The first baobab grew next to a small lake. Taller and taller it grew until it started noticing the other trees. Some were tall and slender, some had brightly coloured flowers and other others had large leaves. Then one day it saw a reflection of itself in the lake which shocked it to its root hairs: There in the mirror of the lake it saw a huge fat trunk covered in bark that looked like the wrinkled hide of an old elephant; small, tiny leaves and pale, creamy flowers.

Very upset, the baobab complained bitterly to the Creator. ‘Why did you make me so ugly?’ it wanted to know. ‘Why couldn’t you make me elegant like the palm tree with its straight and slender trunk? Why did you have to make me so big and fat?’ the baobab protested. ‘Look at the masses of bright and beautiful flowers of the flame tree! What about me? Why couldn’t you give me flowers like that?’

On and on the baobab went, wailing and bemoaning the bad deal it had been given. When it spotted the fruit on the fig trees, its indignation knew no bounds.

God was becoming more and more exasperated with the wailing and complaining of the baobab until eventually, determined to silence the baobab forever, he came down, yanked it out of the earth and replanted it upside down. From that day on the baobab could no longer see its reflection or complain. Since then, it has been working in silence, paying off its ancient transgression by being the most useful and helpful tree around.

Wanneer je als docent in het hoger onderwijs aan de slag gaat en probeert mee te stappen in de gang van zaken kan je overweldigd raken door de hoeveelheid regels, protocollen, procedures en kaders die wat je doet in de klas beïnvloeden. 

But not only these institutional and practical constraints affect how we engage with our students, also the mental models, institute culture and histories and existing patterns of collaboration, of type of teacher-student relations and dominating ways of framing the craft of teaching and designing education can severely limit the amount and quality of possibilities available and imaginable for us. I’ve seen how a respected colleague who won teacher of the year awards in my university and who had an unique and powerful way of supporting students who struggled with learning statistics had his chalk board taken away just because a new policy dictated that there be no more of these from now on. The students set up a petition but to no avail. These seem to be the powers that be at times.

If we take some time we could come up with dozens of these examples. Examples in which baobab trees were severely trimmed and cut back. These stories can make us empathise and reach deep into the 'absordent hairs of our roots' and respond passionately by defying external constraints and firing up our imagination to create new ways of learning support for our students. We want to do good. However static a tree is, it can provide others with a lot of value. Baobab trees can store huge amounts of water in its trunk, provide shade, bear fruits that are said to taste like sorbet and even be a source of fiber, dye and fuels. So even though trees are vulnerable to clipping and pruning, might have to endure extended periods of drought or might find themselves growing in a field that attracts less and less other organisms, there is a resilience innate to them that might enable them to keep on doing good even when the odds are all stacked against them.

Now let’s approach these tightly constrained situations from the four principles of human-centered, forward failing, rapid reframing and visual thinking. Where do they ache to the core and what types of design questions do they invite to relieve this heartache?

In systems where efficiency, status and power prevail it seems to be no surprise that curiosity and empathic attention for the humans inhabiting those systems can easily fall of the cart. Having talked to many teachers over the last 10 years, some say that this can even affect the way they treat there students and it pains them to realise this. Fortunately, stories about wonderful student learning experiences, moments of gratitude after they graduated and insights into what makes them tick are invaluable sources to those whose profession entails being depraved of personal attention a lot of times. If they need it at all…

In class the human at the center of attention can easily be the teacher himself. It is barely unthinkable that this happens at the cost of those that need more engaging forms of learning instead of trying to do it right in the eyes of someone that perpetually towers over them or is mostly passionate about hearing themselves talk at others.

Traditional classroom learning mainly fits the aim to reduce mistakes in student’s ways of thinking and performing. I’m not saying this has no place in education, because there are ample professions or situations we could train students for that require them to be very skilled and mindful in order to prevent tragic or grave errors. But even within these constraints there are more engaging and playful ways to reach our goals and even surpass them! For example: by flipping the roles every now and then. So let’s formulate some design questions that can be helpful for every teacher interested in flipping the roles in a traditional classroom situation:

• How might I facilitate students with overseeing the performance of a small in classroom task performed by other students?
• How might I use what students are passionate about themselves to enrich the topic I want to teach them during class?
• How might can I provide students with a situation in which they teach me something new about the learning content?
• How might I get students to design a stepwise approach for themselves or others to learning the content?
• How might I trigger students to point out flaws and errors in my reasoning or performance related to the learning content?

Flipping the classroom roles is an example of rapid reframing of a problem, going ahead to experiment with it is a form of forward failing and we could apply visual thinking by coming up with sketched out ideas that we could explore further. Literally sketching or visualising the classroom setting can free up possibilities. When asking my student assistants to design a workshop for first year students I also gave them Lego to play around with possibilities and constraints for the classroom set-up and how this would affect or generate types of activities.

So basically, even within very constrained situations exploring from the four principles can be of value. Just allow me to formulate a few more design questions that respectively flow from the principles rapid reframing, failing forward and visual thinking:

• How might I approach the class room situation from a radical different angle/use metaphors in order to find different ways of engaging students?
• How might I create a set-up for a new learning activity in classroom that I can run through with some peers or students beforehand?
• How might I engage students in a more visual way with the learning content or let them create visuals for the learning content?

As you can see with the last question, the lines between designing for performance and designing as performance can begin to blur. But when designing is seen as a form of learning, organising and presenting content we might just have reframed the problem in order to discover even more possibilities.

Luckily for us, there is an abundance of new learning strategies for constrained teaching situations already. Teachers experimenting with online quizzes like Kahoot! for example do so in ways that still meet institutional constraints like efficiency. One of my favourites is an example of a teacher that is pushing the lecture format to its maximum by staging an interactive multidisciplinary debate between immunologists and microbiologists in the form of a live simulation of an attack by a virus on the human immune system. The microphone is literally flying across the room for students to generate input from both perspectives as they are being engaged to connect knowledge from the two - traditionally siloed - disciplines. The lecture hall becomes an interactive theater. And anyone not acknowledging the power and inventiveness of its design could either be to engrained by the institutional constraints or is part of a culture or has a mindset that shuns these forms of creative lecturing.

Rapid reframing might not be an attractive principle for all in the end. Especially when deeply engrained patterns of thinking as an expert in a certain field prohibit one to think outside of the box. The same goes for forward failing which in a culture that clings so much to status (as a professor or a lecturer) might come across as riskful, inefficient and not serious. Even the omnipresence and sheer output of texts as meaningful artefacts in universities can hamper visual thinking although it is hard not to admit that one needs visual representation in at least the form of graphs and figures to make sense of big amounts of data. And aren’t experiments that fail the fire that keeps curiosity going in science? And who can resist a powerful metaphor or story that sheds a new or a truer light on our experiences as teachers?

So, even in situations where the constraints seem to strain the generation of new possibilities there is a lot to be won when applying the four principles. In doing so we free up alternative learning processes. We might have to allow some messiness but we can keep things small scale or create a sketch or prototype first. Would we really opt for our practice to not be explorative and filled with curiosity? Designing for learning values sociality and collaboration because it recognises these qualities as inherent to a rich learning process. But it also acknowledges resilience and inventiveness as central to moving teaching forward in tightly constrained systems like higher education can be. And the more you engage your students with learning as designing, the more they also will be able to develop these qualities and learn from these values as well. But you don’t have to. Not straightaway in any case. But I invite you to take another step forward and generate a different form of value for your students than you as a baobab tree have been providing up until now.