http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html
Human beings synthesise experience all the time. This is how we make sense of what might otherwise seem a shapeless, chaotic world where even the act of knowing how to open a door and enter another room would seem beyond us.
Yet in many ways, at times, we may all find it difficult to risk opening a ‘door’ or to enter ‘another room’ whether in an academic or social context. We hang about ‘stuck’ in these metaphorical doorways, holding onto door handles, unable to make the next move.
Jeanette Winterson who is now Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Victoria University, succinctly declared in her award winning novel The Passion, that ‘what you risk reveals what you value.’ How true.
Yet many students come to me because they feel that they cannot take a risk even with volunteering a trial answer or response in their studies. It seems as if the pressure to be ‘right’ prevents them risking even being right, let alone being wrong.
The shame of failure is the insidious stalker that lurks about this over examined educational system today.
For think about a life without risk. A life without risk is inert, without a pulse. We need in Brene Brown’s summary: Courage, Compassion and Connection in order to experience joy.
Joyless learning can become powerfully changed through the creation of a learning environment where risk can be experienced safely and with positive outcomes and feedback.
David Ausubel famously stated about learning:”The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.”
Learning happily, without disabling criticism or fear. learning happily that we know far more than we think we know or ‘admit’ we know.
As an English tutor I love the ways in which students suddenly ‘get it’, they grasp what has been evading them, obscured by fear, reluctance and lack of confidence. This confidence does not just stop at an examined text or a ‘good grade.’
They may suddenly know what they thought they didn’t know. Or they know that what they thought they didn’t know had just been hidden away until they had the courage to know it!
But when a student recognises that this word or phrase has this effect and reminds them of another experience which in turn has a similarity to that…
….then we are most definitely on our way...
