? Because of uncertainty. Because at some point in my life, I realised that it would benefit me to be more flexible in my thinking and more adaptive in my approach to teaching. Because I had no idea what’s coming next. I had no idea whether teaching GenZ would be similar to teaching Millennials. I had no idea whether the skills for which I was preparing my students were going to be relevant by the time they graduated. Whether there would even be a job market for them.

Since I couldn’t predict the future, I changed my approach from teaching or “covering” a defined set of knowledge and skills, and focused instead on trying to make my students more adaptive, more confident to face uncertainty, and more eager to try new things. As a Dean, my teachers would often come to me and say “But what about X? We didn’t get a chance to cover X this semester!”. I would tell them “So what? Don’t focus on X, or Y, or Z.” I told them to teach them enough so that they can learn it later, on their own. Make them interested enough so that they extrapolated their own learning. I told them, “You can’t teach them everything; they can’t learn everything; and even if they did, it may not be relevant by the time they get to it.”

This is the best thing we can do for our younger generation. Move away from the fixed knowledge base, and teach them instead to appreciate learning and exploring on their own. Prepare them for the unknown, the uncertain, the uncomfortable, and the unforeseeable. Focus on teaching them how to navigate the world, to be independent, to express their opinions, to be unpopular, to rebel, to demand satisfaction. To deal with unforeseen consequences. To plan ahead but also allow for the unplanned. To maintain order but allow for chaos. To be rational but allow for the irrational. To follow and learn but also to lead and teach.

Uncertainty isn’t the future anymore. It’s now.