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Struggling to put words to an idea

This post on things that universities should teach students is a lovely read in its own right. However the final point really stood out to me:

That if they haven’t, at some point, found themselves struggling to put words to an idea that they feel strongly about but can’t explain adequately, then they’ve missed an opportunity to learn.

I’ve long been a little bit obsessed with this experience, without being able to explain why in a way I’m satisfied with (appropriately enough). I guess my hunch is that much of what we subsume under the term ‘creativity’ grows from, resides in or otherwise responds to this discursive gap: the (productive) distance between what we are trying to say and what we can say given the ideational resources available to us. In many cases I think people withdraw from this gap because it can be threatening or frustrating. Could we see an important goal of higher education as being to help people develop the capacity to live in the gap in a productive way? 

I wrote a paper about this (in relation to sexual identity rather than education) which I never tried to get published. I’m wondering if i should try and work it up into something publishable after all. 

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