Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Ph.D. (pronounced Chick-sent-mee-high), former chair
of the psychology department,
Dr Mike (as he’s known at the U of C) answers questions
relating to his work.
Using ‘flow’ and creativity to motivate learning in
school and home
By B TRAINOR
For those
unfamiliar with the concept, what is “Flow”?
It’s the name we give to the experience that people report when they are completely involved in something, so they forget themselves, forget time. It seems to be the kind of moments when people feel the most alive and their life is the most meaningful. Over the years, I’ve [tried] to see whether it’s possible to transform everyday life — whether in school or family — into something that resembles the state of Flow.
Would you say that the problem with education today is that students
don’t experience the state of Flow often enough?
Right, and some of the things we think are going to make it more Flow-like, don’t seem to do it. For instance, we have just been looking at the results from over 1000 teenagers from across the country, whom we have followed for five years, in school and at home. In school, the activities that get closest to Flow are group work and individual work. Lower are lectures and the very lowest one is audiovisual — watching films and TV.
Tests and quizzes are also high on Flow, but they’re also high on anxiety. I guess when you’re taking a test, you move between anxiety and Flow, back and forth. But you’re never bored and never apathetic — or very rarely — whereas apathy and boredom are pretty typical of lecture and audiovisual.
Anxiety, if it’s not extreme, is one of those states that propels you to want to stretch yourself, to develop skills so that you can enter into Flow again.
As I recall,
challenge is an important component of Flow.
If you are bored and apathetic, then to get into Flow, you have to get more challenge. If you are anxious, you have to get more skilled. Those are the two parameters that have to be “upped” if you want to get back into Flow.
How can we apply
these principles in the classroom to create Flow-like
atmosphere in schools?
We don’t have a set of recipes yet, but we certainly have a lot of information, that will eventually be used. With Flow, it’s been very comforting to see how many incredibly diverse applications people have found for it. The North American Montessori Teacher’s Association (NAMTA) published a whole issue of their journal on how Flow relates to Montessori education (Vol 22, No 2, Spring 1997 “Rediscovering Normalization: Deepening the Montessori Experience”). It gives them a whole new way of thinking about what they are doing.
Where there is a tremendous waste of Flow is in home life - how boring and detached people are when they get home. Everybody wants to spend more time at home, yet when people go home, there isn’t much that they can do. People don’t talk to each other. It’s a surprisingly barren life when you look at it. We use these electronic pagers, and the reports from home are typically pretty pathetic. There’s not that much of anything challenging, creative, interesting.
Of course, there are exceptions, but those only occur when people plan for it. You have to prepare or create the atmosphere, create the opportunity so there is interaction. The funny thing is, most often families are together when they leave home. At home, they rarely are.
Why aren’t
teachers creating more of a Flow-like atmosphere in school?
First of all, schools are a recent phenomenon. We have had 200,000 generations who grew up without schools and they learned perfectly well. In the last six generations, we developed this method of teaching, which we call school, and it’s a pretty sorry experiment at this point. Education will probably change tremendously down the line. At this point we are stuck with this system where you have one adult who has to find something challenging for, let’s say, 25 kids whom they don’t really know very well. Each kid has a different interest, different get all of them interested, involved etc. I’m amazed that teachers do as good a job as they do, but it’s really beyond human ability to do that.
So the teacher
also needs to be in a state of Flow to teach well?
I think that certainly helps a lot. It’s contagious to a certain extent. It’s interesting that almost all of the alternative schools realise that the trick in education is to get the kids to take control over their learning and to enjoy what they are doing.
That is not what the public schools have assumed is their mandate. Some teachers recognise it and do it despite [ but I think eventually the education that will work is the one that builds on the interest and the curiosity of the student.
I think the reason so may kids form bands is [ that it’s] likely that they’re going to become famous, but at least it gives them a chance of learning to organise themselves, doing some sort of activity that’s under their control and which has immediate feedback. So is athletics.
Then there are less desirable things. Most violence and delinquency among minors has to do with respect. They want to feel they are respected and recognised. It’s something you don’t get much in [traditional] school where you’re just a number. We need to recognise kids can do more than we give them credit for.