Inspiration by Design
(adapted from “Approaching the Ineffable: Flow, Sublimity, and Student
Learning”)
Donna Heiland
NEASC Annual Meeting and Conference
December 7, 2011
Sublime Learning
• A process that leads students to “aha
moments”
• Four building blocks of my argument:
o Theories of the sublime
o Flow experience
o What kind of learning do such experiences make
possible?
o Can we assess this learning?
Building Block #1
The Sublime
• Burke and Kant
• Transcendent or horrifying
• Collapses boundaries between oneself
and the world outside oneself
• Oneness
Building Block #2
“Flow”
“ …we might even feel that we have stepped out of the
boundaries of the ego and have become part, at
least temporarily, of a larger entity. The musician
feels at one with the harmony of the cosmos, the
athlete moves at one with the team, the reader of a
novel lives for a few hours in a different reality.”
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of
Discovery and Invention (1996; NY: Harper, 1997), 112-113
Characteristics of “flow”
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“There are clear goals every step of the way.”
“There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.”
“There is a balance between challenges and skills.”
“Action and awareness are merged.”
“Distractions are excluded from consciousness.”
“There is no worry of failure.”
“Self-consciousness disappears.”
“The sense of time becomes distorted.”
“The activity becomes autotelic.”
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi Creativity : Flow and the Psychology
of Discovery and Invention (1996; NY: Harper, 1997), 111-113
Building Block #3
What Kind of Learning is Sublime Learning?
• Affective engagement
• Cognitive achievement
• The two are so imbricated in each other as to be
inextricable: “the joy of discovery, of solving a
problem …” (Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi , Creativity : Flow and the
Psychology of Discovery and Invention , 1997, 122)
Building Block #4
How can we assess sublime learning?
• Need for cognition scale
(John T. Cacioppo, & Richard E, Petty, “The Need for Cognition,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 1982, 42: 1, 116-131; John T. Cacioppo,
Richard E. Petty & Chuan Feng Kao, “The Efficient Assessment of Need for
Cognition,” Journal of Personality Assessment, 1984, 43: 3, 306-307)
• Formulate new questions
• Is there a metacognitive dimension to this
learning?
What kind of assessment are we doing?
• Direct assessment
• Intense engagement generates substantive
insight and becomes a form of learning
Sublime Learning and Creativity
• Traditional view of individual creativity as a process
involving preparation, incubation, insight (“aha”
moments), evaluation, elaboration (Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi ,
Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention [1996; NY:
Harper, 1997] 79-80)
• Csikszentmihalyi views creativity as a process that takes
place within a system (Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of
Discovery and Invention [1996; NY: Harper, 1997] 23-50)
• In what system does sublime learning take place and how
do we assess the effectiveness of the system in creating
such experiences?