learn.5tein.com Jared Stein's grad-school-community blog on teaching and learning.

“Passion” for Solitude

Recognizing that I favor a breadth of interests as much as depth, and with understanding that my "passions" are fleeting, I have occasionally sought a common thread with which I might quilt many interests or passions into my/a career path. The problem with pursuing any "passion" is that too often I experience it as spontaneous combustion, an exciting and novel concept that inevitably results in over-exposure, self-consumption, and, as we so often hear, "burn-out". There is also the danger of dismal frustration self-immolation, an act of despair that comes from pursuing ideals that are essentially unattainable. Instead I should approach a passion is a campfire that must be built carefully, with reasoned method, and without wasting too much fuel. In this sense I can gather the kindling of available resources by brainstorming interests that I have not yet exhausted:

• distance learning
• the Web
• appreciation of the arts (esp. literature)
• expression through the arts (esp. writing)

Isolating any one of these as a subject for "passion" makes sense in a common way, but I doubt that I could sustain such single-mindedness. And yet I do not want to neglect any of my interests for mere lack of time; indeed, I want this list to move beyond the accepted seriousness of these interests. In doing so, I wonder if I might explore new paths that may diverge severely, paths that I may have passed, paths that may lie ahead. I want the paths to recurse, intersect, dive, and rise so that through some reflective and experimental weaving of ideas I might line-by-line produce a cohesive tapestry in my life.

(This tapestry idea sounds nice, but I must criticize it too. This continual weaving of many things may be a sign of avoidance, much as Penelope practiced a weaving not so much to express fidelity for her Odysseus as to reject the real but mundane and imperfect suitors.)

This particular list of interest may change next year. By iteself the items are not too disparate to consider: web and distance learning together is a natch, and they both are general enough that they might apply to the others. However these are what I label my more "serious" interests; there are many others that fit what David Wiley described as the "shower test". Three of these are:

• skateboarding
• collectible card games
• antiquarian book collecting

These interests are all recreational, not "serious" (with some exception in the latter), and, in the wrong circles, potentially damaging to one's facia reputation. With respect to their practice, they all involve informal learning almost exclusively. I have been content to keep these distinct from my "professional" interests up until recently, when I began to realize a certain thread that runs through all of them. This potential thread came to while I was skateboarding, and thinking about skateboarding.

Rodney Mullen reflects that the reason skateboarding appealed to him was that (1) it wasn't a typical sport--it had neither teams nor rules, and (2) skating not only encouraged self-expression, it was defined by self-expression. Mullen's excellence grew out of his individualism--no other skateboarder in the past fifty years of skating is credited with as many trick inventions, and no other skateboarder has dominated organized competitions as Mullen.

Skating is by nature an individualistic sport, but Mullen's development as a skater leveraged this ideal of individualism to heighten his creativity. When Mullen stunned judges and fellow skaters with tricks they had never imagined, it was because he had developed those tricks in isolation and through rigorous self-discipline. His creativity was stoked by solitude. This is not to say he did not benefit from the influence of other skaters and sponsors, but his core abilities were not learned through social or networked interactions--at least, not in the way we content ourselves to think about social learning in the late 20th and now early 21st century.

I explain this because when I think of how Mullen mastered his art, I think about self-imposed rigor, hours of solitary practice, and expanding off of one's past successes. And yet this is informal learning. There may be only limited similar examples, but this model of informal learning, this independent study gets me thinking about distance learning and open education. I wonder about the potential power of studying in isolation, immersing one's self in one's own creativity, and maximizing one's efforts through self-discipline.

I wonder about a formalized model of learning that directs students towards self-reliance and solitary study, then provides milestones that may be comparative and social.

<insert looping diagram, iterating from cycles of isolated study --> cycles of group interaction />

This actually looks familiar, in so much as it resembles what many classes do already with the cycle of individual homework and peer review. It looks a lot like what writers and poets do in their creative practice. But for some individual homework is a(n) (un)necessary evil, and I do not see teaching methods encouraging learner independence, self-discipline, and isolation but incidentally or through decontextualized study skills courses. Perhaps, as William Deresiewicz argues in The End of Solitude, our social media drenched culture is losing its tolerance for solitude and isolation, and with it a connection to a great introspection, an understanding of the "second self", even, and if only, genius's "stern friend" (as may have been the case for Mullen).

This suspicion seems not unfounded, as many educators, collectively enrapted with social media (I claim no distinction here), increasingly look to group scenarios to facilitate learning, focus their inquiry on social connections that may have been once only peripheral to learning, portray networked "knowledge" as a panacea, and de-emphasize the value of individual learning--or even wholly deconstruct, then dismiss it. At the same time, or maybe just in time, a handful of researchers and scholars have recently begun to attend to this area of inquiry with something like an urgency--perhaps out of fear of how solitude is demolished by social media.

I feel lucky: though I had inklings of this line of thought before I returned to grad school this year, I have only recently begun to see real possibilities. Yet I know I haven't really begun. As I (very gradually) move through the program I expect to have many opportunities to consider this area of inquiry, pursue leads, redefine it, narrow my scope, maybe even abandon it entirely. For now, I'll settle for an overly-broad question which I can explore in a later post:

What impact does solitude have on learning?