Creativity and Constraints in Student Conduct with Guest Keith Sawyer

Join us as we explore the intersections of creativity, rule-breaking, and education with bestselling author Dr. Keith Sawyer, a renowned expert in educational innovation and creativity. Discover how constraints foster creativity, the importance of improvisation in learning, and insights into nurturing innovative minds.

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Theme music "Fuzzball Parade" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to Ms. Behavior. My name is Colette.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

And I'm Kurt.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

And we are talking about all things student conduct on our podcast. And we've reached a new milestone today because we have our first quasi-celebrity guest. It's somebody I've admired for a very long time, Dr. Keith Sawyer, who is the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the best-selling author of two of my favorite books, Group Genius, which I have used for years in classes that I've taught, and workshops, and zigzag. And I can hear my voice shaking already because I'm a little nervous. Because this is such an honor. Keith also hosts a podcast that I love called The Science of Innovation. And there's a companion blog that I read religiously, and here we have you on the show. So welcome, Dr. Keith Sawyer.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Well, thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here, and thanks for that great introduction.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

And Colette, before Dr. Sawyer joined us, you reminded me of the class that you used to teach that I used to hop in on. You should talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Yeah, the three of us have a little connection here. Back when I worked at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I taught an introduction to innovation class for first-year students. And I found this old YouTube video I made for my class where I held up a copy of Keith's book. And I was introducing them to what we were going to talk about. And I think I sent that to you, Keith. And Kurt heard I was teaching this innovation class, and he used the class as consultants for projects that the medical school he was at were doing. And so somehow I feel like all three of us should have met at some point.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Right, maybe so. We should have, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

That was a fun, they were fun classes. The students always pitched really innovative ideas. Uh, I still remember we were doing a renovation in a building and they suggested a um a chute from the second floor to the first floor instead of of stairs. So anyway, Dr. Sawyer, uh, we we always like to start off the podcast by asking uh questions about what you were like in college. Most specifically, did you ever find yourself in trouble in college uh in a student conduct setting? And what did that look like?

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Oh, was I ever in trouble in college in a student conduct setting? Um I lived off campus. I was a student at MIT, and MIT didn't have enough dormitories on campus, so quite a few students uh lived. It was actually over the river. MIT was in Cambridge, and uh Boston was on the other side of the river, and so I was in an old brownstone, and we didn't have a whole lot of supervision from uh the campus authorities, so we we didn't have uh an adult living in the house. Uh so if something happened, I guess you'd say we were self-managing. There was a time when we were playing around with some chemicals, they were uh explosive chemicals that someone someone had found basically in the garage, and they were basically what you would use to make fireworks. Uh and we thought, wow, uh we were mixing them up and putting them on these pieces of corrugated cardboard and lighting the edge of the carpet up on the roof, and it would burn up to the the uh pile of powder, and they would flame up in different colors and explode. So those kind of chemicals, no, not ingestible chemicals. Uh none of us were high, none of us had been drinking, we were completely straight. Uh, and I was not up on the roof doing this, I was down in the basement where uh my friend was stirring together these powders and different combinations to see, you know, uh what kind of different colors of smoke could be created. And uh they spontaneously combusted around his finger and exploded. And uh I I happened to be in the room when this happened, so he stumbled out of the room and his his face was covered in soot, kind of like the mad scientist look, and his hair was up like that. And I ran in to help him and I stepped in something. I don't know, I didn't know what it was. Uh and the you know, the ambulance came and the police came and they they looked down at my foot and they said, You gotta come to the emergency room. I was like, What? I I'm fine, nothing happened to me. I looked down at my foot and it was covered in blood. Shit, my foot is covered in blood. So they took me to the emergency room. Um and well, it turned out I had stepped in a bucket of red paint. My foot was not covered in blood, and nothing was wrong with me. And as I said, none of us had ingested any chemicals. So that was it. The only thing I did that was bad, I suppose, and it and it wasn't, you know, my fault. Uh I wasn't stirring any chemicals, but I did have to go to the hospital, and it did seem like I was bleeding. So it was all just a misunderstanding. Okay. So, no, basically I was I was good. All of the illegal things I did were went undetected, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

I love that. Uh, this seems like the kind of mischief I would have gotten into in college, but I do have some grave concerns about a uh EMS provider that can't discern blood from paint. That uh that could be problematic at Halloween.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah. Looking back, someone should have noticed that the skin wasn't broken. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

My boss at Emerson would not let me get away with this interview without asking you about rule breakers versus rule followers. So Kurt and I always say uh he tends to be a natural rule follower, and I tend to be a natural rule breaker. And um I did read the book that you recommended, The Creative Classroom, and you sort of hint that um the creative classroom techniques like the guided improvisation, facilitated learning, might work even better for students that don't do well in traditional schools. So I wondered is there any connection, do you think, between folks who like to push boundaries versus those who follow more linear paths?

SPEAKER_02 7:06

Yeah, so that book, the creative classroom, I wrote for teachers, and I talk a lot about the tension between constraints and freedom. Uh I mean, this is like an ancient philosophical tension between, I guess you could say, the individual and society, or free will and determinism. It's sort of the nature of being human in a in a complicated world uh without we can't always do exactly what we want to do. But uh if we're maturing and growing, and you know, it's almost uh Freudian, I guess the the ego and the super ego, the child wants to do what the child wants to do, and you're growing the parent makes you do certain things that you might not want to do. Okay, but you know, when it becomes in a piaget in cognitivism as a cognitive development, this is uh how you learn is the tension between constraint and freedom and constructivism, the basic principle is that you have to be able to construct your own understanding, and that's a creative process, and it has to be improvisational in some sense. You have to be able to find your own way forward. It can't be a linear, scripted process. So that's the fundamental insight of constructivism, and I believe in that. I think there's a lot of scientific evidence that it requires this kind of engaged, creative, unstructured process of moving forward. That's the nature of growth and development. If it's going to be substantive, if it's going to stick, but it can't just be completely chaotic and unstructured, or it's it's gonna be a mess. It's not gonna be optimal. Uh, you're not gonna get to a desired endpoint. So that's where the structure comes in. Or you could say constraints, you could say structure. Learning scientists will use the term scaffolding, I call it guided. Uh, and my way of talking about this balance between this necessary freedom of constructivism and the necessary guidance, I call it guided improvisation. Because when I study improvisation, say jazz ensembles or improvisational theater, improvisation always has this balance between structure and freedom. Jazz ensembles, the jazz musicians don't just play wildly anything they want. They have all sorts of guiding structures. They've got 16-bar song forums, they have uh harmonic sequences that they play, they have uh they have melodic licks that they are all familiar with. And uh they don't view the structures as constraining or limiting, they are enabling. Uh so uh that's that's the world of constraints, they're not something that you think of as limiting. I guess I'm I'm perhaps riffing off of your question. That's the way I think about guidance. I don't know if I've said anything now about being a rule-following person, or even if this is related to rules. Um, when I think about rules in the context of you know your world, I think about institutionalized rules or policies, right? But everything I've been talking about is more informal, it's more like uh unwritten and emergent. So I maybe we can figure out a way to connect those things.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

There's so much connection. When I read, and now I'm adopting your language of instructionism versus creative education. Can you talk a little bit about the because I see the same thing one-on-one with students in discipline hearings where people that approach these as instructionists, it's sort of hierarchical, um, or like memorize the rules. The behavior you talked about at MIT. I would love to have had those students that were on the roof shooting off those self-made fireworks. Like what a great conversation to have about what motivated that instead of just you know, memorize the rules. So for me, it felt like one-on-one there was a lot of transferable information that you shared about education.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

MIT has a tradition of hacking and rule breaking that is to some extent not only tolerated but celebrated, but it has to be, I shouldn't say has to be, but there's a certain way to do it where it's uh productive, I guess you could say productive, rule breaking. And those things you can't write down, you can't formalize them. So of course there are rules, but then there are ways of breaking rules that can be productive. Now, I guess again, in your in your world where it's institutionalized, you can't sort of wink wink and say, Yeah, if you do it that way, but I bet you do. I bet you can see it happen, right? I mean, there are students who break the rules and it's completely destructive, and it's not uh resulting in any human value of any kind. And you probably also see other cases where something has happened and you can see some value in it, and you can see that this person was trying that maybe their motivation came from a good place, and maybe they were trying to get to a valued endpoint, maybe they were breaking the rules. I don't know if this happens. I bet it happens. Um then maybe maybe there's a a learning moment there. You know, not all rules should be rigidly applied. I guess that's true of policy in general, right? I mean, um what do they say? It's a living document, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Yeah. I I think m far more cases are what you're talking about, uh, especially for first-year students that are motivated by wanting to make friends, or um Kurt and I were both uh kids of um school principals, so we had to be kind of goody-goodies growing up, and then college was a place where we could explore what our identities were. Kurt, do you have thoughts on that as a former PK?

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Yeah, I so much of this discussion is making me think about the community standards model that we worked with at our former institution and how it was, in my mind, a collaboration between students who had all different types of personalities and you know, on that spectrum of creative versus rigid, and they were helping create the guidelines in a like the the guardrails in a sense, but also developing their own ways of of talking to each other and about how they were gonna live together. So I'm seeing like threads of that in this discussion that I find very interesting, not just the one-on-one interactions you have with students, but the environment that you create in which they're learning and figuring out how to be creative and uh navigate independence.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

Right. I'm thinking so I'm a professor, I'm an instructor, I'm not in student services, so when my relationships with students are completely in the context of the classroom and when I have issues with students, it's the teaching relationship. So I'm teaching them, they have assignments to do, and then I grade the assignments. So if there's an issue with a student, it's because they've been cheating. But that's the only issue I encounter, and that's the only time I end up finding myself uh talking to someone in uh what do we call it, Office of Student Conduct on my campus, University of North Carolina. Um and this occasionally happens, it's pretty rare. It seems like in the past year it has happened more frequently, and uh I've heard from other people that this has been the case, that it seems like there's been an increase uh after ten years of nothing ever happened, at least in my uh in the past year, several things happening. But maybe just to generalize more, we're talking about rule breaking and rule following. You know, I think there are certain people that rule break for self-serving purposes, right? They're they're sort of pushing the limits or pushing the boundaries, and they'll they sort of justify it, but you know the justification is BS. They're like, oh yeah, you know, this is okay, that rule, it doesn't matter that I'm doing this. But they're they're really just trying to get away with something. Um and you know it, and they probably know it. So there's that kind of rule break. And there's no value in that. And that person, they might go on and be very successful in business. I don't know. But and then there's the other person we were talking about a few minutes ago where they're they're breaking the rule, but maybe they're actually trying to help someone, or they have a moral compass that is leading them to do it, and they maybe they're breaking the same rule, uh, and maybe they're breaking it in a similar way. So how do you I don't know, this is your role, and you have all this experience, so you see this and you can understand this because of your experience, but you can't write it down, right? You can't have a policy. How do you codify these two different kinds of people? And you know, my research area is creativity. I guess I'd have to say they're both creative. Uh, I did an interview several months ago with uh Hansuka Kapoor. She's a researcher who studies what she calls dark creativity. When people use creativity to accomplish bad things, so this would be an example of someone breaks the rules in a creative way to cheat, right? Or another person breaks the rules in a creative way to help someone. So is that dark creativity? Oh no, they're helping someone, maybe maybe that's not dark creativity. So how do you tell the difference? Uh uh it just seems like we can know because we're experienced. We're all none of us are 30 years old, we're not starting out. How do we how do we teach our junior colleagues who are just starting out, who might not have this sense yet?

SPEAKER_00 17:49

And like you said in the creative classroom, beginning instructors usually stick to a script, they like things to be very linear, and then with practice they start to become more flexible. I I loved at the end you wrote sort of um qualifications of folks who are good at this type of work, and I think it's the same in our field, people who listen to students who can make them comfortable sharing, like you know, what made you think about mixing those chemicals together? And then, you know, where was your mind at when you went up on the roof? And if I could put you in a time machine and go back to that roof, is there anything you would do differently? And and you you identified humor as a really important quality too to have in these interactions. So I think for me it's it's still improv.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Experts are better improvisers, it's part of what makes someone an expert, is that they don't have to follow a script. People who are starting out are much more likely to follow the rules and follow the script. They don't have the confidence uh to improvise on the basics. And then there's a lot of research showing that as you go through this trajectory from novice to expert, part of what defines that increase in ability is to be able to base what you're doing on those same rules, so you're not breaking the rules, but you're able to enter new situations where you can't apply the rules exactly because the real world is complicated, and you need to be able to improvise to apply those rules adaptively to be successful in the real world, and that's the nature of professional expertise, and that's true of every discipline, I think. So it's certainly true of teaching, it's true in your field, student conduct as well.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

There's a theorist in our field, Marsha Baxter Magolda, that talks about creating educational environments where we approach things as learners ourselves and not just knowers. I that's not quite as true in the classroom where you are trying to impart certain things, but then giving students the space to be creative. I'm thinking about a student I just met with. She got sent to me because she checked out too many temporary ID cards from our ID office. And somehow it ended up in the discipline office, which didn't feel right to me. And then when I learned her story, she is taking one class, it's in the evening, and the ID office closes at five o'clock every afternoon. And the only way you're allowed to pick up an ID is on campus at that office. So I'm like the rules failed her, and then she got in trouble, and now she's meeting with a student conduct officer about this. So I don't know if that's kind of what you're talking about, where sometimes we have to use these opportunities as for us to get creative about what our purpose is.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

I think so, absolutely. So you're describing a situation where if you had applied your rules exactly, you would not have been accomplishing your your job effectively, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yeah. And she didn't really have anything to learn from me. Uh as you called it like the sage on the stage. You know, me wagging my finger at her about why she keeps having to check out an ID. Um, I think she would have felt bad about Emerson College, bad about her experience with me. And I'm the one that had something to learn. Sorry, Kurt.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

No, I I was just I was thinking the same thing because um I think that what the student did was improv. Uh there was a structure in place that didn't work for her, and she figured out a way around it. So, in that setting, I'm thinking, what do we? Learn as administrators about our how our students experience our campus and what changes do we have to make. If you know a lot of what we talk about is being a student ready campus at the community college I work at. And when I hear things like that, I think, okay, this is something that doesn't work for one student that I know about. Does it work? Is it not working for other students? And if it's not working for a lot of students, then it's broken and we need to fix it, not punish the people who are trying to figure out how to navigate around it. Um I like I, you know, I know I I think of myself as a rule follower, but I think how much of this is subjective. Dr. Sawyer, you asked, you know, how do we impart to our younger colleagues how to discern between a student who is maybe in need of guidance or who's doing something for the wrong reason versus the right reason. So much of that is subjective. And I think of myself as a young professional and being very much like if I had been the conduct officer that would have met with you and the firework situation at 25, I would have thought this is a safety violation, somebody could have gotten hurt. And now at 53, I think, gosh, I want to know, did you learn anything from that situation? Um, what did you take away from it? What would you do differently? Those are the questions I have. Not not as much around, you know, wagging my finger as Colette said, and you did wrong. Uh, more curiosity approaching the the conversation that way.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

Right. We all thought it was very funny that none of us had imbibed anything that particular night.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

You made those decisions clear-headed, and I assume you probably wanted to learn something. That's right. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Back at that time, no one no one tested you for substances when stuff happened, I suppose now. Yes. But you were saying something about instructionism uh a few minutes ago, so I wanted to say there's a parallel between uh your business and my business. Um lecturing does not require creativity. You can do the same lecture over and over again, but I don't teach with lecturing. I teach with something I call project-based learning, where it's constructivist because I'm giving the students opportunities to find their own way through the material. I provide them with a lot of constraints, but ultimately they have to find their own way through the project. So it's a way of balancing constraints with creativity. That's why I call it guided improvisation. And I'm improvising with the students, so it's a kind of collaborative improvisation. It's not only the students that are improvising, but with instructionism, with lecturing, you can keep doing the same lecture over and over again. You don't have to change, you're not responding to the students, or at least you don't have to respond to the students. So with guided improvisation, I think it's necessary that you as the teacher are learning, but because you're responding and you have to create as a response, you're necessarily developing, you're necessarily learning, or else uh you're not successfully uh improvising with those students. I think it's got to be the same way with what you're doing. So if you're sitting there on at your desk and a student comes before you and you just read off the rules to that student and lecture at them, well you know that doesn't require creativity, but you're also not going to be very effective, it seems to me. But then if you're interacting with that student in an improvisational fashion, uh I think you're going to be learning from every one of those encounters.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

And it's delightful. Everyone, uh probably like your classes. Everyone is has a sort of magic of its own. Do you work mostly with undergraduate students or or do you have a graduate cohort that you're working with?

SPEAKER_02 26:05

I teach both undergraduates and graduate students. In the spring, I'll teach an undergraduate class. In the fall, I'll teach graduate class. So yeah, my whole career I've taught both.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

I was curious whether sometimes it's hard to read your books when I'm working in environments that are more constrained. And and you can tell what pages are like I've written in the margins. Oh, I wish we were doing this, oh, I wish we had the freedom. Um, do you ever find your students having experienced this? But living in a world that is instructionist and looking for simple answers to complex things, um, does that create an interesting tension there?

SPEAKER_02 26:50

A lot of students like to have constraints. Partly, I think, because they've spent their academic careers in environments that are highly constrained, uh, that are instructionist. They've had teachers deliver information to them, uh, and then they've been asked to regurgitate that information. So there's been no uncertainty. Uh but to have true learning, there has to be some ambiguity, there has to be some opportunity to uh discover on your own, to explore. But that uncertainty results in anxiety, and I think it's a necessary anxiety, but anxiety is unpleasant. I mean, you're anxious. So when students have not experienced that, and most of them have not, and then they're in an environment where honestly it is high stakes. I mean, you need to get an A, especially if you want to go to graduate school, if you're pre-med, you know, you need to get straight A's to get into a good medical school. So I completely understand the anxiety. So how do you how do you handle that? Uh yeah, it's difficult for the students, and I think part of the reason it's difficult is because they haven't had this experience. So some of the pressure towards bad pedagogy is actually coming from students. It's sort of paradoxical. You think students would be begging for good pedagogy? Uh they know, they know they're not learning anything. They're sitting there passively, the professor's lecturing at them, they're surfing the internet, they're texting, they probably have their earbuds in and they're listening to music. Uh they're jaded, they're cynical. They know they're not learning anything, but they know how to play the game. Um, and they know how to they know they're gonna get the A. They're not anxious. There's a certainty to that. Um, and then they come into a class like mine, which is project-based, where there's some ambiguity, there's some uncertainty. You can't listen to music on your earbuds. You've got to pay attention. Uh, you've got to be invested, you've got to be engaged, and you're not really sure what you're supposed to do exactly. Yeah, you're you're not used to that.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

I think I went through my entire undergraduate experience never having to think critically or uh be exposed to a situation where I was forced to have an opinion about something, and I I agree, I think there was the familiarity of this is what K-12 was. It was very jarring to go into a graduate program where you were presented with seemingly conflicting information, and I think my first semester I had a full meltdown because I thought the instructor doesn't know what they're doing, they're presenting me with contradictory facts, not understanding that they were trying to force me to do research and have an opinion. So I I love this, and I love the idea of instructors being more present with students on that journey and helping them navigate it.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

Right, right. Yeah, you know, because whenever I go into my dean of students and she totally gets it, but the strangest things that students will write on course evaluations, um, and you know, completely opposed things. So half of the students will say, Great best class ever, you know, I really liked how Professor Sawyer let us find our own way through the material and didn't make us all do the same thing. And then the other half of the students will say, Horrible teacher was very unclear about his instructions. I had no idea what he wanted us to do, couldn't explain why I got the grade idea. Yeah, so it's it's bizarre sometimes. But yeah, an experienced dean of students will see that we'll just not, yeah, like like you are right now. I can see you not.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

I appreciate you resetting me because I had this sort of fantasy that students go to their other classes, like, God, I can't wait to get to Dr. Sawyer's class where we're actually allowed to, you know, learn it. But you're right. I remember at RIT we had uh I worked in the STEM area, some of the science instructors were teaching the pogo method, which is project-based. Um, and the students were so angry. Like, they won't just tell us the answers to study. But by the end of the year, they're like, oh my god, I learned so much more than I learned in high school in these in these topics. But you're right, they want instructionism.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

I always hope they're gonna say that, but you know, uh I I don't expect it, that's for sure. After teaching so long, I'm I'm quite senior at this point, so you know, I uh I don't I don't expect to convert every student.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

And maybe you're just experiencing the tension of people being exposed to it for the first time. I you know, I would hope that in retrospect they might understand the value of of the learning experience.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Right. Well, and I change it every time. So a few minutes ago, we were talking about how you learn. You were saying in your career that you're always learning, doesn't matter how experienced you are, how senior you are. I mean, I learn all the time this semester, this project I've been teaching for almost 10 years, and there's an aspect of the project where a couple of students did this thing I've never seen a student do before, and I was like, oh my gosh, I I understand why they did that. It's because I wasn't clear about this one thing, and it was my fault. It was my fault. I was like, oh, let me think about that. You know, and next time I teach this, I'm gonna do this other thing. So, yeah, there's always an opportunity to change, right? There's always an opportunity to be better.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

There's nothing else that I've taken away from you. It's about using constraints as just parameters instead of vetoes. So uh in an ideation project, when there's somebody that's like, well, that won't work because it's too expensive. Like, okay, we'll just use that as a parameter. Whatever idea we come up with has to fit within the budget.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

Oh, budgeting, okay. Yeah, so that's a concern in in your field. Uh I don't have to think about so much uh teaching. It's uh it's just me in a classroom and I guess some chalk.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

But it could be uh there's a worldwide chalk shortage. And it just becomes a parameter. We're gonna have to make the learning happen without chalk. We just add it to the list. I think it's in zigzags, the activity about um list all the things you can think of that are white.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

Oh, absolutely, yes. There were um I think it was uh in the refrigerator, yes. Um and this is a divergent thinking exercise, and divergent thinking is a type of creative thinking where you generate as many ideas as possible as opposed to convergent thinking, which is usually what you're asked to do in school, which means converge on one right hand. Yeah, so that's what school is, you get the right answer. But divergent thinking is get lots and lots of answers. And uh so a lot of creativity exercises and even creativity tests are divergent. One of the exercises is uh list as many things as you can think of that are in your refrigerator, uh and uh then the next one or a different one is list as many things as you can think of in your refrigerator that are white, and sometimes the the second one you will think of more things, even though there's a constraint of right, there are more things in your refrigerator that uh that are white and other colors than are just white. But once you hear that word white, you think of I mean everyone listening, right? You think of oh eggs, milk, uh you know, um, which you might not have thought of when you're just thinking, I don't know, leftover pizza. So yeah, so this happens. Uh something I did with my students um with divergent thinking, uh another aspect of creativity is you think of as range, a range of ideas, or where if you think of uh divergent thinking as coming up with as many ideas as possible, you could come up with lots and lots of ideas that are really similar to each other, or you could come up with lots of ideas that are very different from each other. And the second one is a lot more creative, it has a lot more creative potential if you come up with uh very different ideas. So if name things that are in your refrigerator and you and you name like soda, milk, water, uh you name all liquids. Uh so those are all very similar. Name things in your refrigerator, and then you say, I don't know, ground beef and broccoli and milk and leftover pizza. So those are all different sorts of things. So you have a greater range. Um, so I like to give tests or activities to my students to help demonstrate to them how sometimes constraints can limit the way you think about things, or examples. So, oh, here's something. Students, when I give them creative assignments or I give them open ended open-ended assignments, they always want examples. They say, Can you can you give me an example of a student who got an A last year for this assignment? Uh, or if it's an essay, five-page essay. Can you can you give me an example from last year for the five-page essay? Or it'll be a project assignment, uh, like a typeface design. It's an assignment design in typeface. Uh, yeah, uh, can you show me like three typeface from last year? Like, no, that's like one of the first rules of design. You can't show so then I I demonstrate to them, I'll say things like, uh, and this isn't in zigzag, but it's in uh my latest book from 2025 called Learning to See. So I'd say list as many animals as you can think of, and I'll give you an example. Uh the example is cats, so now get started. So you know, they write down as many animals as they can. Uh and then I I say, well, how many of the animals on your list had legs and had four legs, and they all have legs? I say, How many of you said animals that don't have legs, like you know, snakes, the birds? Like, no, it's see, because I gave you that example of the cat, it constrained the way you were thinking. You didn't even know. You don't know it's constraining, but you can't avoid it. That's why I I don't give you examples because you can't help. It that's a bad kind of constraint, right? So you don't want the constraint that's gonna limit the range of possibilities.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

I love that example. I just saw on a discussion board for people who do discipline. Somebody posted, uh, can you give me some ideas for sanctions for marijuana? And I I think I followed your practice. I was just like, Well, what did you learn from the student? Like, why were they smoking? Were they self-medicating? Were they experimenting for the first time? Are they overusing? Do they have problems with peer pressure? Um the student will create the constraints for you with your conversation, and then I think the sanction idea will come on its own. I don't know if that's a good example or not. But the but as people were just throwing stuff out there, they're like$50 fine, hundred dollar fine. It just didn't it it didn't seem very creative compared to what the student might deliver to you on their own.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Oh, it's gotta I have so much respect for what you're doing, and I think a lot of you know the instructional staff, the professors, yeah, we don't we don't always see what's going on in your position, uh, but you have this perspective on the students as whole beings uh that you're developing, and sometimes we the instructors, we're just focused on the cognitive material. But you know, once they leave the classroom, they have all this other stuff going on. And I I think uh we the faculty we could learn a lot if we just spent more time with you and getting that perspective of the students as whole individuals.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

And I feel the same, like and we have so much to learn. Like you are the scholars, like we are the practitioners that are trying to take the hard work that you're doing and and make it live in other ways. I do wonder though, Keith, the the concerns about student mental health and when you were talking about um academic anxiety for students that just want linear memorizable facts and you're asking them to step out of their comfort zones. Are you seeing uh the the trend in your classrooms of students saying, I can't come to class because I just I'm too anxious, or maybe mental health stuff and I can't do your homework on time?

SPEAKER_02 41:15

Um No, I haven't seen exactly that, no. Um and I require attendance in my class because it's so hands-on participatory. I have a sort of studio pedagogy where there's a lot of peer interaction, feedback, and critique. So uh yeah, so attendance is required. I actually have the students sign a contract at the beginning of the semester saying I understand that attendance is required and I deduct points from their final end of semester grade for missed at missed classes uh beyond a certain number of you know that I allow three of two classes a week, I I give them three for any reason. So they all come. Um so no, I've never had a student contact me and say I'm too anxious to attend class. I haven't had that one yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if if it happens. I don't know if you've seen that happen all the time. Oh, that they can't come to class. Well, that student, because in the first class, oh, I just say this over and over. It's on my syllabus. I say it in the first class, you gotta come. Attendance is required, I'm deducting points from your final grade. If you miss class, I think they're just gonna drop my class. Uh that if it's that person, they're gonna drop my class. So I I want to make sure we have an understanding so that doesn't come up in week three.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

I uh deeply appreciated your integrity. When you recommended a book to me, you weren't just shilling your new book. Um, you you gave me one of your classics instead, but I did want to give you the opportunity to talk about your new book a little. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I'd love to know what it's about and what we'll learn.

SPEAKER_02 43:11

Oh, yes, uh, my latest book. It's from 2025, and it's called Learning to See Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools, and it's from MIT Press. I spent almost 15 years going to the top art and design schools around the United States. I went to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and these are leading artists and designers. I spent so much time doing this. I ended up talking to people in over 20 different disciplines of art and design painting, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, bookmaking. And what I wanted to get at was the underlying essence of visual creativity, visual art creativity. What is it that People do to create these amazing objects that they make and their professional practice. And I was able to get at that. First of all, they there is an underlying shared essence. There are things that they all do that are shared by painters and sculptors and graphic designers. And what they share is a certain way of working. It's a process and it's a practice. It's a way of engaging with materials in a in a dialogue so that it doesn't all come out of your head onto the canvas, but you are engaging in a dialogue with the paint and with the canvas so that the object talks back to you and the creative object emerges from the process. So that is improvisational, I guess you could say. You're improvising with the materials. And then these are all artists and designers who are teaching in the world's leading art and design schools. So these are BFA and MFA students. And this is why they were so articulate when I interviewed them. It's because they have to teach students how to create in this way, like they do. How do you teach someone to engage in a certain kind of process? How do you teach someone how to see the world in a certain way? But in particular, how do you teach someone how to see their own work while they're working? How do you teach someone to see how to think about their own practice while they're engaged in that practice? It's an embodied way of being in the world. It's yeah, it's very heady, it's almost spiritual, and you can't lecture at someone and give them a PowerPoint and say, here's how you you should be designing a poster, here's how you should be painting. So it's very much project-based and it's very constructive. And it's a form of personal transformation, is what I ended up discovering. It's not just about visual art creativity, it's about thinking and seeing and acting in the world. Oh, yeah, it's so powerful. I feel like I'm bragging about my book, but really I'm telling the stories of these amazing creators. So I'm bragging about them. They are they are incredible. So I've it's not an academic book. I don't have any citations in it. It's just me telling stories of artists and designers and how they create.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

I can't wait. I've heard that the book is a piece of art itself, that it's so beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

Um, thank you for for hearing that and saying that.

SPEAKER_03 46:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:44

Yeah, it's very nicely designed as an object. MIT Press did a great job. They're graphic designer. Uh it's printed in full color, it's filled with artworks by the artist and designer professors, and then the students, some of the work that they did. Uh I don't know. Do I have a copy over here? Oh, here uh for those people who are watching the video, and it's got there it is. Yeah, look at this cool cover, and it's got you know, this the names of all the universities. Oh, I didn't even mention uh 50 institutions, art and design schools. So, yes, I'm very proud of this book, uh, but mostly because of the artists and designers whose stories I'm telling. So I'm they are they are just amazing. I'm very fortunate that they were willing to be interviewed and let me go into their studio class that it's then observed them.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

I want a new career where I just follow you around. You went and studied Second City, you like the visual stuff. It's oh you're doing good in this world.

SPEAKER_02 48:01

And the weirdest thing is that I'm the in both of those cases, I was the first one, like at Chicago Improvisational Theater back in the early 1990s when I called up these improv theater companies, said, you know, I'd like to come set up my video camera and study your interactional dynamics that lead to the emergence of these improvisational theater performances. And no one had done that. They're like, oh, no one's done that before. Sure, come on in. I was no one has done this, really. That sounds fascinating. I can't believe no one's done it. So, and that was the 1990s. I was I was the first one, and then with these um artists and designers, I started interviewing them in 2010, and no one had done that. It's like and I'm so fascinated. Can't believe no one's and now it's 2025 and no one came along and did it in the meantime. So I um yes, I'm very fortunate, but at least uh I w I was the one who thought of it, I guess. So anyone else could have thought of it, but but at least you know, maybe uh I was maybe I'm just uh very nice at asking the people to agree to interviews, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

You are very nice. I was telling Kurt before you hopped on, I went to an improv class yesterday, and I told people like, I'm gonna meet Keith Sawyer, but I've I've determined if he's a big jerk, I'm still gonna love his books and I'm still gonna love his scholarship, but you're not a big jerk. You're you are kind and smart and generous. Yeah, I'm I'm glad that you are in higher education.

SPEAKER_02 49:48

It's a great industry to be in.

unknown 49:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 49:52

Oh, let's end on that. Can you say more about that? That there are folks that are stretched pretty thin, and morale is hard to find. Can you say something great about higher education?

SPEAKER_02 50:06

Oh, I'm not jaded. I've wanted to be a professor since about 10th grade, and the university life is for me. So I'm living the dream. Uh when I first spent time on a university campus, it was Randolph Macon Women's College in the summer of kidding. Yeah, the summer of 1976, I think it was. Uh and yep, beautiful campus. Um my parents are not academics, so uh and uh then I was very lucky to get into MIT, which I have to admit it's not a beautiful, charming campus, but but I love being a student in graduate school. Yeah, I just love everything about being a professor. I love teaching, I love research. For me, and I don't know if it's like this uh on your side of the campus, but for me it's about uh the life of the mind. Uh it's about ideas, it's about creating new knowledge and disseminating knowledge and preserving knowledge. So where the students come in is that uh they're you know, they're the next generation. If I just create new knowledge and it sits in the library, then what good is it? Uh you know, it's uh it has to be passed on.

SPEAKER_00 51:29

I have a theory. I'd love for it to be tested by a scholar. Every opportunity to engage with a student is a new creative opportunity, and I think those of us who find that joy each time and each new experience stay in higher education longer. There's kind of a revolving door of folks who come in and come out, but every student is a new student, every report is a new report. There's some new technology on our podcast folks who are listening. We would love to hear, and now you can not only just text us in the podcast notes, but you can um record a voicemail, and we would love to hear what creative ideas you are implementing or how you're using creativity in your work, because we would love to just spread the word. Um, because there are scholars like Dr. Sawyer that are giving us tools that we can use in our work every day. Keith, thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 52:34

Thank you. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 52:43

Ms. Behavior is written and produced by Colette Shaw and Kurt Doan. Theme music was written and performed by Kevin McLeod from NCompatech.com. You can contact Ms. Behavior at Ms. BehaviorCollege at gmail.com. That's msbehaviorcollege at gmail.com.