Divergence

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This is a response to a question/prompt from a classmate:

“After all, do we not all end up doing things that we have an aptitude for anyway? This would simply put us on that same road earlier and allow us to spend more time harnessing our skills and knowledge of it. Maybe, we don’t all need to be jack-of-all trades, but rather masters of one.” (D.P.)

My response:

I’ve just finished watching the movie series Divergent and Insurgent, based on the books by Veronica Roth, set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic version of Chicago. The premise is similar to your suggestion here, about being sorted and selected at a specific age, to fit into a societal role. While individuals can break from their parental ‘factions’, so there is some element of personal choice, it reminds me of the sorting hats in Harry Potter. Some type of intelligence or attributes are used to select the route you would take into society. No career counselling needed, just a hat or a stone to make your choice. Once in their selected ‘factions’, in the case of the heroine in this story, she’s tested to be ‘divergent’ and thus deemed factionless. Her ability to think divergently (creatively) puts her above or different than others – I’d say she’s more like an individual with a growth mindset.

In terms of mindset, even Carol Dweck (2015) is addressing the myth that growth mindset is not all about effort, as many people believe. Students’ belief that they can improve their intellectual ability is due to a repertoire of strategies to apply when they get stuck. So it’s not just accepting your ‘faction’ in life, but being able to think divergently about tasks and learning, that will lead to success. This is not just based on praise, such as ‘good job at being a Dauntless’, but getting feedback on the skills and qualifications for being a member of the dauntless faction – shooting, train hopping, climbing, etc.

There is more to being intelligent, but knowing that there isn’t a fixed capacity, gives us all hope in our own futures, and the futures of our children.

A second response with similar threads:

I remember going through workshops in the late 1990’s where this shift in belief systems happened in force. Educators were confronted with their beliefs about whether all children could learn. To that point, exceptional learners were tested, found wanting, and relegated to segregated classes to ‘learn what they could’. Since I was a special education teacher at the time, this didn’t fit with my internal beliefs about the value and ability within each child. I used the starfish story as my mantra – I made a difference to this one child at this one time. At that time, it was common practice for teachers to send children out of their classrooms because they ‘couldn’t learn’. I don’t think we can go back to that time, but I know there are still many places in the world where this fixed view of student’s intellectual abilities is still prevalent.

You ask a good question “do we not all end up doing things that we have an aptitude for anyway?” I had to search a bit to define aptitude and then compare it to competence and intelligence, since I’m not sure I’ve got them clear in my mind. So, if aptitude is a defined ability to do something, competence is the ability to do something effectively or successfully, and intelligence is the ability to develop knowledge about something, then I’m content in my believe that each of these are malleable, since my own aptitudes have shifted and transformed over the years. When I first started teaching, I never guessed I’d have an aptitude for teaching in higher ed, yet here I am. I never dreamed I’d have an aptitude for using computers, but sort of found that along the way. My aptitude for problem solving should have been evident, but wouldn’t have been something that would’ve stood out on the ‘tests’. In terms of my own children, I wouldn’t want them to be slotted into a job for life based on one or two aptitudes at a specific moment in time, knowing that they had potential to do so much more. And, with a rapidly changing world of work (Doxtdator, 2017), the jobs they may yet create should come from newly acquired aptitudes and competencies.

Would you agree? What assumptions about aptitude and intelligence truly give us hope or quash our dreams?

References

Doxtdator, B. (2017, July 8). A field guide to jobs that don’t exist yet. [weblog]. Retrieved from https://www.longviewoneducation.org/field-guide-jobs-dont-exist-yet/

Dweck, C. (2015). Carol Dweck revisits the ‘growth mindset’. Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.stem.org.uk/system/files/community-resources/2016/06/DweckEducationWeek.pdf

Divergent trilogy. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved 2018, November 21 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_trilogy