On My Soapbox from Michael Wallis | December 2024
Michael Wallis is the Student Learning Consultant for The Washington Center. His collaborative services are available to faculty who wish to improve the equity and student learning focus of their curricula.
Fog
Right now, I’m sitting in the Commons and looking out the window over Red Square. A dense fog has descended over the campus, hiding the details and texture of the landscape and leaving only the silhouettes and outlines of our little kingdom in the woods.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m in a fogbank like this, I always have the thought, “Man, this would be difficult to paint!”
A photograph could capture the literal image of what I see out my window, true to life. It could present the weather and the landscape as it is. But I’m not interested in presentation. I’m interested in representation. You see, fog has its own emotion tied to it that can’t be captured in a photograph. I find it peaceful, in an uneasy way. It obscures beauty, beautifully. Only a skilled painter could capture that kind of juxtaposition. You have to be able to see it as they saw it, not how it is.
Get to the point, Michael.
The point is this: sometimes, we (students, teachers, human beings) have an instinct that directs us toward over-specifying. We say more, write more, direct more, in order to make sure our audience gets exactly what we want them to. We photograph our meaning, thinking that, actually, this is the simplest way. Then, once we’ve shown our audience– the viewer, the reader, the student– the high-resolution photograph of what we want them to understand, it comes as a shock to us that the meaning isn’t there for them. Why don’t they get it? What is there to misunderstand?
What would happen if, instead, you gave your audience less?
The beauty of fog is that I get to imagine the hidden details. I see the silhouette of the Fir trees behind Evans Hall, and that triggers only the representative portion of my brain. The part that knows Douglas Firs are beautiful, and resilient, that they smell amazing, that the boughs can be made into a delicious tea that’s high in Vitamin C, and that my family cut one down every year around Christmas time to decorate and admire. The fog allows me to explore the brushstrokes of my entire relationship with the thing that it is obscuring.
Good instruction is like this, too. The ability to keep some of the details just obscured enough for students to know that they should be there, and can be discovered by exploring the ideas through their own lens. It is a method of teaching that places value on the student, leans on their experiences, and trusts them to be capable of making meaning for themselves. It asks more questions than it answers. It recognizes that learning is something that the student does themselves, not that their instructor does to them.
And yes, it’s harder to paint a foggy landscape than it is to photograph one. It requires having a plan for building up layers of detail and then obscuring them. It requires knowing what the painting would look like without the fog, and trusting that blending out all of that beautiful detail will be worthwhile, in the end.
If there is nothing to question, nothing to imagine, nor explore, then what is there to learn?
-Michael Wallis
Student Learning Consultant
