That katana called question
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Virgil.
“What creative technology do you recommend for me?” I often hear this in workshops and conferences. The first thing I answer is that technology is creative and implies technology, so “creative technology” could be considered a pleonasm.
Creativity is a process of identifying problems, devising possible solutions, and testing them to achieve an optimal result. Technology is knowledge applied to problem-solving, so… technology implies creativity, right?
I often disappoint people when they ask me about foolproof technology for organizations. I know they expect me to recommend a fabulous app that is effortless to use, costs no money, and magically helps us reduce our mundane frictions: but there is no life without friction. Friction allows us to get around, just for starters.
In the classroom (as in many other settings), the most potent technology I know of is language (langue, the system of signs we use to communicate and acquire during our socialization, according to the father of semiology, Ferdinand de Saussure), which is condensed into speech acts. More specifically, our most potent technological tool, as powerful as a katana, questions.
Asking questions allows us to delimit reality and organize it virtually. Facts are presented to us in a disorderly fashion, but when we ask questions, we order reality and prepare it:
How does the air fryer work?
You are one step away from getting the answer when you ask a question.
Not all questions are relevant. I often suggest to my undergraduate and graduate students that they pose their concerns with “how?” rather than “why?” because we cannot always know the true causes of things.
When I was a communications major and formulated the research question for my dissertation, I remember it was something like this:
What does the ecstatic journey of the Mexica dancers of Mexico City consist of?
It is a complicated question for several reasons. First, it assumes that all Mexica dancers perform an ecstatic journey, which implies a fallacy of consensus. And what does it consist of? In dances, songs, paraphernalia, beliefs, rituals?
Over the years, I understood that a more appropriate question would have been: How is the Mexica dance of Mexico City? To answer this question in the field of social communication knowledge, it would have been useful to approach the phenomenon with Harold Lasswell’s model:
I did not do that because I had yet to perfect my questioning technique, the road we walked was difficult, and I learned a lot. Thanks to my setbacks, it is clear to me the importance of accompanying students in the process of sculpting their questions so that from that amorphous block, flashing knowledge results.
A few years ago, Harvard professors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana founded the Right Question Institute to teach people how to bake cakes… wait, no. With the purpose that people in different contexts learn to ask the right questions (especially in the classroom!); for this goal, they created a technique called Question Formulation Technique (QFT) which they describe in the book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Questions (Harvard Education Press: 2011).
One of the substantive changes implied by this technique is that it shifts the focus of the questions from the teacher to the student. The students should ask as many questions as possible, blurring the role of the teacher-police officer who interrogates the class attendants.
When I started using QFT, the students reacted as if I was giving them a task that I was supposed to take on (asking questions), but once they learned the way, they became Kalashnikovs of questioning. Not all of their questions are pertinent, but all can serve mutatis mutandis to get closer to the truth.
The Institute I referred to earlier provides various materials translated into different languages to adapt the QFT in class; believe me, it is worth the effort.
You will say: “I don’t need to learn to ask questions. I am an adult”. If that is your conclusion, I prescribe intravenous and intramuscular QFT as a matter of urgency. We can ask powerful questions that help us find direction in an ocean of false information. Get yourself a good katana now!
