The Power of Uncertainty

I’m piloting a very student-driven fiction class this semester that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

Confusion, it would seem, is the seat of creativity.

Or at least it’s the barrier that pushes us to find better solutions and tell better stories.

This makes sense, in a way. If we understand our situation, well, then there is no reason to think much about it. We slide the understood into our vast store of things we feel like we have a handle on and only pull it back out when something challenges that sense of certainty. For example, consider the last time you talked yourself through tying your shoe or getting dressed in the morning.

I may be indecisive regarding which shirt to wear, but unless my fingers have lost feeling, I rarely have to coach myself on buttoning up the one I choose.

This may seem obvious, but what was not, at least to me, was that it might increase my students’ productive work as collaborative writers of fiction if I built some necessary confusion into my new class. But that’s what research seems to indicate.

One study, done of information networks and collaborative work, indicates that while collaborative groups need access to information with as few barriers as possible, the creative process is actually improved by being slowed down and that impediment can be engineered into the system from the outset.

Put another way, choosing to make the creative process less efficient can and often does produce better solutions to problems because it keeps us from choosing the most obvious and least creative response to the situation at hand.

Seems like a pretty solid argument for the principle that invention truly is the mother of necessity.

And if the early returns are any indication, this has proven true in the case of my class. In most cases, my students have navigated the confusion well given the combination of the freedom the class gives them and the challenges it presents directly to that very freedom. I can’t wait to see how they remake the class I spent the last year making.