Implementing provocation

Provoke me if you want me to learn

Provocation is a key starting point of the Austrian Green Pedagogy model and can be difficult to understand. I have earlier explained why it is needed. In this post I aim to offer a few ideas about how to implement provocation.

1. Provocation is a starting point

Edward de Bono uses a tool — Po — as a way to help develop new ideas, like “what if Governments gave everyone a free car?”. That is obviously not a very sustainable suggestion, but part of the idea of provocations or Po, is to push you in an unexpected direction in order to uncover creative thinking. Therefore the provocation has to come at the beginning of a planned learning session.

What is Po?

According to Wikipedia:

Po is a word that precedes and signals a provocation. A provocation is an idea which moves thinking forward to a new place from where new ideas or solutions may be found. The term po was created by Edward de Bono as part of a lateral thinking technique to suggest forward movement, that is, making a statement and seeing where it leads to. It is an extraction from words such as hypothesis, suppose, possible and poetry, all of which indicate forward movement and contain the syllable “po.”

Having said that, provocations can also be useful about a third of the way into the topic in order to shake things up a bit, as shown in the Green Pedagogy diagram.

2. Provocation can be unrealistic

Ewan McIntosh, of the educational consultancy Notosh, explains it like this in his latest newsletter:

The free car idea is provocative, although not realistic, but from it we can develop elements of new ideas: insurance-free, no more thefts, safer vehicles, car loans… and we end up arriving at modern city car-shares for all. Innovative, and all from a provocation.

3. What does a provocation look like?

There is a wonderful blog post by Cristina Milos which lists 12 different types of provocation. They include:

Images
Role play
Dressing-up
Video
Quotes
Posters
Provocative statements
Artifacts
Music
Maps & statistics
Changing the setting

I might add art to the list and in that way include the installation pictured in the featured image of this post that is located in Venice. And Ewan McIntosh also suggests:

conflicting newspaper reports of the same issue
invited visitors
short stories

Neither Milos nor McIntosh are writing from a sustainability perspective so a useful exercise would be to create a 2-column table in which you try to add an example of each type of provocation that could be used in your curriculum to promote a sustainable mindset.

4. Possible reactions to a provocation

Tom Barrett gives a list of possible ways in which learners can be challenged by provocations:

Emotionally (This is challenging how I feel or what I have previously felt)
Understanding (This is challenging what I think I know and my assumptions)
Perception (This is challenging my point of view)
Ethically (This is challenging our shared beliefs)
Morally (This is challenging my own principles)
Action (This is challenging me to take action, to change or make a difference)

And McIntosh adds a few other emotions into the mix when he says:

The provocation comes at the beginning of learning, along with many other resources and content sources in an immersion that will contradict, delight, frustrate and generate a discord.

So when using provocations as part of learning activity plan it is important to think ahead to the possible reactions to the provocation and how you are going to follow up. You could try adding a third column to the table proposed in section 3 in which you anticipate the types of reactions you might provoke with your provocation.

5. Provocative ways into a topic

What would x do?

This is another suggestion from McIntosh in the newsletter I referred to earlier.

Teams explore a problem with the provocation of “what would x do?”, where x is replaced by a brand, company or organisation whose way of doing things might offer some insight. It’s a great tool that allows participants in a workshop to travel around a room, getting inspiration from how Spotify would meet their challenge one minute, or how Google might solve it from another.

I would add famous people to the list of possible candidates for a ‘What would x do?’ exercise.

And McIntosh goes on to not only make the link between provocation and a better planet but also to make the radical (to some) suggestion that students should be more involved in coming up with provocations.

Provocations feel like a more real-world scenario: conflicting and provocative opinions on several related (or apparently unrelated) subjects creating confusion and discord. And it’s these wicked problems, steeped in provocations, that we need more people to understand — the planet’s future depends on it.

The discord is what sets students off to ‘problem-find’ for themselves, seeking the genuine core of the many problems and many potentially ‘essential’ questions being presented. Having synthesised down to their own problem, or “how might we” statement, students will set out to ideate and prototype their solutions to the problem, or their way of showing off what they have learned. Often the ingredients used in the provocation will reappear in the prototypes.

By ensuring our students have the time and space to ask questions of their own, examining topics close to their heart, and provoking them to view and investigate these from a new or different angle, we can engage learners and allow them to lead the way forward.

6 The way forward

One question we got from our participants was ‘Isn’t it boring to start each lesson with a provocation?’

I hope that with this post I have demonstrated that there can be a great variety of provocations. It is also important to remember that it is unlikely that a class can fully tackle any given issue in one lesson period. Therefore this means that there will be several lesson periods needed to tackle each separate issue and therefore it will not be the case that each lesson starts with a provocation.

One good reason for using provocations is that the current state of the world IS in itself a provocation!