For those of you who watched my most recent talk, Learning as soul-making, you know that I have become interested in moments of profound transformation and growth among students that I call “Learning worth crying about.” I came to this interest in the pursuit of a question that most of us professors care about, “How can I teach critical thinking?” And after realizing after some time that it is not so easily taught, I focused on how it might be learned. And after realizing it is not just an “it” to learn but a process to be practiced I focused on creating problems and projects through which it could be practiced. And then after realizing that it was not just a process but a complete change of being I started diving into the literature on student and human development and now sit buried (almost literally) in a pile of books on my desk which I voraciously read day after day trying to understand this most beautiful and complex process of how it is that we become who we are.

As a rough summary of the literature, students typically enter college with the idea that the professor and textbooks have the answers and their job is to learn those answers. They soon become frustrated with professors who pose questions. They think the professors are trying to be clever, or perhaps trying out a teaching technique. They know the professor knows the answer already, and just want to get on with it. Eventually they might realize that these questions are not simply posed, but are indeed real and controversial. But they remain firm in their idea that the answer can be found if only they can find enough information or the right theory. A significant transformation occurs when students realize that some questions are not simply posed or merely controversial, but are truly ambiguous. There is no clear right answer. Most of the big questions they worry most about most (Who am I? What am I going to do? Am I going to make it?) fall into this category, as do their sister questions that shape the arts & sciences (Who are we? What are we going to do? Are we going to make it?). This can be a hard time for students. Many will retreat by fabricating illusions that there actually are clear answers to these questions. Only a few will instead nurture an ability to sit and profit from the ambiguity, “live the questions”, and nurture a life-sustaining sense of wonder and curiosity.

At each breaking point is a sharp-turn, an awakening, and possibly a learning worth crying about. I have been interviewing students for months now and discovered some amazing stories of transformation and growth. Just this morning I stumbled across a student blog by Ephraim Hussain, who wrote about his own “learning worth crying about”:

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I cried once that class, which is the primary inspiration for this blog, came to its inevitable conclusion. I cried for so many reasons. I cried because I was lost before this class. I was lost in the sense that I was a bio major on the misguided path to medical school. Of course, when I was a high school senior, all I though about was “Hey I’m good at science and I want to help people=Bio Major and Medical School and Eventually Doctor.” My passion lay dormant, repressed by an oppressive and dictatorial school environment. I had no perspective or sense of self. High school does not afford you those privileges. It should, but it doesn’t. Instead, it leaves you on an uncertain path to nowhere. I cried because I was angry. I was angry at an educational system that continues to leave millions of kids out to dry. I was angry at an educational system that continues to put standards and test scores above the learning needs of its students. I was angry at an educational system that continues to show a blatant disregard for cognitive science. I cried, because I was immensely grateful for this one professor and this one group of students who helped me see the light in my own life. Finally, I cried because I knew that for me and for every student mired in the American educational system, that this sort of classroom experience remains one of those “few and far between”.

And what exactly happened in that class that sparked the transformation? He quotes Freire’s famous description of the “banking system” of education in which “the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat,” holding them into a learning-as-answers orientation. This class (which was a “Philosophy of Education” class) allowed Ephraim to experience a “problem posing education” in which

There was meaningful dialogue between the teacher and the students. Not only did the students learn from the teacher, but the teacher also learned from the students. There was no single recognizable authority. Rather, teacher and students engaged each other at the same level both literally and figuratively.

But stories like Ephraim’s in which a transformational “learning worth crying about” takes place in a classroom might be rare. The wonderfully insightful Women’s Ways of Knowing by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule which analyzes in-depth intimate interviews with 135 women leads one to realize that many of the most profound learning that transforms us often comes from life events and powerful relationships (good and bad).

(I have much more to write, but have to run, so three quick thoughts and a request before I sign off):
1. Although many of the great transformations of life happen outside the classroom, we have an important role to play in helping our students move toward a capacity to live the questions
2. Our lip service to “critical thinking” is really only lip service if we do not recognize that our goals do not ultimately involve a more complete transformation of the person.
3. Framing what we do in terms of soul-making and transformative learning serves as a strong counter to current discourse which tends to define college as simply job preparation.

Request: please share any “learning worth crying about” that you have experienced yourself, or that you have witnessed, helped along, or otherwise been a part of. I’m fascinated by what makes us who we are, how we change, and how education might play a role in such changes.

Vasili is one of 11 students from Digital Ethnography 2014 who moved into the Meadowlark Hills retirement community and lived there for 4 months. Having recently experienced the ecstasy and freedom of hitch-hiking and living with almost nothing but the clothes on his back, Vasili came to Meadowlark looking to explore the meaning of death and life.

This past semester, seven of the eleven students in my Digital Ethnography class moved into a continuing care retirement community full-time, while the other four visited often. After four months and 100+ hours of interviews, the students found themselves fully immersed in the lives and stories of the residents. This short compresses many lifetimes into a brief exploration of meaning and significance throughout the life cycle. I’ll post more thoughts about the semester and videos from other students soon …

In the meantime, for more background on how and why we started living in a retirement community, check out our full-length documentary from 2013, Smile Because it Happened.

We’ve just started the process of researching colleges in our house. After watching this video of students attacking other students at Kansas State University, it’s suddenly at the top of my list.

Watch the whole video, if you have time, but if not, here are some of the attacks-of-kindness highlights: at :32, they hand out free money; at :54, they cheer for students, just because; at 1:33, they buy someone lunch, then at 1:55, they buy someone books; they parallel park a car BY PICKING IT UP at 2:57; and at 4:06, meet the girl who had cancer, who was the recipient of a K-State Proud award.

The video picked up a quick additional 80,000 viewers since being featured on the site. And since it was recently posted by Aggieville on Facebook, I’ve been receiving several e-mails from people telling me that they hope their kids come to K-State.

Congatulations Diggies of 2010!

We chose the Meadowlark Hills retirement community because it is such a clear attempt to reclaim a sense of community at a time in which we are more disconnected than ever. The central hallway presents itself as the welcoming, walkable and lively small town downtown that only exists in the outside world as a shell of what it once was in the hollowed out ghosts towns of the Midwest. Based on progressive “elder-centered” living philosophies, Meadowlark represents one of the most impressive intentional community-building efforts we have yet to find in our studies – one that is all the more impressive by their own recognition that their own intentions to build community might get in the way of community itself. As we discovered during the making of this documentary, community is more like a happening to be lived, rather than a structure to be built.

For most students, this is their first exposure to video creation as well as their first exposure to real ethnographic research. But there is an unexpected freshness to the eye of the novice. Instead of doing traditional “documentary” video, we try to convey the blooming, buzzing complexity of a culture in whatever ways we can imagine. We seek to inspire empathy and a sense of connection between the audience and the subject, and all of our productions strive to achieve what we call “profound authenticity” – giving the viewer and the subject a sense of wonder about those things that otherwise seem mundane and trivial.

As readers of this blog will know, I do not like to simply “cover” the material as a teacher. I believe that much of what needs to be learned in our courses can only truly be learned through real-life practice, so I work with students each year to find an inspiring project that allows them to put their whole selves into it. In this regard, this was probably the most successful project we have ever done. Students had to face their own fears of death, they had to grieve for those they lost, and they had to overcome their insecurities to reach across a generational divide that was both wider and narrower than they had imagined.

This was also the most challenging project we have ever done. Some of those challenges are featured in the final cut, but there were others that are not so neatly processed into a video story – or into any story at all. Working with the biggest themes of the human condition often leaves us with such irresolvable issues. Those are the ones that will stay with us long after the project is over, slowly working us over and continuing to challenge us.

How do you even begin to express thanks to a group of students who gave of themselves so fully, or to the residents who gave up their time and stories, or to the staff who so graciously hosted and guided us throughout the semester? I hope the video itself might be seen as an expression of our collective gratitude for one another. When we premiered this video to over 100 residents and staff at Meadowlark last month, I told them that I felt as if I were hugging the whole room as I clicked “play.” It was such a very special experience for all of us.