The Power of Ritual Learning: Cultivating Connection and Growth
In an era marked by uncertainty and rapid change, the concept of "ritual learning" offers a compelling framework for fostering connection, promoting well-being, and enhancing the learning experience. Ritual learning, at its core, involves intentionally incorporating structured activities, gestures, words, actions, or objects into educational settings to create a sense of belonging, purpose, and shared understanding. It recognizes the inherent human need for connection and structure, particularly during formative periods of life.
The Importance of Safe and Secure Learning Environments
Chy Sprauve reminds us that an effective classroom is one in which students feel secure. She suggests academics build a ‘ritual toolkit’. The eagerness of students to return to campus and salvage something of the experience they had known or expected highlights the significance of physical spaces in fostering learning and social connection. A campus-based education is about experiencing the world together at a highly formative point in our lives. The disruption of this safe space during periods of isolation, such as lockdowns, underscores the need to find alternative ways to cultivate belonging and interdependence among students and staff. Ritual learning provides a powerful means to address this need by creating a surrogate connected experience, whether online or in person.
Affinity Spaces: Where Learning and Belonging Intertwine
Affinity spaces accommodate social affiliation by being places where learning can happen and where acts of learning are acts of being productive together. Being productive together can be called collaboration, but the features of affinity spaces emphasise the value of the ‘being’. These spaces, characterized by shared interests and practices, offer a unique environment where individuals can connect, learn, and grow together. Gee notes, “In such [affinity] spaces, people who may share little, and even differ dramatically on other issues, affiliate around their common cause and the practices associated with espousing it via affinity spaces that have most or all of the previously described eleven features.” The emphasis on "being" highlights the importance of social and emotional connection in the learning process.
Ritual as a Framework for Enculturation and Identity Formation
Ritual is usually described in formal ways of being, rites, and ceremonies. It often has religious connotations. It describes a sense of acquiescence or willingness to silently consent to a system or to show respect for the procedures that define us. A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Committing to being a student is about making a commitment to an unknown culture and an immersion in an inherently alien, liminal and dynamic experience. For some of us our parents made this commitment before us, or our siblings, or others we know well. For many students these days, making this commitment is less well founded. Many students enter education on trust and with their own expectations which may be ill-conceived, for example being based on what they may have experienced in education previously. Making values, traditions, and ways of being explicit is the beginning of creating a ritual toolkit. Studios can be defined by their customs - rules that have to be learnt but are full of mystery and tradition; rules which may even be unspoken; rules that are learnt in the doing. Calling yourself an artist, an engineer, or a scientist is arguably the first step to acquiring identity and expertise.
Rituality and custom can provide a lens for interrogating what is already done, what mustn’t be lost, or what could be introduced from professional practice. Dannels considers academic ritual in the studio in terms of ‘tribes’; a term also used by Becher and Trowler to help differentiate disciplinary cultures, norms and territories. It often has religious connotations. It describes a sense of acquiescence or willingness to silently consent to a system or to show respect for the procedures that define us. A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Its interest for educators, I think, is in knowing the value of acquiescence and agency as being complementary and without contradiction. Ritual may be a powerful thing, not only in uncertain times, but more generally in what is essentially an uncertain and formative phase in our lives.
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Creating a Ritual Toolkit: Practical Strategies for Educators
Making values, traditions, and ways of being explicit is the beginning of creating a ritual toolkit. Doing so can be an act of co-creation. Working together on creating a set of ground rules, for example, is something I advocate. Discussing rituals, habits, practices can help us to create a safe space without unduly constraining and determining a student’s experience. Talking about tools, folklore, respect, and so forth, is a healthy way to immerse our students in our practices and scholarship and developing a strong sense of our ways of doing, seeing, being, and feeling.
Ritual-Work: Intentional Practices for Joy, Safety, and Calm
“Ritual-work is an intentional practice of something one builds into their routine to bring them feelings of joy, safety or calm. Indeed Sprauve suggests that we reconceptualise the classroom as a workshop.
Learning Ritual: A Simple Process
Learning a part in a Masonic ritual is a journey. It’s something that adds depth, meaning, and a new understanding to what you have already experienced in the Masonic Temple. This is the first time a book has been published that combines information on elements of performance and that of memorization, which of course are interlinked in every way. Andrew Skidmore demonstrates that learning ritual doesn't have to be a stressful and worrying undertaking.
Personal Learning Rituals: A Path to Continuous Growth
Ever since I committed to being an infinite learner, I've been executing on a daily one hour learning ritual. While it's easy to say that continuous learning is important to me, I knew that if I didn't proactively dedicate time in my day to it, it wouldn't become a habit. So I set aside an hour first thing in the morning with my morning cup of coffee (or two) to this ritual. Over time I've refined what I actually do with that hour to maximize active learning of relevant skills and drive as much efficiency as possible in the process. I ultimately settled on a learning lifecycle of discover, consume, share, discuss, and write.
Discovering Relevant Content: Strategies for Efficient Learning
The first thing I noticed in driving efficiency in my learning hour was separating the discovery of relevant content to consume from the actual consumption of that content. This was important for a few reasons. First, I was only going to spend an hour a day on this ritual, usually no more or no less. So there would always be more content than I could consume and needed to ensure I could efficiently catalog it independent of reading it. I also found that I was often discovering content outside of my hour ritual that I needed to catalog for consumption during the learning hour. I settled on using Pocket to store content I discovered. I installed the mobile app on my phone, which allowed me to easily save via the share action sheet any web page, blog, video, article, etc that I came across from any app I was in. I similarly installed the Pocket browser extension so I could quickly save content I discovered from my laptop. Instapaper is another great read-it-later service that provides similar functionality.
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Curating Content: Algorithmic and Human Approaches
The next important question became where do I discover the most relevant content for the topics I was interested in? The internet and social media in-particular provide an endless supply of content, but it took me awhile to develop a strategy that in-fact resulted in me efficiently discovering the most relevant content. While there is certainly great content on these sites, directly sifting through it was low quality (the majority of shared pop culture / news was not relevant to my learning goals) and distracting (photos of what my friends were up to was distracting from the task at hand). I instead learned to rely on both algorithmic and human curators of the topics I cared about. Techmeme provides the best algorithmic aggregator of the top headlines in the world of tech. With a dense but highly usable web interface, I could quickly scan headlines to stay abreast of what's going on in the tech world and drill-in to the topics that were most interesting. The beauty of Techmeme is they actually rewrite the headlines of articles to give you the full gist of the article without having to dig in. Given my main goal with Techmeme was staying informed with the industry I worked on, I could accomplish this mostly by reading headlines and only occasionally saving actual articles to Pocket when it was particularly relevant to my areas of interest. It effectively reads your feeds for you and bubbles up the most discussed content. The third great source of content for me has been hand-curated newsletters from various individuals and companies in the industry. I get them in my inbox and simply scan them for relevant content and add a subset to my Pocket.
Diverse Learning Resources: Blogs, Books, Products, and More
I find that in the ever-evolving world of product, design, and startups, the most relevant tactical content exists mostly in the form of online blogs, articles, and videos. However, I do use my learning hour as well to read books. For me I've found books the best way to truly internalize the importance of a concept through a long read. For example, Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month help me internalize how the cost of communication and alignment increases exponentially with team size. Brad Stone's Everything Store internalized the importance of a clear and sound strategy through the crystal clear strategy Jeff Bezos' executed at Amazon. helped me develop my deep understanding of how you build a creative organization through an inside look at Pixar's very own process. In addition to blogs, articles, videos, and books, the best way to learn about product management is to carefully study products themselves. So I keep a running list of products to deep-dive on. These might be competitor products that I come across. Or products that are buzzing in the industry. Or one's with new and novel design elements. Whenever someone mentions or I read about such a product, I add it to my to-do list and spend time dissecting them as part of my learning hour. Looking for an in-flow of products to analyze? Spend some time on Product Hunt and follow the collections of products most interesting and relevant to you.
The Consumption Phase: Deep Diving into Specific Topics
I spend the bulk of my hour in the consumption phase, reading, watching, and analyzing the various content I've stored in Pocket. When beginning the consumption phase, I don't simply read the newest or oldest content that's been saved to Pocket. Instead I scroll through Pocket and pick a topic I'm going to read about and consume all the content associated with that topic. This reduces context switching between numerous topics and really allows me to deep-dive on a given topic. One day it might be design-related content. Another day it might be machine-learning and AI. Or VR/AR. Or mobile development, product development process, or product leadership.
Sharing and Discussing: Solidifying Understanding
In the share phase I decide what subset of content I've read that resonates with me from the perspective of I agree with the advocated concepts, principles, tactics, etc. and am eager to implement them myself. This requires me to form a point-of-view on the content, which takes time to dissect it and not just quickly consume it. Since I do all my reading in the morning, it's not ideal to share it all at that time. Buffer instead shares content 3-times a day for me, once in the morning, once mid-day, and once in the evening. The part I do use social networks for in this process is engaging with my audiences on the content.
Writing: Crystallizing Concepts and Knowledge
The content I find most compelling that I learned the most from I try to write about to solidify the ideas for myself. This might take the form of jotting down some notes about the topic for later reference, for example. For the most important learnings, it usually turns into adding the concept to my list of potential blog posts to write. I include blog post writing in my learning hour because I believe writing about various topics is one of the best ways to crystallize concepts in your head, since it requires you to really understand them to be able to commit them to writing.
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