Whitney Clay: Welcome to the West Valley College TEACH Center podcast.
Michelle Francis: TEACH stands for training educators advocating change.
Whitney Clay: I'm Whitney Clay, Instructional designer.
Michelle Francis And I'm Michelle Francis, Professional Development Coordinator and Instructor in Child Studies.
Whitney Clay: At the TEACH Center, we support faculty as they cultivate excellence in teaching and learning and welcome their students with engaging pedagogies.
Michelle Francis: In this podcast, we discuss hot topics in teaching and learning. We interview educators about what they are doing in their fields, and we talk to learners about what inspires them.
Whitney Clay: Welcome to the first in our series of four episodes about belonging and connection with our guest. Motivation and performance researcher Dr. Omid Fotuhi. In this episode, as we explore the concept of imagination, you will learn about mindsets and discover a simple but very important truth about the optimal psychological state for learning.
Whitney Clay: Today I want to welcome to the TEACH Center podcast Dr. Omid Fotuhi. Dr. Fotuhi is a motivation and performance researcher with more than 15 years of experience in training students, athletes, and leaders to optimize their performance. His training is in psychology from the University of Waterloo and he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University. Currently, he holds an affiliation with the University of Pittsburgh and serves as Director of Learning Innovation at WGU Labs. Welcome to the program, Dr. Fotuhi.
Omid Fotuhi: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Whitney Clay: So for the structure of our interview today, I have some questions that are kind of designed to take our conversation in a couple of different directions. For each question I have for you, I'm going to start off with a quote and then I'm going to ask you a follow up question. And I wanted to note that listeners can find out more information about Dr. Fotuhi and also the source of each of these quotes on our podcast website. Our first question focuses on student imagination and play. In Alison James and Stephen Brookfield’s book, Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers, they write, “Imagination is the key to human progress. Why would we strive for something better or different if we didn't have the imagination to conceive of a more beautiful way of living?” They go on to say that imagination is also often playful and elusive. And so here's my question for you. What does it take for entering college students to feel safe or comfortable engaging their imagination and their playfulness? And in my experience, imagination and play are enjoyable, but they can be quite vulnerable, which is a challenging situation for students to be in.
Omid Fotuhi: Yeah, I think there's actually a fair bit to unpack with that question and that quote, which I really appreciate. Some of the great privileges that I've had was to share space with some of the pioneer researchers, including Dr. Carol Dweck, who sort of pioneered the concept of mindset. As we all know, a mindset is this construct or this concept about how you perceive the nature of certain qualities and skills and abilities as either being internal and fixed or something that's malleable and can be developed over time. Now, certainly we've come a long way as a society when it comes to mindsets of intelligence, but we're also just scratching the surface of really where mindsets manifest in productive or unproductive ways. There's some really great work from some of our colleagues who are trying to see how mindsets actually play out in different domains. So, for instance, as you think about the notion of passion or interest, research by Dr. Paul O'Keefe actually shows a very similar pattern to what mindsets of intelligence have long conveyed, which is that some people, as they think about the nature of passion or interest, believe that passion or interest is this fixed thing that one day you sort of turn the corner and find that beaming later you are completely, entirely developed, almost waiting for your arrival like this perfect match that just happens instantaneously upon connection. And if you have that belief that that's what passion is and that's what it ought to feel like, then it's upon acquaintance of passion. You see all of the things you've been yearning for and looking for. And that can be both positive, if it happens that way, but potentially limiting if it doesn't happen that way. The alternative is that passion can be seen as something that requires a lot of filtering out of the things that you over time realize you're not as interested in. You're not as sort of energized by and realizing that it's not a singular thing that will be with you for the rest of your life. So it's a lot more of a malleable concept that if you have that perception, keeps you more open to opportunities and allows you to sort of journey into those new areas where you may not have if you believe that passion is this thing that you're supposed to like, feel instantaneously, and this is an all consuming, ever powerful experience. I think there's also other domains that either research has or has not tapped into or started to articulate. And I think this notion of imagination and creativity happens to be one of those topics as well. So as we think about the perceptions of creativity, I would wager that there probably is a similar fixed term growth mindset about the nature of creativity, whether you believe that you either are or are not creative, or if you believe that creativity is something that you can develop over time. And similarly, the same can be said about imagination. What is the notion of imagination to you? What do you think it ought to feel like? And where do you think the source of imagination comes from? I again would wager that if we were to survey a large group of individuals, that they would either fall into the perception that imagination is something that some people have more propensity to have, and in greater intensity and greater frequency, versus others who maybe believe that imagination is one of those things that we're all sort of pre equipped with. And but the further you develop it, the better you get at it. And I think that's what resonated with me about your quotes is that phrase, the imagination is often playful and elusive, and I think there's a bit of a trap with that, with that sort of implicit portrayal of imagination that is this thing that you're supposed to find and connect with and that’s already well developed, as opposed to the sort of struggling and wrestling of developing that experience and that skill set. So that's the first thing I'll say about that question, which again, is very thought provoking. The second thing that I'll say about it, which I hope is more in line with where you were going with the question is when it comes to the optimal psychological states of learning and performance, this is actually a question I get all the time from students, from teachers. They ask me, you know, being an expert researcher in psychology and performance, what is the optimal psychological state for maximum performance? And it's not what you might expect. It's not one of sort of deep curiosity or high alertness or a grittiness or being in the state of flow. What I often end up responding to this question is that the optimal psychological state of learning and performance is one in which you are psychologically okay. And what I mean by that is that the noise and the chatter and the weight is down, allowing you to really immerse yourself and engage with the content in a way that feels light, that the heavy blankets have been taken off. And I think, again, with any desirable domain, we tend to put these heavy blankets in terms of the expectations of what it ought to feel like or who ought to be able to demonstrate these things. And if you think of it from a mechanism perspective, there’s great work from a number of researchers, especially on stereotype threat, that show that when you're worried about the way that you might be perceived, there is this sort of conflicting internal chatter that is, on the one hand, trying to focus on the task at hand. And on the other hand, combating the negative thoughts that are sort of running in your mind, suggesting that, you know, I don't know why you're trying to do this particular task when most people don't think you can do it, all the while trying to fight off these thoughts, saying, be quiet, I'm just trying to focus. But you can't sort of deny the fact that there's chatter happening, and all the while what's really necessary is just a deep focus on what you're doing. And so I think when it comes to imagination, I think when it comes to optimal learning, understanding where the source of the weight comes from, imagination in particular is one in which you actually want to quiet the sort of, the rational system of our minds that's trying to be logical and trying to contextualize everything. And you want the free flowing of connection to happen relatively easily. The other thing that's important to note is and then this is sort of relevant to the work I'm doing more recently around the concept of innovation. And as you can imagine, innovation and imagination and creativity. There's concepts that are pretty tightly connected in people's minds when you think of innovation and even imagination at its core, it's the ability to connect the dots that don't necessarily and and immediately seem like they're aligned. It's the possibility of taking a step back, getting a full view of all of the data and all of the possibilities, and then being able to very sort of freely see, could this be a connection or not? Could that be a connection or not? And experimenting with various possibilities. And so I think innovation and imagination, and really sort of learning at its core, requires that you quiet the noise and allow yourself to experiment with potentially uncomfortable notions of what could feel connected and possible and what doesn't. So great question. A lot to unpack. Some of the thoughts that I have, related to that particular concept of imagination.
Whitney Clay: Next, join us for episode two as the conversation with Dr. Fotuhi about imagination and play continues and goes on to explore the concept of belonging.