3.2 Discussion

At the very end of the first ICE book is a section called “Sharing ICE With Learners.” In that section, a story about a broken toaster is used to concretize Ideas, Connections, and Extensions as a developmental process of increasingly sophisticated and complex ways of knowing. Learning on this trajectory evolves from factual comprehension of fundamental elements to describing relationships among elements and sketching patterns of cause and effect. Finally, learners are able to extrapolate their learning to new scenarios and innovations. 

In my post-secondary teaching practice, where students are adult learners and where self-reflexivity about how one learns is a central goal, this is the step that always comes first. So, on the second day of a new course, after we’ve discussed the syllabus and covered all the administrative course details, I share ICE with learners. I agree with the original storyteller of the broken toaster tale that one of the beauties of ICE is that it reveals a clear road map for each stage of learning, but at the same time the map does not predetermine the outcome of the journey. Not every student will be able to accomplish every step. Perhaps not yet. But it is important that each traveller has a map. And so, I have adopted and adapted the story of the broken toaster. Over the years, I have become oddly infamous in our unit as a devoted lover of broken toasters. It is now a cultivated part of my professor persona. 

I tell the broken toaster story as a kind of fable with three parts. “Once upon a time, there was a broken toaster…” I tell them that a group of students encounters the toaster and they do an Ideas-based analysis. The group examines the toaster and identifies the particular part that is broken. They point and say “See, this is the bit that doesn’t work.” Then the second group does a Connections-based analysis. This group builds on the work of the first group. They take that information and upon further examining the toaster they are able to describe how this broken part is no longer connected to some other part and they know why the toaster doesn’t work. Finally, a third group approaches the toaster, and they engage in an Extensions-level analysis: they note the broken part; they understand and explain why the toaster doesn’t toast, and they fix the broken toaster. This is the punchline. Perfectly sound as a narrative structure, but actually not that funny, I admit.

After the story, I facilitate an application exercise. Students work in pairs or small groups to apply the ICE model to a series of subject-related prompts. The assignment asks learners to make a list of tasks they might undertake or a typology of research questions they might ask to elicit Ideas-, Connections-, or Extensions-based insights given a particular topic or data set. For example, in an arts management class, one of the prompts is “audiences, spectators, consumers of art experiences.” In response to this prompt students might say that an Ideas-level task involves identifying audience members according to demographic features. And so, as part of processing the data from an audience survey, they might determine how many attendees fall into particular age or income brackets. Or they could ask about previous arts-going experiences. Or they could sort them by height or shoe colour. There are nearly infinite Ideas that could be generated to describe this phenomenon. At this step, it becomes apparent to my learners that the data gathering and sorting at the Ideas-level establishes critical parameters for the subsequent questions you can ask. The Connections-level task then needs to elaborate on the fundamental elements of the Ideas outputs. At this step, students might propose to correlate age against the number of arts events attended each year. Here they can see that by combining two Ideas elements, Connections are formed and the insights become more complex and meaningful. They might ask, do older people go to more arts events than younger people? Is there a prime age where arts attendance is maximized? Finally, they apply Extensions-type thinking to ask a new question. As incipient arts-administrators, they are invited to use the patterns revealed by Connections-type tasks to think about what might be done to either exploit or reshape these patterns. So, if younger people attend significantly fewer arts events than older people, what might be done to increase their attendance? Or, adding another correlative Connection for increased complexity, if older people have higher income levels, how can fundraising initiatives and patronage incentives be tailored to their preferences and interests? 

Other authentic real-world prompts for this class included “architecture or geographical spaces of art institutions,” “the staff of an arts organization” and “sources of revenue for arts organizations.” In a dramatic literature class, the prompts might be “female characters” or “staging acts of violence” or “endings.” This is a very simple exercise, and the students are developing prospective questions in advance of working with actual data, but the effect is to get them thinking about how Ideas are the bricks to build Connections which in turn provide the structures to build Extensions. The journey from I to C to E is not just one of climbing higher – each level actually evolves directly out of insights gained in the previous frame of learning.