Einstein, Monty Python and lateral thinking #twistedpair

The #twistedpair blogging challenge asks you to put together an unlikely pairing of characters - historical, contemporary or fictional - and write about a connection they have (however tenuous) and how it relates to learning. I hope that going through a process of thinking about connections between two seemingly unconnected characters will involve a lot of creative, lateral thinking, and that the end result will be a unique perspective on education from which we can all enjoy reading and learning.

Yesterday Sarah Honeychurch wrote a first blog post in response to the challenge and came up with Fools march in which is a brief but pithy reflection on professional practice and human impulsiveness using a tentative connection between Alexander Pope and the cartoon characters Roobarb and Custard (I love it!).

Andrew Smith swiftly followed up on my #twistedpair challenge with another strange pairing: How Monty Python and Albert Einstein inform my professional outlook just goes to prove my point that a lot of lateral thinking can be generated when we stretch our imagination a little. I created a whole bunch of other unlikely pairings in my initial blogpost. What kind of conversation might Tarzan have had with Jean Piaget? How might the love child of Marshall McLuhan and Madonna have turned out? Would Han Solo have been BFF with Queen Elizabeth I or would he have been beheaded? And what the heck has that to do with education?

Feel free to choose one of the unlikely pairs, or better still, make your own up, and join in with the fun and mayhem, as together we explore our professional practise through humour, imagery and creativity. I look forward to reading your #twistedpair blogs!

Photo source


Einstein, Monty Python and lateral thinking #twistedpair by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Danger illustrated

Students often struggle with critical thinking. They are great at description, but ask them to move beyond this into critical analysis and they look at you and shrug. And yet critical thinking is a vital graduate skill that once acquired, can be applied to all aspects of life.

Recently I have been teaching a research skills module to a whole year group of third year education undergraduates. The time came to address critical thinking, and I thought long and hard about the best way to help them to learn.

There are some great exemplars of effective education from across the ages. Think of Socrates with his constant questioning, or the great educator Comenius with his naturalistic approach to learning by 'obtaining knowledge through objects rather than words'. Then there was Maria von Trapp (played by Julie Andrews in the movie musical The Sound of Music. Look, I'm being serious here - kind of). She used a combination of sounds, imagery and mnemonics to teach the children to sing. She could have taught them to sing anything using this method - even Firestarter.

I brought all these ideas together to teach critical thinking this week. I illustrated my teaching with a simple plastic bottle of water. I asked my students to describe it. 'It's transparent', 'It's made of plastic', and 'It holds water' were perfect answers. These are superficial qualities to the bottle of water, but they don't really tell us much more about it. It's dangerous to accept something at face value without examining it in depth.

So, I made the illustration a little more difficult. I asked them to analyse the bottle of water. Now, there are many ways you can do this. You could chemically analyse the contents for example. Or you could simply trust the manufacturer and read the contents label on the side to see what levels of calcium, sodium or magnesium were present. You could also analyse the shape of the bottle - its design - and the affordance of the bottle top and whether it allowed you to twist or flip the bottle open.

The next stage is one that most students struggle with. How do we critically analyse the bottle of water? After a lot of thinking, several ideas were ventured including 'the water is almost gone, therefore the owner might have been thirsty', and 'the design of this bottle isn't as good as another brand I usually buy.' In essence the students were speculating based on their analysis of the bottle, and were also beginning to evaluate the worth of the bottle. They could have gone further and evaluated its worth in terms of value for money, or its health benefits in comparison to other popular drinks. They may have discussed the history of bottle water, its cultural impact, or even debated the plastic bottle in terms of how easy it would be to recycle its component parts. In fact, when you get to the critical analysis and the evaluation stages of thinking, there are endless possibilities. Let's hope the students make the connection to their education studies.

Photo from various sources to numerous to list here


Danger illustrated by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.