Higher Education Reconceived: A Geography of Change

Chapter One. Personal Change

1 Personal Change C H A P T E R O N E Labyrinth from Watts Chapel in Compton, England, built by Mary Watts during the nineteenthcentury labyrinth revival. Four labyrinth shields held by hand-carved terra cotta angels surround the interior walls, each instructed the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Courtesy Jeff Saward, photographer. 2 H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N R E C O N C E I V E D “Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.” Kathleen Norris (Dakota, 64) Sherrie Reynolds: Change T rue change is a complex and difficult psychological process. This is especially true of change in teaching because teaching rests on closely held beliefs that arise from our deepest sense of our world, our selves, and others. My friend Howard Polanz calls these “baby elephant beliefs.” He tells how circus elephant trainers restrain a baby elephant with a rope tied to a stake in the ground. If it tries to escape , it cannot because it is not strong enough to get free of the rope. The baby elephant adopts the belief that it cannot escape, and by the time it is grown no longer questions that belief. The adult elephant would find escape easy, but it never tries. Howard suggests that many of us have baby elephant beliefs that restrain us just as surely as the elephant’s belief about the rope. It has been important for me to uncover these baby elephant beliefs, examine them, and make conscious choices about the ones worth keeping. Much of my growth as a professor has not been as much about adding new ideas as it has been about uncovering and discarding old ones that are constraining me. Change as Process Most of us think of change as linear and incremental, like adding one brick at a time. The kind of change that interests me, deep transformative change, is more adequately conceived as what chaos scientists call a “phase shift.” A phase shift is a process of change that occurs suddenly. It is a change from one kind of state to another. When I am sleeping and I awaken, I experience a phase shift. I describe it as if it is gradual, but in fact the movement from asleep to awake is a sudden change in state. Much of human experience is like that. Because it is not incremental, the process of change often feels like repeated failure rather than progress. I conducted an informal survey for a number of years about how people stop smoking. When I asked people how they quit, they said something like “I tried and failed and tried and failed and then finally I did ‘x’ and it worked and I quit.” Most of these people think that the last thing they tried is the one that works and that the other things they tried were simply failures. It interests me that something different worked for each of these people. The reason they think ‘x’ is the way to stop smoking is because coincidentally it was the last thing they tried before they were able to stop. The fact that one person’s last thing may have been another person’s first thing helps us to see that the magic is not in ‘x’. What they had in common was the process of trying, failing, trying, failing, and finally succeeding. Few of us began our careers as professors thinking about how people learn. Most C H A P T E R O N E P E R S O N A L C H A N G E 3 of us thought, and some still think, that our job is to pass on knowledge and information that has been generated in a discipline or field of study. Many of us believed that it is the professor’s job to cover certain material. We thought we had to have the answers, and that we had to be in charge or in control. At some point in our careers, we may realize that these are baby elephant ideas. In my experience of listening to lectures, it is clear to me that ideas are not conveyed from the lecturer to us. I do not sit passively in the lecture absorbing what the lecturer says. I am thinking and going off on tangents. If I am really...