“… there is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to see the ways that you yourself have changed.” – Nelson Mandela
For my 10th birthday, I received a copy of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. It was the first ‘big kid’ book I’d been given, and I’ve since read it multiple times in the last 30 years. (I even recently shared it with my daughter, who’s 7, along with Lowry’s other young adult classic, Number the Stars). The novelist Vladimir Nabokov (most famous for Lolita) said that there is no reading, only re-reading. What he meant is that, upon first exposure, we’re still reading to find out what happens, which takes precedence over artistic appreciation. It’s only through coming back to texts over and over that we appreciate how the book ‘works.’
Within education, things look a little different. It is driven by the need to get on to the next thing: we have more content to cover, the next exam, or a new semester, with new courses. Who has time to look back when we have so much to do and so much to cover? Collectively, it keeps us moving from one initiative to another, new strategic plans, and new curricula without getting a sense of how to deepen our engagement, effectiveness, and impact before we need to move on. On an individual level, this often looked like turning in a (first) draft of a paper, getting it back (with feedback I had no opportunity to implement), and putting it ‘away’ (paper recycle bin).
In the first post for the CT&L Corner, I wrote about the work of an art historian who asked their students to sit with a work for an extended time, practicing the art of patience and allowing themselves to notice. In a similar vein, Joanna Ziegler asked her students to behold: to sit with the same work (in their campus museum) for an hour every week. In a student’s remembrance of this assignment cum ritual, they cited the initial eye rolling boredom of settling in but, soon enough, they pointed to details that had escaped them on previous viewings. As Nabokov said, as we process the initial detail, we can move on to that which had previously escaped our view.
In a rather extreme example (and in apparent contradiction to his usual practice of never recording the same piece twice), Glenn Gould revisited the work with which he is most associated, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, after over two decades, recording it first in 1955 and again in 1981 (combined, both records have sold well over a million copies). We don’t have 25 years for students to revisit their work, but even 2.5 weeks or months provides a space with new perspectives, new ideas, and new experiences to bring to bear on previous work. This idea of rereading, re-encountering, and relearning has played a role in my life as a pianist. I have a small repertoire of pieces that I return to over and over again, partly to have more immediate access to the joy of playing, but also for a deep affinity. I notice something new when I return to a piece after an extended time away.
Another of my favorite pianists, Arcadi Volodos (who doesn’t record nearly as much as I think he ought to), reflected on how this ‘living with the music’ is where the real learning starts to happen:
“Of course, I work for hours when I learn a new piece (finding the fingerings is my least favorite part!). But the real work begins on stage , because at home you can never really know if it works. After five months, the interpretation transforms and becomes much richer. I hate traveling, airports; the only thing that excites me about this job is seeing the evolution of the works and, as I said, being able to come back to them sometimes ten years later and say to myself: “Hey, you never noticed that detail, how is that possible!” “ Source article for Volodos quote
We need new knowledge, new perspectives (or, as Proust famously said, new eyes, to return to the familiar place and see afresh, whether it’s just a week of life away from the same artwork, or years away from the piece of music we practiced for hours. What is happening when we return to things we thought we had ‘learned’? Cognitively, the idea of spaced practice suggests that repeated exposure to and interaction with ideas helps us deepen our understanding. Is this just cognitive science trying to legitimize what artists have been talking about for years? Maybe.
Where do you have opportunities for intentional revisiting, and what value(s) do they serve?
- Can you have students return to previous work, from earlier in the semester? Can they see it differently? Would they do anything differently?
- How can we ask students to return to certain works or assignments on a regular basis?
- Is there an assignment that you would ask them to do at the beginning and at the end of the semester? (This could serve as a kind of pre-test and post-test for your assessment).
- Can we ask students to recall what they’re bringing into the class from last semester?