By Heather Fitzgerald
Folks who attended the start-of-term meeting for faculty and academic staff will have heard VP Academic and Provost Diyan Achjadi’s opening remarks.
In that address, Diyan referenced a report from MIT on AI in education, which they used to foreground the importance of the work we do at ECU with hands-on, practice-based learning.
But there was a short phrase in Diyan’s remarks that caught my attention: that of the “productive struggle” that is at the core of learning.
In the MIT report, the authors argue that for students, “the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle, and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma but themselves: their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight, and judgment.”
The challenge for educators, when “helpful” chatbots are embedded in every system, is persuading students of the value, the necessity, of struggle. Learning and growth just can’t happen without encountering some resistance, as anyone who has ever tried to build a fitness or gym routine knows all too well. Babies and small children understand this instinctively, where every new development – learning to roll over, crawl or walk – is preceded by weeks or months of sometimes frustrating struggle. But somewhere along the way, we lose that understanding that struggle is necessary for learning.
We too often see struggle as a sign of weakness or failure: if we struggle at math or languages, we are “bad” at those things; if we struggle to synthesize new information quickly, we are “slow.” Struggle is, for many of us, just a short hop away from failure … and failure is, well, not something we aspire to. This tension around struggle is now complicated by the innumerable AI tools which promise to take away struggle (and the bad feelings that attach to it) in many tasks. Our students may not be aware of what they lose when they take the path of least resistance.
So what can we, as instructors, do to help students normalize struggle as a valuable and necessary part of learning?
- We can tell them why struggle matters: research shows that learning is better, more lasting, and more highly valued if it’s slower and more frustrating – in other words, if it involves more struggle (Epstein 89).
- We can help them build community and connections in the classroom which has two benefits: 1) students are more likely to share their struggles in a group with high levels of trust (which in turn normalizes struggle), and 2) students are more likely to persevere in the face of difficulty if they perceive themselves to be part of a group engaged in the struggle (Paul 222). I think Sara Osenton’s Noisy Messy Reading workshops are a great example of how we can make visible the struggle of learning — in this case reading a long or difficult text — via a collaborative group activity.
- We can normalize the emotions around struggle (anxiety, frustration, despair) and help students work through them. See the previous post about Emotions and Learning for ideas.
- We can encourage students to predict, guess and make mistakes: research unequivocally shows that struggling to generate an answer on your own, even if it’s wrong, will enhance subsequent learning, and in fact, the more wrong the answer, the better the long-term learning (Epstein 85-6)! Even testing can be a valuable tool because the struggle to retrieve information primes the brain for future learning.
- We can help students develop what psychologist Angela Duckworth calls “grit” — choosing to pursue long-term goals with passion and perseverance, even when they encounter obstacles or experience setbacks.
If we can do these things, maybe we can convince our students to forgo the “path of least resistance” that AI tools promise and instead build their learning muscle through progessive, productive challenge. It won’t be an easy sell, but I think we are up for the struggle!
Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner/Simon & Schuster.
Epstein, D. J. (2019). Range: why generalists triumph in a specialized world. New York, Riverhead Books.
Paul, A. M. (2021). The extended mind: the power of thinking outside the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.