Laura

Stoughton: Educating for Complexity

One of my favorite videos to show to my psychology classes is one in which a color-blind man puts on a

special pair of glasses that allows him to see certain colors for the first time. The process of education, I

believe, is somewhat akin to putting on these glasses. Through education, one’s perspective becomes not

only broadened, but more nuanced; we come to both know more and know better. With this new ability to

see things in shades of grey instead of simply black or white, one is able to navigate a greater degree of

complexity.

It is my belief that an inability or unwillingness to grapple with complex and nuanced ideas is one of the

driving factors behind the increasing polarization that plagues our society. In my classroom, fighting this

trend begins with imploring students to “imagine others complexly”: a phrase novelist John Green has used

to describe the attempt to view others with the same lens of nuance and history through which we

interpret our own actions and beliefs. I stress the importance of imagining others complexly when I

introduce mental disorders in my psychology class. For example, I have my students use simulators that

mimic the auditory hallucinations of someone with schizophrenia to help them see why these people may

talk to themselves or have trouble focusing instead of just writing them off as “crazy.” A class project

actually inspired one pair of students to start a Taft chapter of the mental health awareness club called

Active Minds (the club has continued even after its founders graduated).

The empathy that can be nurtured through training oneself to imagine others complexly extends far

beyond mental health issues. Students in my biology class work with authentic data to explore the genetics

and evolution of skin color to better understand our visible differences. During the intelligence and testing

unit in my psychology class, my students identify unsettling trends in the previous year’s national AP exam

performance broken down by exam, race/ethnicity, and gender. We then brainstorm what might account

for these correlations besides innate differences across social groups.

 Laura Stoughton: Educating for Complexity

The ability to interpret such complex data sets is invaluable at a time when “we are drowning in

information, while starving for wisdom,” to quote biologist EO Wilson.1 In such a climate, my job as a

teacher must transcend the role of mere purveyor of facts. Like Wilson, I believe that “the world henceforth

will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think

critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” So I have made it my personal mission to instill in

students the curiosity to seek out or generate new knowledge and the literacy and thinking skills to

interpret and use that knowledge wisely. I teach my students how to look at things with a healthy dose of

skepticism: how to interpret data and evaluate evidence, how to critique and improve an experimental

design, how to weigh the merits of alternative explanations, and how to recognize when their cognitive and

emotional biases are influencing their ability to think rationally. I aim to cultivate in my students an

insatiable inquisitiveness about the world that will follow them long after their formal education. When

students have a question that may be a bit tangential to the material, they can walk over to the “I Wonder”

Box, write their question on one of the blank notecards inside, and pin it up on the bulletin board. When

the time is right, I will surprise them by taking their notecard down, answering their question, and

validating their curiosity.

Finally, I try to teach my students not just how to handle complex ideas, but also how to distill those

ideas down and communicate them in a way that is still honest and accurate, but simple and clear enough

that others can understand them as well. For example, my students have collaborated with The Franklin

Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia, to craft a proposal for a museum exhibit about how we sense

and perceive the world. This required them to think about the material in an entirely different way in order

to turn psychological jargon into an engaging exhibit that would reach visitors of all ages and backgrounds.

To create an environment in which effective learning and teaching can take place, I attend to the

physical space, the classroom community and culture, and the sense that the class is a safe place to make

mistakes. As an educator, I strive to think simultaneously like an expert, drawing on both content and

1
Wilson, E.O. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York: Knopf
 Laura Stoughton: Educating for Complexity

pedagogical knowledge, and a like novice, anticipating misconceptions and potential pitfalls. The

complexity of this task, coupled with an awareness from my cognitive science background that our

intuitions are often wrong, leads me to adopt an evidence-based approach to teaching. My master’s thesis

and my experience as a research scientist have both reinforced the mindset that I must be engaged in

iterative redesign of my approach in light of empirical evidence and personal experience. So although I have

a very clear vision of the type of classroom I would like to establish as a teacher, just how to bring that

vision about is an area where I am eternally the learner.