Teaching Inquiry

“It’s better to be wrong than boring.” So believes Andre Geim, the only scientist to win both a Nobel Prize—for isolating the highly versatile material graphene—and an Ig Nobel Prize—for his highly unconventional experiments levitating frogs. Geim is what art historian Sarah Lewis calls a deliberate amateur, someone driven by a restless spirit of exploration, curiosity, and a willingness to pursue experiments that will likely fail. According to Lewis, both the Ig Nobel and, ten years later, the Nobel resulted from this same playful approach to inquiry.

By play, I mean low-stakes, free activities that encourage experimentation and tinkering. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that play of this kind is fundamental to human nature, precisely because it is not meant to meet predetermined outcomes. Nguyen distinguishes this striving form of play, when people voluntarily face obstacles to experience the (sometimes joyful, sometimes frustrating, but always compelling) struggle of overcoming them, from achievement play, when the goal is to win. Achievement play has potential educational merits, but that’s not what I’m interested in here.

Playful inquiry and problem-solving are meandering and divergent by nature. Playful learners embark on paths other than the most obvious or well-beaten ones, and they bend or even break conventions, which can lead to unique and unexpected discoveries, solutions, and innovations—sometimes you get levitating frogs, sometimes you get major breakthroughs in materials science.

Geim’s quote: “It’s better to be wrong than boring,” crystallizes for me what is missing from most students’ experiences in formal education. That is, most students have been led to believe that when it comes to their education, it is better to be boring than wrong.

Let me be clear that the students themselves are not boring. Students have complex and messy lives that require navigating numerous competing demands on their time and headspace. But most students have also been socially and institutionally conditioned to approach their education from a stance of risk-aversion, fear of failure (which often means any grade below an A), and pressure to do what they believe their teachers want at the expense of their own interests.

A sense—real or imagined—of high-stakes accountability constrains many students within the narrow boundaries of paths laid down by others—teachers, parents, counselors, administrators, etc. Adding to the problem is that, culturally, play is often juxtaposed against work, as in the adage, “if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.” This is a mistake, because striving play isn’t always fun.

In fact, play can be quite rigorous—another complicated term—and even tedious. Sarah Lewis highlights the painstaking trial-and-error approach Geim and his research team employed during their graphene experiments. They spent many late nights experimenting with different methods and tools as they incrementally reduced the thickness of graphite to a micron.

The thing is, playful experimentation and learning from mistakes are infants’ and young children’s primary approach to learning; just about everything they do is what Geim calls “curiosity-driven research.” But when children’s conditioning as students begins, this playful approach to learning shifts toward risk-averse, less intrinsically curious behaviors—i.e., schooling communicates to children that it is better to be boring than wrong.

By the time students get to college, the mindset that play is the opposite of work, and that joy and education do not mix, is well-worn. I experienced this firsthand when, following my own playful approach to course design, I began offering students (virtual) carte blanche to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven learning projects and (virtually) guaranteed them an A for trying.

Although students showed excitement about their self-chosen projects, many worked far less hard on them than I anticipated. I came away from these experiments sensing that for many students, the chance to pursue personally meaningful projects had pushed them too far outside their educational comfort zones. Because they weren’t required to demonstrate a predetermined level of achievement, and because the projects were much more enjoyable than typical coursework—i.e., the work felt more like play—students experienced dissonance, which they “resolved” by prioritizing more conventional assignments from other courses.

At the time, I was surprised and disappointed by these outcomes, but in retrospect, who could blame students for responding this way?

These experiments in playful learning helped me understand that teaching and learning take place within an educational ecology, and that every idea, value, or practice a teacher seeks to implement is connected to all the other components of that environment. Students’ behaviors are tied to their lived experiences and the habits of mind (whether conscious or unconscious) they have adopted as a result. I can encourage students to “unlearn” these habits of mind, but this is incredibly difficult given that: 1. Most students will only take one course with me, and 2. Their other courses likely reinforce those same habits of mind.

Every potential solution to a teaching and learning challenge creates new challenges. Amid this conundrum, I invite students to adopt a more playful approach to learning. This includes discussing the concept of learning as play and encouraging students to share stories of times they enjoyed learning; unsurprisingly, many of their stories are set outside formal education. But I am ethically obligated to establish learning environments in which students can complete all the activities and assignments of the course from the stance they are accustomed to—i.e., performing learning and coloring within the lines as they perceive them—and, assuming they meet the appropriate standards, obtain the grade they desire. Playful learning, like engaged learning more broadly, is encouraged but never required. To put this another way, I do not punish students for behaving as though it is better to be boring than wrong.

Playful approaches to learning do not make sense for all educational environments. In fact, it isn’t always better to be wrong than boring. But within the landscape of formal education, there should be far more opportunities to learn through play. This is ultimately a structural problem, but progress could be made by assembling faculty communities of practice—which is, admittedly, my response to a host of problems in higher education—dedicated to learning as play. If cohorts of conscientious faculty were encouraged (and given appropriate time) to practice teaching as curiosity-driven research: Treating their courses as pedagogical laboratories, pooling their knowledge, sharing their success and failures, etc., they would model for students the approaches I associate with learning and inquiry as play. Over time, the educational ecology would shift, and more and more students would take similar approaches to their own learning.