Take a moment to think about all the things you know how to do well. Choose one that really matters to you. It can be part of what you do professionally, an aspect of your personal life…even a beloved hobby. Now, think about how you went from being a beginner to what we might call an accomplished performer in this area.
If you’re like most people, you think of that performance as part of who you are. Examples might include:
“I’m a history professor.”
“I’m a mother.”
“I’m a gardener.”
The performances that matter most to us are a big part of how we define and present ourselves—they’re a facet of our identity. Not just what we DO (the performance itself), but who are ARE.
In order to understand (and then possibly improve) these most important performances, we need to appreciate that there are multiple aspects to them, any one of which can be targeted for analysis OR improvement. These aspects of performance are:
- Identity
- Learning Skills
- Knowledge
- Context
- Personal Factors
- Fixed Factors
We’ll tackle learning skills, knowledge, context, and factors, in future posts, but for now, let’s just focus on identity. In order to do that in a meaningful way, we need to do more than talk in vague terms.
Let’s talk about the person who is a gardener.
To perform well as a gardener means identifying yourself AS a gardener. You take on the shared identity of “gardener”. You are not the only person engaging in gardening. Even if you don’t join Facebook or Reddit groups of gardeners, you share an identity with those who do. You share an identity with the gardeners who fought leaf blight and compost issues in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon 2500 years ago. You can visit Etsy or your local garden shop and buy coffee mugs with witty gardening-related observations on them. There is a gardenerhood (think non-gendered brotherhood) of which you are a part. That is your shared identity. It’s why you can say, “I’m a gardener” and have people understand and quite possibly share that they identify as gardeners in return.
In order to IMPROVE your performance as a gardener, you first have to care enough about gardening to be willing to commit to improving…it can’t be something you would easily walk away from. For the gardener, that’s kind of funny, right? You’re a gardener because it’s something already so important to you that it’s part of your identity. But step out of your gardening shoes for a moment and think about being a college student. What if you needed to improve at the performance of being a college student? You would first have to care enough about being in college and learning that it would be part of your identity. You would have to understand yourself in terms of someone who is a member of ‘the studenthood’ and part of something larger. It isn’t just something you’re doing for 4, 5, or x years, but part of who you are. When you share the identity of student, you care enough to commit to doing what you can to get better at it.
Maybe this is why large online courses have such high attrition rates. And why students at commuter colleges tend to struggle more than students living on campus. Students who juggle school and a job (and a family!) have the odds stacked against them. Each of these scenarios tends to weaken the strength of identity as a student, sometimes by forcing more critical identities (higher priorities) such as “parent”.
As educators (gardeners of students!), part of what we can do to help our students succeed is to help them assume the identity of student. Other aspects of their lives will push forward, but it is up to US to assert the importance of the identity of student. To do this, we can address them as students, steer them to student services or organizations, encourage them to work in groups of students by using collaborative or cooperative learning in our classrooms…anything that will help them discover, appreciate, and assume the identity of college student. When it has become part of how they see themselves and their own understanding of who they are, the chances are so much better that they’re in it for the long haul and will do the hard work of improving their performance as college students instead of just walking away.
