Research question
How do learners themselves characterise their experiences of 'Flow' and how can these findings inform new practises in teaching and learning?
I'll never know which way to flow
Set a course that I don't know
Norman Blake, Teenage Fanclub "Everything Flows"
Introduction
Let's start sometime in the early eighties. Inside St.Paul's Cathedral. You are ten and part of a choir of roughly two hundred choristers from all over the country singing Handel's Messiah. The unfathomable reverberation and harmonic connectivity of the music is beyond you but the feeling is not. Singing at your limit. The best of all the practises and late evenings after school in preparation. The occasion has lifted you and you are flowing with the music; the soprano line you have been given sings itself through you. You're part of a vast sonic ecosystem that functions perfectly but no more able to stand back and comprehend it than a single coral organism is able to conceive of the reef. The sheer elation of singing like this caught in a moment inside the three hundred year old history of the building is both ecstatic and transfiguring. You are in flow and will remember this feeling every time you play music or take up the challenge to be your very best at something that matters to you. Unknowingly you have set yourself on a path to being a musician as this (amongst others) is the path that will take to lead you back to these feelings, never articulated but never forgotten.
Flow. Being in the Zone. I could write similar accounts of a dozen experiences that have lead me to this point: on stage in the 1990's, preparing for my first NQT interview and micro-teach in a school in West London. As Stephen King has put it, 'Seeing the Line' when your sense of self disappears and pure engagement and autotelic joy become the axis for your moment to moment experiences and everything else drifts away. In a click or two from now watch the 'Snarky Puppy' video, that's what it can look and sound like. Nevertheless 'it' isn't one thing it is many. Everyone has their own experience of flow, some people seem to have a strong relationship with it others none at all.
When I began asking my students about their experiences of 'being in the zone', observing their workflow and gauging their performance, I began to wonder how and if, as educators, we could lead them to these 'peak experiences'? Indeed, for teachers of vocational subjects where 'being in the zone' would seem to be essential for developing a lasting professional commitment, it could be argued that we have a profound opportunity to make young people aware of this aspect of experience and make it central to our curriculum design. It has also been widely discussed by the growing 'Positive Psychology' movement as an integral component of mental wellbeing. In the current climate of spending cuts for mental health services and the perceived crisis in youth mental health, greater awareness of flow alongside other interventions such as mindfulness could provide young people with a tool for self-emancipation. But how? Flow, at first glance is a willow-the-whisp phenomena; hard to pin down, even more-so to recreate with any certainty. Which lead to my research for emCETT
Focusing on BTEC Media and Creative Arts students in a 16-19 college in the South West of England, my research aims to explore young peoples experiences of flow: do they ever experience it? What is like and what (if any) are the conditions in which it is most likely to thrive? I will then examine further whether or not they have flow-based experiences whilst at college and if so under what circumstances. From this research I intend to make recommendation based on the learner voice that could inform practices in teaching and learning.
Flow. Being in the Zone. I could write similar accounts of a dozen experiences that have lead me to this point: on stage in the 1990's, preparing for my first NQT interview and micro-teach in a school in West London. As Stephen King has put it, 'Seeing the Line' when your sense of self disappears and pure engagement and autotelic joy become the axis for your moment to moment experiences and everything else drifts away. In a click or two from now watch the 'Snarky Puppy' video, that's what it can look and sound like. Nevertheless 'it' isn't one thing it is many. Everyone has their own experience of flow, some people seem to have a strong relationship with it others none at all.
When I began asking my students about their experiences of 'being in the zone', observing their workflow and gauging their performance, I began to wonder how and if, as educators, we could lead them to these 'peak experiences'? Indeed, for teachers of vocational subjects where 'being in the zone' would seem to be essential for developing a lasting professional commitment, it could be argued that we have a profound opportunity to make young people aware of this aspect of experience and make it central to our curriculum design. It has also been widely discussed by the growing 'Positive Psychology' movement as an integral component of mental wellbeing. In the current climate of spending cuts for mental health services and the perceived crisis in youth mental health, greater awareness of flow alongside other interventions such as mindfulness could provide young people with a tool for self-emancipation. But how? Flow, at first glance is a willow-the-whisp phenomena; hard to pin down, even more-so to recreate with any certainty. Which lead to my research for emCETT
Focusing on BTEC Media and Creative Arts students in a 16-19 college in the South West of England, my research aims to explore young peoples experiences of flow: do they ever experience it? What is like and what (if any) are the conditions in which it is most likely to thrive? I will then examine further whether or not they have flow-based experiences whilst at college and if so under what circumstances. From this research I intend to make recommendation based on the learner voice that could inform practices in teaching and learning.