Disruption

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery  - Sartre, Nausea

What do learning and beauty have in common? In their most essential form both are disruptive experiences. Experiences where reality crashes in upon us, disrupting our constructs, forcing us off the rails, opening us up to the possibility of being reshaped. Of course, not all learning or beauty is experienced in this way – but there is something to be learned by considering their essential character.

By now, I imagine this seems very abstract. It’s not. Consider your own experience. If you recall the milestones in your own learning trajectory. I’m prepared to bet that ‘disruptive’ is a pretty good descriptor: starting a new job, a new school, an accident, a sudden change of health, a personal comment that cut you to the core – your first child, perhaps. Of course we tend to remember distinctive events but this is hardly incidental. The distinctive, the disruptive, the ‘worthy-of-a-story’ experiences form the cornerstones of our learning and the gravitational centres of our personality and world-view. These are indeed our ‘defining moments’. These are the things with affective context.

From this perspective it is easy to frame a more vague dissatisfaction with learning experiences: not only do they often fall short of being disruptive – the opposite is true: the most common descriptor applied to school by my children is ‘boring’. I think most people probably think of elearning as boring too.

Now I am not arguing for disruption for disruption’s sake – nor should we be too hasty in conjuring up an image of what counts as ‘disruption’. An example might help: at a recent event we were all encouraged to give very direct feedback to colleagues that we had only just met - our first impressions. The experience was clearly disruptive for at least some of the people there. At school disruptive experiences are field trips and challenges . Odd, then that we use ‘disruptive’ to apply to the kinds of people we don’t want in the classroom.

Looking back, I think much of what I have been striving for in Online (at least at the ‘push’ end) is the disruptive experience – something that bursts through the protective shell of our expectations and succeeds in making someone really care about diversity… or safety… or leadership. Generally speaking, people avoid learning - they reach equilibrium, their schema suffice, they remain cognitive misers – and it seems to become harder to bring about learning as people’s attitudes harden around them. How do you pitch data protection or safety to an audience in such a way that it doesn’t merely ‘bounce off’?

We do two kinds of things, I think: as learning professionals we create disruption – for example we engineer failure in an attempt to bring about learning – or we arrange resources that help people cope with disruption. This latter activity is more commonly called ‘performance support’. The former is ‘push’, the latter is ‘pull’; but neither are at all effective without the disruption that calls for learning.

In conclusion, the role played by disruption in learning serves as a reminder of how ‘fallen’ learning presents itself – as convention. The worst fate that can befall a learning professional is to become high-priests and curators of convention; and in so doing become boring.