You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Having booked the trip last fall, my wife and I had been looking forward to our biking/hiking tour of the west coast New Zealand’s south island for months.
It didn’t happen. Hundred-year rains[1]wiped out a key bridge connecting the early part of our planned trek to the rest and our tour leaders, (Jan and Lauren), were forced into calling an audible, creating an itinerary around the Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail, which highlights the south island’s major lakes.
It was amazing. Great weather, breathtaking scenery, and all while barely seeing another soul who wasn’t on the same tour while we were riding. If this is the “alternate” tour thrown together as a last minute improvisation, I can’t imagine how incredible the more commonly trod path must be.
Or maybe the more common path isn’t any more incredible. Maybe it’s just as good, or more accurately, simply different. Prior to the trip I was thinking that this would be my one lifetime bite at New Zealand. The distance, the expense, the endless list of other places I’d like to visit while I’m still capable had me thinking that if I was going to experience New Zealand, this was my shot.
After the trip, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to return to New Zealand, to see more of the country and add to experiences and context I absorbed on my first go ‘round. I’m hungry for more, and will act affirmatively to make it happen, even at the inevitable expense of seeing something else.
Towards the end of the tour, I started to see some connections to teaching. One of the tensions I think lots of us experience in planning a course is the feeling that this may be the only exposure students have to our particular subject. If we only have students for a semester, we want to make sure they at least see the highlights, don’t we? How can we say a student has studied British Literature if they don’t read Shakespeare?
How could someone say they’ve toured New Zealand if they haven’t seen Milford Sound, one of the planet’s greatest natural wonders, as I have not?
The “one-bite” mentality often drives considerations of content, where we choose what we think students should have read in order to check the boxes of expectations often set by what exactly? Tradition? (Or more likely, folklore.) This is different than what students should read to maximize their learning in a particular place and time. Jan and Lauren could’ve likely cobbled some west coast sights together, but as Kiwis, experts in the region and very experienced tour leaders, they knew that we were looking at days of inclement weather even if we could get to the originally planned sights. They knew that to do the expected simply because it was expected was going to result in a diminished experience.
In teaching first-year writing, the one-bite at the content mentality resulted in me assigning research papers year after year, even though the end result was inevitably disappointing to all involved and often seemed to trigger a devolution in the student progress I’d previously perceived.
I’ll admit, for a couple of days on the tour I was wondering what I was missing. This was not the plan we’d so eagerly signed up for. Sure, it was great, but was there something even better just out of reach?
But over time, I forgot there ever was a plan, becoming wholly absorbed in the experience at hand. Who needs the west coast when you have the Alps 2 Ocean trail? The experiences themselves overwhelmed any disappointment I might’ve had about what I was missing because the truth was, I wasn’t missing anything.[2]
I wasn’t missing anything because our trip leaders were focused not on the content of the trip, but the moment-to-moment and day-to-day experiences of the travelers. Each day had a schedule, of course, but there were times we might linger in a particular spot because an organic interest had arisen.[3]While we needed to wind up in certain places at certain times, the schedule by itself would not be the driving force, and at any time, we may deviate in order to maximize the pleasure of those experiences.[4]
Our leaders were focused on making sure we were going to be thoroughly introduced to New Zealand – its culture, its language[5], even its music – including a stunning surprise private performance of the haka on our next to last day, which also included a lesson in the dance’s meaning and importance. They planned as though this was going to be our only bite at New Zealand.
But by planning around experiences, rather than content, they upped the odds that we will return to New Zealand someday by instilling a hunger to know more.[6] Content is important, but New Zealand has a lifetime of content one could experience. There was no going wrong with content. This is often true in our courses. How many of you have made a preliminary reading list for a course that would span years, not a semester? (My hand is raised.)
If teaching a course requires us to adopt a one-bite mentality, it has me thinking that we should plan our one-bite around inducing students to want to take another bite after the course is over when the instructor isn’t around commanding that the students chew a sufficient number of times before they swallow.
This is even more true for writing courses where we know that the learning often works on a delayed fuse as a writer’s skills and abilities take time to catch up to their knowledge of what makes for effective communication. If I want students to become better writers, I need to arm them not just with knowledge, but the desire to continue to develop their writing practices.[7]
Turns out you can have a worthwhile New Zealand touring experience without seeing the most popular sights, just like you can have a worthwhile British Literature course without teaching Shakespeare. By focusing on immersion through experiences – as opposed to exposure to content – we up the odds that students will come back to sample the morsels we’ll never have enough time to cover.
--
Thanks to Paula Patch for filling in during my absence. If you missed her posts from the last two weeks. Check out the archives.
[1]Amazing how often these hundred-year weather events seem to be happening these days.
[2]Having Kiwi guides was a significant advantage. Lauren had traveled the entire country (and even the wider world) and Jan had lived in the areas we were trekking through for years. This allowed us to have a lunch at the hobby farm of a fellow VBT tour leader, and we even ran into one of Jan’s neighbors on one of our rides. The passion for the places makes a difference in how those places are introduced to the newcomer. The same holds true in teaching, IMO.
[3]One memorable moment was a trek through tall grass on sheep trails in search of a cave that our leader, Jan, had seen like 20 years before where generations of Kiwis had etched their names. After a couple of false starts and passing through a short stretch of prickly bush, we found it.
[4]The result was we were likely the first and possibly only VBT New Zealand tour to experience this itinerary and see these places. How cool is that?
[5]Look up “rattle your dags” to understand how this phrase translates to “shake a leg,”
[6]Have I been googling “How do I emigrate to New Zealand?” since I got home? Maybe.
[7]Not coincidentally, these are the principles I used in designing the experiences in The Writer’s Practice.
