Twenty ways to nurture conscious ignorance and a beginner’s mind

Frozen thinking

The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions … To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. (James Baldwin) 

As learners and as teachers we often rely on the habitual modes of thinking that we developed along with our expertise. This reliance can create a fixed orientation, or mental rut that limits how we act in, and react to, the world around us. We therefore tend to experience things in an autopilot mode, in the way we always have – the way we’ve come to expect. These thinking habits become highly limiting and impede our abilities to create or accept ideas that conflict with our assumptions or with conventional wisdom. This is dogmatic cognition. The political theorist Hannah Arendt rather more poetically referred to it as ‘frozen thinking’ whereby we adhere to deeply held ideas and principles that we have developed over time and no longer question. 

Deliberate doubt

In a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, Galileo wrote that those truths which we know are very few in comparison with those which we do not know. A few decades before, in several of the pages in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, he had scribbled the word, dimmi (‘tell me’). It’s a brief indication of a wider principle. Da Vinci led his remarkable life predicated on a commitment to question everything he thought he knew and believed. He rigorously interrogated the beliefs and conventions of his time, the pervasive frames of reference that governed the way his contemporaries thought and lived. In doing so, he blurred the boundaries between art, engineering, anatomy, maths and science – between reality and fantasy, experience and mystery, between objects and their surroundings. He was never addicted to, or even interested in, the comfort of consensus, but instead was attentive to the irregular, the odd. His choice was of deliberate doubt. This acted as a prelude to the way he thought, about the present and his own learning. Such doubt enabled him to let go of beliefs and attitudes that he had acquired at earlier stages of his learning and gave him the confidence to confidently ‘abandon’ his expertise and to embrace ambiguity and resist conclusions. In the end Leonardo simply refused to seize and freeze on a final approach or conclusion – in his paintings or in all of the other disciplines he forensically investigated. This immersion into a wise unknowingness and a lack of preconception gave him his flexibility of thought and an entrance point for his astonishing innovations.

Experimenting with ignorance

Yet this type of commitment does so much more than encourage new ideas, it also helps set up productive ‘collisions’ between existent ideas: in particular the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. In this way, Da Vinci, who earned his genius across so many disciplines, who was born into a world of traditional, religious and restricted thinking, managed to wander through his world asking profound insightful questions and developing a questing free-range mind. Centuries later, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell made the point that a thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science. We must judge the value of science by the ignorance it reveals and defines. Fact-fetishism shackles us only to the allure of the known. Instead, facts should serve mainly to access the ignorance beyond. Feynman adds that in order to make progress, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. These are all useful strategies we must engage with to try to counter the anaesthetic of our own familiarities.

We might also call this approach just mucking about in the unknown. As Jonah Lehrer puts it ‘The only way to be creative over time — to not be undone by our expertise — is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand.’ Rather than trying simply to accumulate knowledge, we ought to expose ourselves to our own ignorance on a daily basis. 

Approaches that create a classroom environment that nurtures a beginner’s mind

So, what might Montaigne’s assertion that, ‘only fools make up their minds and are certain’ look like in a school classroom? What are the best ways to create the uncertainty that fuels learning? How do we develop learners that look to multiple academic disciplines and make connections between them? How can we set up classrooms that offer genuine surprise, complexity and independence?

1. Encourage students to learn more scatteringly and instinctively by sharing with them the premise that so much of what we learn about the world is provisional and complicated.
2. Create, cultivate and embrace a classroom culture of collaboration and discussion by inviting more diverse questions and creating a group dynamic that encourages more serendipitous peer interactions.
3. Draw attention to challenging but manageable gaps in student knowledge by using them as a necessary exposure of their ignorance and thereby an insight into what they still need to learn.
4. Explore and embrace the notion of desirable difficulties by acknowledging that increasing accumulated information encourages  greater interest and growth.
5. Set up elements of struggle to stimulate learning and remembering by offering just enough information to stimulate a need for resolution and further investigation.
6. Give more opportunities for multi dimensional thinking by asking learners to negotiate unfamiliar materials and more tangential resources in off-syllabus ongoing projects.
7. Create and use stories that provide drama, uncertainly and resolution by bringing the world you want to focus on into the room, using music and pictures to immerse students into the subject matter.
8. Embrace ambiguity and keep learning outcomes open by framing your lesson with a series of big-idea questions rather than objectives as part of a constant quest for new options.
9. Create a classroom bursting with complexities that invite questions and multiple solutions by encouraging learners to generate, play with and integrate a wide variety of ideas.
10. Encourage curiosity into the causes of errors as an index of what needs to be learned by planting questions in learners minds that can ripen, via deferral, into genuine interests.
11. Slow down the learning process by spacing the sessions, varying the pace, savouring ideas, delaying conclusions and offering broader, deeper and richer experiences.
12. Find ways to reinvent materials rather than simply restudying them by offering learners the opportunity to experience alternative outcomes which are decidedly indeterminate.
13. Encourage learners to re-deliver material and lead sections of a lesson by occasionally taking a less controlling position and dividing up the responsibilities for the learning.
14. Don’t accept first answers, avoid surface slide discussions and press for justifications by insisting on extended and detailed responses to several ‘so what’ follow-up questions.
15. Actively encourage learners to generate their own materials, rather than receiving or reading passively by encouraging independent research without the use of search engines.
16. Try to vary the setting and procedures in which the learning takes place by introducing more flexible approaches such as starting with the most challenging elements of the lesson.
17. Present learning materials in a less organised form by introducing more abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from far flung ideas to more complex and unusual information.
18. Encourage more flexible mastery and expertise by helping learners to let go of beliefs acquired at earlier stages of learning and to revise what they assume they already know.
19. Support learners to develop a metaphoric perspective by shuffling ideas and exploring how everything can be connected by thinking aside and weaving together disciplines. 
20. Develop the capability to rise above conventional mind-sets by disrupting ingrained assumptions, exploring new paradigms and embracing contradictions and anomalies.

If you are interested by any of the approaches above you can discover what they look like in far more detail in Learning with Leonardo; Unfinished Perfection (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Leonardo-Unfinished-Perfection-children/dp/1911382977) by Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman.