How might we tailor our own particular teaching environments – the spaces where we plan for courses and respond to student work, as well as the spaces where we meet with students for the shared formal time of class session meetings – for the behaviors we want to encourage? So, what if we – drawing on the findings from these experiments – see both order and disorder as functional – “particularly insofar as they could activate different psychological states and benefit different kinds of outcomes”? What if we look closely at the messy and tidy characteristics of our personal work spaces as well as the spaces we inhabit as teachers? Disorder can be noted as valuing ambiguity and freedom, for variation, deviations and boundary – even taboo – breaking. Order can be marked as a valuing,or expressing a preference for tradition and convention, for orderly patterns of morality and correctness. Our point of departure from prior work was to reason that order and disorder are common states of the environment that activate different mindsets, which in turn might benefit different outcomes.Īs the researchers note, personal and cultural dispositions – feelings and inferences about order/disorder – infuse our lives. Order and disorder might be functional, particularly insofar as they could activate different psychological states and benefit different kinds of outcomes. Via a Summer 2013 Psychological Science article, the three researchers share findings based on several laboratory experiments – conducted as part of a larger examination of the effects of office environments on employees’ preferences, choices, and behavior they report that work conducted in messy spaces might produce its own set of virtues. Working in a messy room might be similarly provoke a sustained sequence of generative writing across a word document, a set of post its, a folder stashing related articles and a white board mapping out ways the pieces fit to make an argument. Working in an tidy room might help researchers to map potentials for a mixed methods analysis and to compose a sharply edited abstract. In short, researchers hypothesized that messiness – like tidiness – might have its virtues as well. In their work researching impacts of order and disorder, University of Minnesota faculty Kathleen Vohs, Joe Redden and Ryan Rahinel report that “Order and disorder might be functional, particularly insofar as they could activate different psychological states and benefit different kinds of outcomes”. Vohs, Kathleen, Redden, Joseph, and Rahinel, Ryan, “Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity.” Psychological Science 24.9 (2013): 1860-1867. “It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity.” New York Times.
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