The MISsed Opportunity »
September 26, 2005
The Weavers
Next week I start a new class, a new term, and a new group of students.
Walking across the empty campus today filled me with nostalgia for past
classes and past students. How the
years go by. The new batch of MBAs
is hanging out in the lounge, animated and excited, forming new relationships,
measuring one another, establishing the pecking orders.
And I'm thinking about last year's students, where are they now?
All these new faces and the loss of the familiar ones leave me sad, and
worried.
I'm teaching Introduction to MIS to undergrads, and I'm haunted by my
last class. It was a wonderful
group, just the right mixture of serious professionals-to-be with a few smart
alecks – just enough piquancy to keep the stew interesting, but not so much as
to ruin it. We had fun and I think
they learned something. We respected
one another. I want that same
experience, again. Lurking in the
back of my mind are the classes that weren't so wonderful, where somehow I lost
the group, or they lost me, or we lost each other.
They and I could hardly wait for the term to be over.
What bodes over the horizon this term?
I know my expectations ruin the experience.
I know that no group is exactly like another group.
I know that trying to make this class into that class is unhelpful –
jamming this group into the suit that fit that group.
I know that, but …
I once heard Virginia Satir say that every group experience is like a
weaving. We each represent a thread
– a thread of the warp or woof and that our experience over the days forms a
tapestry. It might be beautiful; the
texture might be just right, or, again, the colors might clash, and the result
could be odd and disconcerting, even painful.
I guess
we're the weavers. We're given the
students, those threads, and we're given the pattern of the class, the material
we're supposed to teach. And
somehow, we weave it together – but our threads are not passive, oh, no.
Some are wily threads that won't take their place in my pre-defined
order. And some threads just lie
there, passive and limp. And some
are certain they don't want to be there while others don't seem to know where
they are at all.
It's a promising analogy and this
Fall it prompted me to walk over to the art school library to see what I could
find about weaving. The art school
library! So interesting – the
displays of student work in the cases in the hallway make the b-school's
Hoover
's Online tedious and boring. Anyway,
their helpful librarian led me to Selected
Writing on Design by Anni Albers.
Albers started weaving at the
Bauhaus and immigrated to the
United States
in 1933. Her book is indeed
beautiful and filled with statements that jump out at me as relevant to my
teaching. I see why she was known
not only as a great weaver, but also, through her writings, as a strong
spokesperson for art.
"One of Anni Alber's most
emphatic convictions, and a topic she returned to repeatedly, was her faith that
materials hold the key to the creative process." (p. xi)
Materials
hold the key to the creative process. Take
students as materials: My students
hold the key to the creative process. What
does that mean? Who are they?
What do they want? What are
they worried about? Why are they
here? What made them choose business
and not art as a major? What sort of
a weaving do they want to make? The students hold the key to the creative process.
What does that mean?
Reading on, "She knowingly
frames a further paradox … 'To circumvent the NO of the material with the YES
of an inventive solution, that is the way new things come about – in a contest
with the material.'" (p. xi)
In
a contest with the material. I
know one contest, the contest between me the
assigner and the student the resister.
Ah, yes, there it is: I must
move that conflict, the assigner / resister conflict, from between me and the
student to within the students. If I
do not, I'll be dragging a 500 pound sack of potatoes around campus all term.
Move that contest to within the
student: "You want to be a
business professional. A wonderful
goal, a terrific goal. And, with
that goal, you chose to major in business and hence are here.
OK. Now what?
What do you want to know? In
this, the 'information age' what do you want to know about information systems
in business? What will prepare you
for what you want to do? I can be
your guide, but you hold responsibility for what happens.
You determine whether you waste your time or not."
But if they decide, then maybe the
analogy falls down. Maybe I've
assigned myself too great a role (not the first time, either).
I'm not the weaver, or at least I'm not the ONLY weaver.
The students must weave their own experience.
If I'm successful, they will decide their own pattern, their own design,
and they will use me to learn how to weave that pattern for themselves.
And all of those patterns, together, will weave the experience of the
class.
Maybe I'm a meta-weaver?
Posted by DavidK at September 26, 2005 10:58 AM | Permalink
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