Scared but Not Too Scared? Fear & the Creative Act

He turned to me, looked at my face and said sharply, “Something on your mind, son? Speak up!”
“Uh—” I blurted it out. “Sir, that temporary third lieutenant—the one that got cashiered. How could I find out what happened?”
“Oh. Young man, I didn’t mean to scare the daylights out of you; I simply intended to wake you up.”
(dialogue from R.A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, 1951.

“I didn’t mean to scare the daylights out of you; I simply intended to wake you up.” Two of our Seminarium bloggers have raised, each in her or his own way, the observation that frightened people don’t learn. Jennifer Shepherd notes that a learner’s early brushes with pluralism can provoke a fear response, and embeds an article arguing (from a constructivist, learning-as-making perspective) that fearful emotions inhibit the creation of meaning. David Rhoades writes about Hospitality in the Classroom, with a focus on drawing the learners’ fears into the open and addressing them, putting the students at ease, and helping them become comfortable in the learning space.

When we say, “Fear inhibits learning,” we may just be thinking, in an intuitive and common-sense way, that paralysis is, well…paralyzing. Being “woken up” is good for thinking; having the daylights scared out of you is not.

But implicit in this is an idea worth dragging into the open (as does the article Jennifer embeds), to wit: Learning is a creative act. “Learning” has happened when a person takes a body of raw material (prior experiences and understandings, course materials and course experiences, the input of others, etc) and out of it crafts—makes—some novel understanding. A learner has not learned the meaning of “586 BCE” when she reads the words “Fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians.” She has learned its meaning when she has created a meaning for it that is relevant to her.

When we say, “Fear inhibits learning,” we are articulating a subset of the larger truth, “Fear inhibits acts of creation, of creativity.” On this, John Cleese (yes, that John Cleese) spoke at length in 1991, in an invited presentation on “creativity” to Video Arts.

http://vimeo.com/18913413

The entire presentation is worth while (not least for his late-in-the-game association of humor with subversion and insurrection), and hearing it all will provide a context for his point that, while fostering creativity may be a complex task, it is astonishingly simple to kill it: simply frighten your subjects. Scare the daylights out of people, and you will render them safely incapable of creating a darned thing…including (for our purposes) “meaning” or “understanding.”

The “mood” that fosters creativity Cleese describes as “an ability to play,” to be “childlike,” for “no particular purpose.” If you’ve ever seen an adult try to soothe a frightened child, you may have observed that an invitation to play is a non-starter: the invitation might even frighten the child further. First the fear has to be addressed and overcome, then an invitation to “play” might be offered. The mode of “play,” for Cleese, is an “open” mode, as opposed to a fearful, “closed,” mode.

Those of you who have taken a PhD degree that includes “Comprehensive Exams” (or something similar) may have enjoyed a certain experience: You are neck-deep in reading, probably better-informed in your field than you ever will be again, and in a state of near-constant percolation, with ideas bubbling up and connecting unpredictably with one another. In this state, a commercial for a sugary cereal may connect unpredictably with some critical issue in your field, which connects unpredictably with a problem your partner is facing with her co-worker in their shared cubicle-farm, which connects unpredictably…. It’s what my friend Bryan Bibb describes as that state when you are constantly turning to whomever is at hand and exclaiming, “You know what’s interesting…” That’s the open mode. But let one tangible fear fall into the picture (say, a falling-out with an examiner), and WHAM: paralysis. No connections. Closed mode.

David Rhoades, then, models hospitality and the anticipation of learners’ misgivings as a strategy for fostering Cleese’s “open mode.” Jennifer Shepherd, similarly, encourages learners to speak up about their fearful responses to new ideas as a strategy for removing shame (“I’m supposed to love pluralism but I don’t like the examples at hand!”), prompting honesty, and thereby also fostering Cleese’s “open mode.”

At the same time, we all know that the learning environment can never be entirely “safe.” Learning is risky. David’s students are in a position to be treated hospitably precisely because they are not at home. Jennifer’s students can only be encouraged to voice fears that they actually undergo. The thing about making meaning through the construction of “unpredictable connections” is that those connections can be mighty unpredictable.

This term, I have asked that each of my learners create multimedia projects: an oral presentation (mp3), and an audio-visual “Book Trailer” (any digital A/V format). At the outset, a large handful register enough fear that they are having a hard time moving forward imaginatively on the tasks (closed mode: daylights scared out). But, I have placed the projects late enough in the term (fourth and tenth weeks) that we have time to build trust in other areas of the course and address concerns, hopefully with a measure of humor (open mode; simply woken up). Time will tell!

What currently threatens to scare the daylights out of your learners? What strategies have you tried, or considered, for helping them find their way out of fear and into the coveted, creative “open mode”?

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