Last post I promised to explain paper bag thinking but then I thought why not show you. Imagine I handed you a paper bag filled with marshmallows, balloon, pipe cleaners, marbles, sparkly stars, tiny wooden blocks, and coloured wooden sticks, a wooden dolly peg, a plastic egg and a random selection of letters. From here I tell you to make something. No other instructions, no other rules. How would you react?

Paper Bag Challenge contents

I assume you would react much like my advertising students, like the proverbial stunned mullets! Buoyed by my earlier success with finger-painting, I arrived in the lecture in the third week of semester with a box of brown paper bags each containing the above items. From here I asked my students to come up in pairs to take a paper bag and ‘do something creative’ with the contents and bring the finished product products to class in week seven. They were also given a list of words: frivolous, synergy, relationship, intense, solution, proportion, signs, and possibility.

I told them that the highest grade they could get for this assignment was zero —that no grade would be given. Failure to create something however, would cause them to lose participation marks. And of course, since I am in a school environment, I had to apply three simple rules: no injuries, no fires and no arrests.

My purpose was to encourage students to see things differently and to be active while doing it.  And eureka, it worked!

In week seven, success! 100% of the assignments were delivered on time. (That has to be a world first, especially considering that there was no grade). The paper bag contents had morphed into a children’s novel, several stop motion movies, animations, a meme, a TV style ad, a sculpture, a mobile, a logo and even a traveling toy cowboy. amongst other things.

Here is some of my students work.

I asked the students “What was your initial reaction to the challenge?’ About 30% used words such as ‘confused,’ ‘overwhelmed,’ ‘dismissive’ or ‘shocked.’ Just over 60% indicated that they were intrigued and only 10% did not answer. After completing the challenge, 10% indicated that they were nervous, 27% felt inspired and 63% said that they had fun and felt that they were successful.

When I asked how many of them had thought of using the paper bag, shock rippled through the class. Some thought it a trick question. I replied that it wasn’t, and that it was simply a question to find how many of them had even thought of using the paper bag. Only a couple of teams said they had considered it, with only one team actually using the paper bag. Many of them said that it never occurred to them, they saw it as ‘just a bag’.

I explained to them that this is known as “functional fixedness”, a term coined by psychologist Karl Duncker in 1945, who defined this as being a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.” Basically, when we see items in only one way, it severely limits our abilities to use ‘what we have already got’ to solve a problem. People exhibiting functional fixedness simply do not see beyond what they perceive as being the sole use or value of everyday items.

In response to other questions, students agreed that they were fully aware of the ‘no rules’ rule (apart from the no injuries, fires or arrests rule). So imagine their surprise when I asked if any of them had elected to team up with others, swap items or ask for any more pieces.  Overwhelmingly, they said ‘no’ to each of these because they ‘didn’t think they could.’

I watched with some wry amusement as expressions of shock, bafflement and disbelief rippled across my students’ faces as they realised how they had limited themselves and hadn’t even known it until now.

When they realised how they had limited themselves, they began to actively look for opportunities rather than see obstacles. This recognition of functional fixedness and self-imposed constraints changed the way many of them approached problem solving over subsequent weeks. And it didn’t end there. A couple of semesters later a postgrad student said to me that this exercise and his realisations have forever changed the way he sees a problem. He said that now, whenever he is confronted with a challenge, he asks himself ‘where is the paper bag in all this?’ Since that occasion, a number of other former students who completed the paper bag challenge have bashfully admitted how the paper bag challenge revolutionised their thought processes.

Feedback from this exercise highlighted several key issues.

• Culture of fear of failure
• Anxiety over ambiguity of task
• Experiencing Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of grief
• Anxiety at not having criteria/checklist
• Shame in ‘play’
• Fear of peer judgment
• Fixed mindsets
• Bell curve paranoia
• Quantified Best of the Best Mindset
• Trust
  • Trust in the teacher, trust in the environment, trust in their peers and trust in themselves and in their abilities.

These observations are nothing new. Students face a future of uncertainty and complexity, where they are expected to have multiple careers in a lifetime, be more mobile than their predecessors and be technologically, socially, culturally and individually adaptive.  Put simply, in order to be prepared for this future, students need to be comfortable with ambiguity and risk-taking. As educators, we need therefore to create multiple contexts and opportunities in which students can learn to trust and develop their creative capacities.

The first step is we need to remove fear from the equation. And to remove fear we must encourage students to learn again how to play. To do this we must build trust.

Next week I will tell you how I got my students to lose their “deer in the headlights” mentality by convincing them it is ok for them to play.

If curious, check out these other fascinating talks and readings:

Tim Brown: Tales of Creativity and Play TedX Talk

Duncker. (1945) On problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 58:5 (Whole No 270).