There are many layers of differences between humans. On a personal level, I prefer to socialise with people who share the same values, and who perceive the world in a similar way. Professionally, too many similarities may lead to stagnation rather than development. With only visionaries in a team, there is an obvious risk that the work is never done. In a learning context, I have preached the benefits of differences for years.
A late evening, six years ago, I sat at home trying to create an illustrative picture of the pedagogic core of the three international and interdisciplinary master programmes at Graduate school, where I was director of studies. I gave up, went into my daughter Tyra’s room and asked for help. She gladly abandoned her school assignment, and some thirty minutes later, she came to me with a drawing that expressed exactly what I wanted to say (see the result above).
There are similarities between what ideally happens in the ONL course and what we strived to achieve at Graduate School: Bring a bunch of diverse people together (different roots), provide a room with structure and trust (the flowerbed), present a complicated problem, let there be discussion and challenges and humour, guide the process, and new knowledge will grow. The flowers will still be different, and also (hopefully) more beautiful and sturdier than they would have become on their own.
Communicating and building relations with people that appear to be different from yourself may lead to new insights, if you keep your eyes, ears and heart wide open. Communicating with people who think in a different direction or at another pace can also be painful if you have a specific task to perform together and if there are divergent ideas on how to do it. Tuckman (1965) identified four faces before a group becomes a team: forming, storming, norming, and performing. We had no storms in PBL07, but it might have happened.
In a teaching context, it can be tough to handle differences, and to convince students that they have something to learn from their peers. Often it implies that it takes more time and efforts to finish an assignment, and time is as precious for students as it is for teachers.
Amanda in our group taught us – the non-native speakers – a new word in English: Inculcation, which is “the process of fixing beliefs or ideas in someone’s mind, especially by repeating them often” (definition by Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus). I did not have a word for it by then, but we did our best to inculcate the positive potential of differences to the students at Graduate School. The programmes were, and still are, international and interdisciplinary, dealing with global issues, so the potential of diversity could appear to be evident. But it was not for all. We – the staff – believed in it, hence the repetition.
But what is an adequate level of differences, where it becomes a stimulus for learning rather than an obstacle? A common ground is helpful to start with; all participants in ONL have experience of teaching in higher education, all work in an academic environment, and all want to learn more about online learning. All students at Graduate School had a bachelor in a Social Science subject and all of them wanted to change the world for the better (or at least obtain a master degree).
Then comes the differences, which could create enough resistance to open up your mind and make you think in another direction. Or just give you a wider perspective. Age, values, nationality, ethnicity, culture, personality, gender, education, language, social background, and experiences. There are many ways to be different.
We had an interesting post-course-pre-holiday-conversation in our PBL-group, which stayed in my mind for several days. Someone mentioned Covid, and the strange fact that people do not talk or even look at each other when they meet, as they used to. I, and someone else, protested when it was stated that people in Sweden never say hello to strangers. People in Swedish cities may not, but on the countryside they do. Another one mentioned the different ways to greet people in English-speaking countries, and how awkward it could be to not knowing the codes when it is taken for granted that you do.
I grew up in a non-academic environment and it took me many years to understand the culture, codes and norms within the university. I am not sure I have grasped it yet. But I was an outsider in secondary high school as well, being the only one coming from a farmer background, so it has never been a big issue.
During my fieldwork in Thailand as a PhD candidate in the 1990s I could feel a closer connection to the farmers I interviewed in the villages, than to the academics I talked to at the universities in Bangkok. There was one particular occasion, in a remote village in Chiang Mai, where the setting was ludicrously similar to my childhood farm in Southern Sweden. The cows, the kittens, the mix of curiosity and down-to-earth scepticism that gleamed from my interviewees. I suddenly felt very much at home.
We, as humans, are quick to assume differences where they don´t exist and we could be equally quick to assume a common understanding that is not there. The essence of all this, I think, is that learning comes from openness and communication.
I have learned a lot from ONL (in addition to the meaning of inculcation) and consider myself to be equally different as before, but on a new level. The warm atmosphere in PBL07 has made me more confident and at ease when it comes to teamwork. Together we have played and tried out a number of clever digital tools. It is great also that the course leaders have forced us to write blogs. I doubt I will ever get quicker as a writer, but ONL has given me the chance to practice this format before I go public in my professional LU-blog.
References
The flowerbed picture ended up here: Tojo, Naoko and Bernadette Kiss (eds.) 2017, Diversity in Education, Crossing Cultural, Disciplinary and Professional Divides. https://www.iiiee.lu.se/education/diversity-in-education
Tuckman, Bruce W (1965). “Developmental sequence in small groups”. Psychological Bulletin. 63 (6): 384-99 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development
