License to Learn

By Anna Switzer

Life is an adventurous and winding road, and License to Learn delivers a flexible and intriguing map so that you can navigate your own unique journey. With this map, you are invited to see life's experiences-some chosen, some not-differently, and to make meaning from them in new ways. The key is that the so-called "comfort zone" is truly not the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636495866

Book preview

LICENSE TO LEARN

Elevating Discomfort in Service

of Lifelong Learning

ANNA SWITZER, PhD

atmosphere press

Copyright © 2020 Anna Switzer

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Ronaldo Alves

No part of this book may be reproduced

except in brief quotations and in reviews

without permission from the author.

License to Learn

2020, Anna Switzer

atmospherepress.com

I dedicate this book to Keith V King who I have known since I was 18 years old. He challenged me to be a better person and shaped my ability to be thoughtful about what I was doing as an educator. A dearly loved and self-proclaimed curmudgeon, KV passed away on September 25, 2019 at 92 years of age.

His voice is in these pages.

Contents

Introduction      3

Part One - The Terrain

Chapter 1: Going Outward Bound      17

Vignette 1: Time for a Change      17

Chapter 2: Mapping the Terrain      28

Vignette 2: Getting Dirty      28

Chapter 3: Why is the Learning Zone so Important?      37

Vignette 3: The Good Stuff      37

Part Two – A Deeper Dive into Comfort

Chapter 4: All Models are Wrong       51

Vignette 4: Wake Up Call      55

Playground One      71

Part Three - Rivers Running Through It

Chapter 5: Challenge by Choice      77

Vignette 5: Going Inward Bound      77

Chapter 6: Making Mistakes and the Role of Feedback      89

Vignette 6: Biking Across the US      90

Vignette 7: Not a Harsh Word      98

Part Four - The Roads

Chapter 7: Bird’s Eye View      103

Chapter 8: Risk      109

Vignette 8: To India with Mr. Hyde      110

Chapter 9: Rest and Reflection, Resistance, Resourcing      118

Chapter 10: Oops! Shut Down      128

Vignette 9: On the Rocks      129

Vignette 10: Mind the Gap      132

Chapter 11: Recovery, Resilience      137

Vignette 11: Tough Morning      139

Chapter 12: Reverence      146

Part Five - Transfer to Real Life

Chapter 14: Two Parts of My Brain      157

Chapter 15: Comfort with Discomfort      161

Playground Two      171

Appendices

Appendix A: A Brief History of Outward Bound      177

Appendix B: Unlearning in Order to Create Your Own

Comfort Zone      181

Appendix C: For Educators and Other Leaders      187

Application for Any Organization      198

References      201

Acknowledgments      203

"Adventure is not in a guidebook and Beauty is not on the map.

Seek and ye shall find." 

― Terry Russell

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Introduction

Poring over the National Geographic maps that arrive with the magazine once a month, I’m completely captivated as a kid. The colors, lines, and symbols connect me to my own history on the planet so far and invite me to dream of places I am yet to see. Contour lines, rivers, lakes and roads beckon me onto the page and out into the world. Additionally, driving around on Saturday doing errands, my dad at the wheel, he places the local map in my lap so that I can navigate our route. I guide us from a rural farm’s garage sale to the hardware store and back home again, for example. I’m eight to ten years old. If I make a mistake and take us the wrong direction, it is not a problem. We say OOPS!, find a place to turn around, and go back to get on the correct road. When we arrive where we are headed, guided by my instructions, my insides seem to glow. I love this authentic task in the world, and it makes me feel competent at a real-life adult skill. I also find myself curious about how the map and the land correlate with one another. So begins my fascination with maps and with learning. 

On one of those jaunts in the car with my dad, he asks me the following question: "Who do you think is smarter, someone who knows ‘a lot about a little’ or someone who knows ‘a little about a lot?’ I don't hesitate before answering, someone who knows a little about a lot." My youth speaks with certainty and I cast my vote for breadth over depth. Although my answer has actually wavered over time, I’ve never forgotten the question.

Over the years, questions like this propel me into being a lifelong learner. I have a bachelor’s degree in physics, a master's degree in oceanography, and a PhD in education. As I keep learning, I keep changing fields. Additionally, each of these topics and others become the focus of my own work as an educator. Thus, even as I try to know a little about a lot on the breadth side of the coin, I develop the depth side of the coin, too, because what I come to understand deeply is the process of learning. This a lot about a little side of the coin feels just as rich to me as the other, and in all likelihood, there is a plethora of in-between places to land that are just as rich. If my dad asked me the question again today, I’d say that there are many ways to be smart.  

When I look at my resume through the lens of future potential employers, I might appear to be someone who has bounced around in my career. But what I see, looking back as the one who has lived it, is a powerful thread of what is called Experiential Education (EE). In many ways, over the course of my career, I’ve become obsessed with experience and how we make meaning from experience. I design experiences for others to learn and grow from, and in the process have had some wild adventures myself. My work spans many branches of the educational tree—including traditional classroom teaching (mostly in the sciences), Outward Bound wilderness course instructing, pre-service teacher teaching, in-service teacher professional development, environmental education, and several unique combinations of these as well. I have often opted for—what some would call crazy—adventures over having a more settled life. This path has put me in direct connection with thousands of people, witnessing and encouraging them in circumstances where the overall intention is for learning and growth. Our shared experiences have taken place at sea, on rivers, in forests, on mountaintops, and in classrooms. Through them, I’ve learned a great deal—about the world, about myself, and about learning through experience.

One way to name what I am or who I have become through my life’s path so far is that I’m a) an experience engineer and/or b) a discomfort designer. My role, like that of all teachers and boiled down to its essence, is to first challenge and then support people to get out of their Comfort Zone(s). I carefully craft and provide a challenge, then assist people to rise to that challenge. And I’m pretty skillful at doing that for myself as well. I challenge myself to try new things and then go about figuring out how to meet the challenge, sometimes garnering the support or expertise of others as part of the process.

In order to glean the lessons in an experience—whether a challenging one or not—we must reflect on the experience. Reflections on my own experience have led me to write this book. My hope is that these reflections are of service in building a more adventurous and reflective society—one where curiosity, humility, and the spirit of adventure run rampant. This book is my attempt to share my experiences, in the form of stories and reflections, and share them in a way that perhaps will be helpful to others of all ages and backgrounds. 

Many of us are not necessarily taught how to make sense of our experiences in life. Thus, our ability to learn from it is hindered. We (individually and collectively) keep going into experience after experience rather than taking the time, and making the effort, to learn from what happens to us. We (individually and collectively) often seek comfort away from what is difficult rather than diving in to glean the lessons. This book can help you make sense of your own life experiences. My stories and sense-making act as a model for one way to go about it. It is not the only way, but I do draw a powerful, and ultimately flexible, map.

As a teacher, one of the things I want most for my students is for them to take what they have learned and use it outside of school. This is called transfer. And, in many ways, even if students don’t transfer the particular content (information) they learn into real-life—or aren’t aware that they are doing so—they are hopefully learning how to learn. In my mind, if someone can transfer the skill of learning into real life, they will always be able to stay engaged, grow, develop, and learn anything! I am a firm believer that learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of one’s formal schooling. As my dad used to say, any diploma or certificate of accomplishment shouldn’t be thought of as an exit from learning but as a license to learn more.

Thus, this book is about my own learning experiences. But it is mostly about a map. The value of maps is that they give us some awareness of our whereabouts so that we can direct ourselves from one place to another. They give us the bird’s eye view of the space we are in. The map I illustrate here is not of specific roads or places in the external world that may or may not be traveled, but of internal spaces that all of us have the opportunity to find and explore. By illustrating these spaces, and the roads that connect them, I hope to give you a more visible, though metaphorical, map by which you can find your way into lots of exciting learning on any topic(s) you choose. A new and different license to learn, this map doesn’t depend at all on your background or your level of schooling. I offer it as a way for you to blaze your own trail, and I believe in you.

License to Learn aims to improve your ability to learn from your own life experience. Regardless of where you are in any formal learning trajectory (or not), the Comfort Zone is truly not the place to be when you want to learn, grow, or develop—except as a place to reflect and make meaning before heading out again. With this map and the stories as your guide, you can become your own best teacher. The offering here is designed to be extremely flexible for each person. It can be used by anyone who wishes to learn and grow. I demonstrate how humans can learn from, or be stunted by, difficult experiences. I also demonstrate how our own choices can make all the difference. We can choose to learn even if we haven’t chosen the lesson or the teacher. We can even recover from, and learn through, traumatic experiences. We can develop anew throughout our lives.

You may have heard the phrase or even said it yourself: I need to get out of my Comfort Zone. This notion of Comfort Zone has become a common reference. I find it fascinating because I’ve taught this idea for close to 30 years in different settings and notice that most people aren’t familiar with other aspects of the metaphor. For example, two other zones exist outside of the Comfort Zone. Each of the three zones has benefits and downsides, and together they all form a terrain on which we can travel. Additionally, there are roads that we can use to move around this terrain that make life self-directed, full of learning, endlessly interesting and enriching. In this book, I outline the whole metaphorical map of zones to which the reference Comfort Zone alludes (as it is utilized in the field of Experiential Education). I highlight the role of experiencing discomfort, making mistakes, and getting feedback, as well as the value of risk, reverence, reflection, resilience, resistance, resourcing, and recovery in route-finding around this terrain. 

History of Comfort Zone

Where does this idea of the Comfort Zone originate? No clear answer to this question seems to exist. A few people besides myself have asked it, and while a general progression of its usage can be surmised, it’s not well documented. Two sources say that Comfort Zone originated as an idea relative to temperature¹, ². The basic idea is that the Comfort Zone is the range of external (or room) temperatures in which (if naked) humans are able to live comfortably. In this range, the internal heat balance is maintained without sweating or shivering. Generally, this zone is from 82 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit and is consistent for most humans.

Any consistency disappears as we consider the evolution of the phrase over time, however. Eventually the phrase took a metaphoric turn in psychology and later in business training to refer to a psychological state of ease¹. With this turn in use, much more variability for what is inside and outside of the Comfort Zone exists, depending on the person. The rather narrow range regarding comfort with temperature becomes a much wider range in the psychological sense. Every person's psychological Comfort Zone is unique.

Relative to this discussion, in the world of education, there is an iconic theory called the Zones of Proximal Development (often shortened to ZPD). The idea of ZPD was developed by a Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who lived from 1896 until 1934. His research interests included developmental psychology, child development, and education. His thoughts regarding ZPD, as with most of his other ideas, developed in his last ten years of life—from 1924–1934 (UNESCO, 2000)—which precedes the mid-late twentieth century dating by Rolls off the Tongue for the phrase Comfort Zone. And, given that it often takes time for ideas to become well known and well used, it seems reasonable to consider that Vygotsky’s idea of the ZPD could have contributed to the switch from Comfort Zone referring to a temperature range to that of a metaphorical range.

Overall, Vygotsky’s idea refers to one’s ability to do things. Images of it show there is an inner zone where a learner can do things without any help; a middle zone where a learner can do other things with support from a knowledgeable helper; and an outer zone where a learner cannot do some other things. This idea, as I mentioned before, is utilized in education and backs up the idea that learners need a role model or knowledgeable other in order to learn. Specifically, this person can help a student attain a new skill proximal (nearby) to their current skills but cannot help a student with a new skill too distant from their current skills. Outside the ZPD, a person simply cannot do what is being asked (yet). So, the Zone of Proximal Development is the middle zone in Diagram 1a, with Diagram 1b an alternative view.

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Diagram 1a. Zone of Proximal Development as it normally shown.

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Diagram 1b. An alternative