Part 2—Fuzzy thinking

 Fuzzy thinking - Part 2

By Marli Santos 

Translated by Hedley Richards

Learning and teaching through an ecological and integrative approach using threads of wool to represent a network of fuzzy (entanglement) thoughts

Below, I describe another experience during the same workshop held in 2012 for students enrolled in an environmental management program in Campinas mentioned in the first post. The title above may seem a tad strange. What does it have to do with the experience recounted in the previous post? I will return to this question later, but I would like to start by telling the story backwards.

As I left the school and headed for the parking space, I suddenly felt as though time had stopped while I worked with the students. Night had already fallen, and sunlight had made way for a silvery full moon, which in its radiant beauty powerfully evoked complementary opposites that form a whole. Feeling the fresh air on my face and listening to the evening songs of birds, the sense of having completed a pleasant journey made me both happy and grateful. It was with these sensations that I headed home to rest, with the hope that the hearts of the young participants had somewhat been touched and a renewed faith in the importance of the inner dimension in the process of learning in formal education.

Someone called out in a breathless voice, making me turn around: “Please promise that you will come back!” It was a student, part of a small group, who approached me as I headed for the car that was waiting to bring me home. “For sure, we will meet again soon,” I said with a smile. They answered: “When?”

 

Detecting the state of minds, the ambiance in a classroom

On that day, we had worked on an activity that I find particularly rich as it focuses on the issues dimension with an eye to bring out the importance of complexity and systemic thinking.

Before starting the activity, I used a simple technique to gauge the students’ state of mind as well as mine. Seated on the ground in a circle, students were invited to position themselves, at their leisure, in relation to two mental-state-gauging messages that I had written on the board: “I feel like a porcupine, slow and rather prickly” and “The sky has been dark and cloudy lately, but the sun is beginning to shine through.”

Such messages are in general related to nature (weather, animals and plants); they are used to connect with how each participant feels right before the start of a more challenging activity. This quick and simple activity can be used to detect the state of mind of participants during the learning process, reset their feelings and promote indirect listening as they move from one activity to another. It was during this moment of transition that I perceived that anxiety still permeated the learning environment, as some students were still stifling sighs. “Will I be able to answer the questions?” said one student when I approached discretely to listen to her.

“How will my evaluation be affected if I am not able to answer the questions?” asked another student shyly. “I will be ashamed if I do not know the answers.” Such concerns helped me assess the emotional state of the group as a whole and gave me clues to rethink aspects of the experiential activity called Fuzzy Thinking.

We often design classroom activities with a view to achieving specific cognitive goals, but we forget to pay attention to the actual feelings of the students, ranging from insecurity, anxiety and stress to outright fear for their self-image and bullying. This tumultuous and confused inner environment—typical of the stage of life when the brain is undergoing deep transformations—may impact the process of learning significantly. After this recalibration of our internal and external environments, we proceeded with the next activity, which was more challenging yet fun!

Fuzzy Thinking is an interactive activity that promotes discussion of big and complex issues, such as global warming, human rights, socioenvironmental justice, gender equity, war and conflicts, among others. Within a pluralist and democratic perspective, students are encouraged to engage in critical and integrative thinking. They are challenged to think outside the box in search of creative solutions to solve, mitigate or prevent current and future global scale issues (e.g., global warming, climate change crisis, pandemics and war and peace). The intention here is to not only work on their cognitive skills, but also integrate other dimensions, such as the emotional, social, spiritual and corporal ones, with the understanding that the process of learning must take into account the set of knowledge, skills, values and experiences that students bring within themselves as actors in the construction of knowledge rather than considering them to be mere recipients of information. The fuzzy thinking is also a kind of entanglement thinking in which the notion of complexity has to be addressed.

Returning to the proposed activity, events proceeded as follows. Students were invited to form eleven groups of four participants that were selected randomly, but with an eye to achieving as much diversity (in terms of gender, color, height and self-confidence) as possible. Each group chose one of eleven proposed themes: environmental pollution, malnutrition, human rights violations, declining natural resources, racism, gender iniquity, urban development, guns, underdevelopment, global warming and poverty. Next, each group sat on chairs placed in a circle and discussed the theme they had selected, as shown in the photograph below.

Photo 1. Groups of students: receiving instructions about the activity and ready to begin the brainstorm about their topics.

 

Each student received a badge identifying the chosen theme. Groups were asked to brainstorm to identify relevant issues. They were then asked to record these issues on a sheet of paper to guide them during the next stage of the activity. While still brainstorming, each group selected two representatives, a static negotiator and a mobile one, who would mediate negotiations with the other groups. Each representative had a different role to play during the next stage of the activity aimed at building consensus around possible connections between the different themes.

The static negotiators were invited to stand still in a circle with one end of a ball of wool attached to their waist. The mobile negotiators moved freely around the room with this ball of wool with the goal of establishing, through negotiation, as many connections with other groups as possible, while always returning to the static negotiator to provide a summary of the agreements reached with other groups. This feedback step was required as the static negotiators were responsible for negotiating with their peers during the round-table stage of the activity (which symbolizes open, democratic and participatory processes). Each of the agreements reached between groups were physically represented by threads of wool of various colors (with one color representing each theme).

 

 Photo 2. Poster summarizing the discussion around the issue of gender inequality.  

Quite a bit of logistics was required to organize the classroom in a way that facilitated cross-thematic discussion: opening of spaces to allow negotiators to move around, creation of spaces on the walls to post the results of the negotiations and record the consensus agreements reached on connections between themes, storage of chairs at the back of the room and placement of some in a circle to allow static negotiators to sit down for the round-table discussions.

You can imagine the confusion this generated until we reached an understanding on what was needed for the activity to begin. Of course, this was expected for this offbeat classroom activity. In the end, everything fell into place during the round-table discussion, where static negotiators defended vigorously the points of view of their group and attempted to convince others using the arguments that were developed throughout the activity over potential links between the various themes. Disagreements also had to be noted during the round-table stage of the activity and mobile negotiators had to stand by their colleague to support the discussions between static negotiators.

 

Photo 3. Students weaving a web of fuzzy thoughts according to their understanding.

 

The physical materialization of the “round-table” and the “web of fuzzy thoughts,” with their countless interconnections, ended up playing a key role in making these connections visible and tangible. The vivid colors of the threads of wool—each of which represented a theme—woven into a large web interconnecting multiple nodes had a marvelous aesthetic impact while providing a visible representation of the concept of sustainability.

In addition to the meticulous construction of various concepts with the help of the colorful yarns, the round-table discussion allowed for some skills to be exercised and revealed. The importance of skills such as observation, cooperation, communication (including listening as well as oral and written expression) and lateral thinking was brought to the fore and reinforced.

Reflecting on the notion of fuzzy thinking, I remember how one of my professors at the University of Toronto used to say that confused thinking was a good thing. I must confess that this confused me at first. After a while, I began to perceive that this involved thinking in terms of complexity rather than adopting a linear form of thinking, where the answers to challenging questions follow a framework of causes and effects, without factoring in the complex networks of interrelations, interconnections and interdependencies that permeate our way of thinking and reality itself, often generating ambiguity, uncertainty, conflict and paradoxes.

Thus, an activity that invited students to engage in deeper reflection on complex themes and the relations among them created the possibility of experimenting with the idea that deeper thinking may initially generate a state of confused thinking that may help participants understand how complex issues call for complex responses. I believe that the theme of sustainability is perfectly matched to this activity, especially since it brings out the notion of transversality.

 

Photo 4. This picture gives a slight idea of the work involved in thinking about complexity.

 

It was interesting to note that students first approached the activity in a spirit of competition, seeking to make as many connections in as little time as possible. Perhaps I had left this aspect unclear, but as the activity proceeded, especially during the stage where the threads of wool were being woven into a web among groups, some began to perceive that rather than competition, what was required was cooperation, a lot of listening and even a sense of humor. This happened when participants found out that they needed to untangle the threads of wool. A lot of presence of mind, good humor and much laughter were needed to complete the last task before heading off for a well-deserved rest after an unconventional afternoon spent in a tangle of wool and confused thoughts!