Coming About

Today, I will be recording a podcast of my digital storytelling workshop experience and what I learned from it with colleagues Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl in the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU. My story, A Teacher’s Journey, was created during a five-week workshop with eight other faculty members. Sometime during those five Fridays in September, I remember thinking about a concept that I was first exposed to in Dee Fink’s book on creating significant learning experiences–the concept of “flow.”

Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (prounounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”, according to Wikipedia), describes a flow as

a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation…the flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.

I can think of no better description to describe the joy that I experienced when I immersed myself in the world of Flickr photos, freely available, open source music and the experience of condensing 27 years of working with adult learners into a 300-word story produced with a simple editor such as PhotoStory.

For hours at a time, I was lost in my own world, remembering the faces of years past, re-experiencing the places and people of my personal history with a vividness that I haven’t felt in years. Hours melted away at my fingertips, and only the call of pressing University responsibilities and the students of TODAY brought me back to reality. The time I spent evaporated into pleasurable recollections and the joy of new insights. It felt as if I was learning anew all the lessons of my past within the wisdom of the present.

Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s, studied at the University of Chicago and later became head of the Department of Psychology there. His concept of flow is related to his research on the various states of mind we humans experience. The flow state is considered an optimally motivating, engaging situation, which all of us have experienced at times — one that most of us wish happened more often.

Csíkszentmihályi described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

To achieve this extraordinary state, which can happen for all of us, a balance must occur between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. When the task is either too easy or too difficult, flow does not occur. Flow occurs only when there is a match between skill level and the task requirements.

Isn’t this the very challenge a teacher faces with each and every assignment or activity? How to create learning experiences that engage us fully, challenging us to ever higher levels of performance? I know that this experience of digital storytelling is what I will have in mind when I think of engaging our learners to push the boundaries of their skills to their maximum potential as they challenge themselves in aquiring new knowledge and skill. Thank you, Bud Deihl, for the opportunity to learn how creative an activity this can be. I hope I can re-create the same for my learners!

Credits:
A Teacher’s Journey - Terry Carter
Wikipedia, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the photo describing “flow”