Going the extra mile

During my undergraduate degree programme, I remember assembling with a small group of fellow students in a room to start our new module on social psychology. We knew our new lecturer's name, but beyond that we knew very little about her. So we sat and waited for her to appear. And we sat and waited. At around five minutes after we were due to start, we began to wonder if perhaps she was already sat in the room with us, posing as a student, conducting some bizarre psychological experiment. It's amazing how paranoid psychology students can become. At ten minutes we began speculating on whether she had been delayed by traffic, or worse, had been involved in an accident. At around 12 minutes past the hour, the door banged noisily open, and in burst this strange, dark clad woman with a black hat jammed down over her face. In her arms she had half a dozen old Tesco carrier bags, which she threw against the wall. She stalked over to the whiteboard and without a single word of greeting to us, began writing a string of strange and esoteric words. This continued for a few more minutes, as we sat bewildered, perplexed, and yes... increasingly annoyed, at having our time wasted by this strange, anonymous black clad woman.

Finally, she turned, removed her hat and faced us. She asked us to write down in a few words what we thought of her. She went out and changed into a more colourful outfit (which was in the Tesco carrier bags), and returned, a pleasant and friendly woman. 'This is the real me', she smiled. She admitted that what she had just performed, in front of a group of strangers, was a very big risk to take, and that it had taken a lot of courage for her to go through with the charade. She told us she had been very worried that the whole episode could so easily have backfired and been a total disaster.

It was a very creative lesson, and we learnt a lot about our perceptions and prejudices that day. We also learnt about powerful ideas such as identity, presence, interaction and representation of reality. Our opinions of our lecturer, when we examined them, ranged from 'weird', 'crazy' and 'rude', to expressions such as 'she should have been on time', 'she's bald!' and 'she must be a witch.' We all laughed, but we realised the import of the performance. We learnt a very important lesson that day which set us up extremely well for the entire social psychology module. We learnt a deep lesson about ourselves and the positions we take in the social world, because our lecturer had decided she was going to take a risk and go the extra mile, and in so doing, facilitate a very powerful experience that none of us would ever forget. I'm so glad she did.

As a teacher, how much do you do that is above and beyond the call of duty? Do you ever go the extra mile? How much does creativity cost you? Many teachers do put in that extra bit of effort, taking risks, trying something new and creative, to engage students more, make them think more deeply, or enhance their learning in some way. Taking risks is not just a part of being a teacher, it's a part of being human.

Image source by Richard Pullen


Going the extra mile by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What you see is what you get

Human perception has been explained in many ways, from Decartes, through to the 'top-down' experiments of Richard Gregory, then J.J. Gibson's ecological 'bottom-up' model and a host of other theorists. Each clamours for our attention, attempting to explain the way we represent our version of reality inside our heads. The plain fact remains: What you see is what you get. You simply make your own interpretation of it, and believe what you want to believe. This is what allows illusionists and street 'magicians' such as David Blaine and Derren Brown to maintain their popular appeal.

Yesterday I took my second year teacher trainees over to our Virtual Immersion Cinema where for an hour they watched high resolution 3D images projected using a fish-eye lens onto the ceiling of the dome. There were a few inertia-sickness issues, but mercifully, there were no technicolour yawns. The wow factor was high though, and many were left afterwards with questions about how they could use such a facility to enhance the teaching of science, history, geography and other subject areas.

After this we went back to the classroom and I demonstrated the art of illusion using nothing more than a simple can of baked beans and my index finger. If you are sqeamish, don't watch this video. And please don't try this at home. You probably won't be insured.

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