Two things have prompted this post. The first is the book that I am currently reading Wild Signs and Star Paths by Tristan Gooley which describes ways in which we can ‘read’ nature in order to locate and orientate ourselves and, ultimately, to navigate. The second is a conversation I had this morning with a graphic design colleague, Nigel Ball, about the way in which his design training and experience leads him to spot patterns and to take photos of things that I have not even noticed.

Gooley talks about fast and slow thinking - suggesting that as we become more familiar and practiced in using the techniques he outlines we gradually become less aware of the process that we have to go through: we ‘think’ less and instead generate knowledge in a more intuitive way. These ideas, which came from Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow, help to explain why it can be difficult to describe the process that we go through when we perform tasks that are very familiar to us.

My colleague is much more practiced than I am in spotting interesting design and examples of how shape, colour and type have been used creatively (or not…!) - he has been immersed in this practice for years and is well studied in the subject. He can do it more easily than me, but may find it hard to explain exactly what the process is that he goes through.

So I find myself wondering two things:

  1. What do we do that is more or less intuitive - that we have become good at through a combination of knowledge, experience and, perhaps, talent, but which may be difficult for us to explain?
  2. How do we make this process explicit in order to expose exactly what we do, and to help our students understand?

I wonder if this helps to explain some of those topics that we find more difficult to teach? How should we help students to develop their skills in these areas? Should we work on exposing the process that we go through even though we know that there might be many other ways to achieve the same results?

Sadly, I don’t have any solutions to these questions - but I plan to see whether thinking about some of my teaching challenges in this way might help as I plan for next year…