Curiosity and careers: How wonder guides life paths

Adam: Where are we getting the most value out of curiosity? What's a career path for your students or for students here at the university or the high school students for that matter, where they're going to need that curiosity to be successful-

Jen: Everywhere

Adam: That was the right answer.

Jen: With technology evolving, with the evolution of AI, with things like that, people being curious, people being creative, these other pieces of humanity are the things that are going to be really important. I think that curiosity and creativity are two things that are going to be paramount in individuals wanting to succeed in the future.

Adam: Are people born curious or is curiosity something that can be nurtured over time? Welcome to The Search Bar. I'm your host, Adam Sparkes, and on today's episode we're discussing the curious case of curiosity with Jen Weibel, professor of teacher and special education at Central Michigan University. Well, Jen, I am curious to talk to you today about this subject. We're going to talk about curiosity, and I want to know what you're curious about.

Jen: 7 million things.

Adam: 70 million things.

Jen: Yes.

Are most people curious?

Adam: Do you feel like you have-are most people curious?

Jen: I think that, studies show when kids are little, they're very, very curious, and then as we age, we learn stuff, and that kind of eliminates some of the curiosity. But to kind of quote Neil deGrasse Tyson “scientists are the people that kept the childlike curiosity.” That was very paraphrased. But I think that people as they grow older, can lose a little bit of their curiosity just because you know more things that you know, you know, you know, and so you're not as curious, but I think it's really an important piece of humanity that's necessary.

Adam: I guess. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to be curious? If you had to put a definition on it?

Jen: So the way that I like to define curiosity with my research and with my personal use is looking at is both embracing and stretching. So embracing is kind of looking at things that you want to know, and then stretching is looking for new experiences or new information. Why do you ride a roller coaster? Because you curious.

Adam: I mean, I don't anymore.

Jen: Oh, I'm sad for you.

Adam: I used to do it,

Jen: But you want that new experience. You want to see what it's like to drop down over. You want to see what it's like to ride the tallest one, the fastest one. You're curious about that. One of the ways that I think we often look at curiosity though is we say to kids even, so do you want to know why the sky's blue? And they're like, no. And you're like, oh, they're not a curious person. Well, maybe they're super curious, but they already know that answer. So looking at curiosity I think has to be way broader than answering a set of questions on your interests or things like that. But I think it drives all learning. It drives, kind of human existence.

Adam: Let's start with those kids you were talking about because I mean, it seems, at least for me, at an eighth grade level, it seems pretty logical that as things become more routine, we may lose curiosity because that's sort of the doldrum of adult life a little bit before that, when you're developing, what are some of the signs of curiosity or highly curious children, what do you see in research that indicates that?

Jen: A lot of things in research point to students-or kids. I'm sorry. Just talking about kids in general, asking questions, being able to fully immerse their selves in an experience, touching, testing out sensory exploration of things, seeking new experiences, being willing to test things out multiple times, looking for different answers. Those are things that they really note. Nothing that's really like fireworks going off or anything like that, but the student or the child that's asking why continuously, why not settling for, because they're probably really curious about a lot of things and not just wanting to be annoying. The asking questions, the observations, and then linking questions to that is really indicative of students being really curious.

Adam: Where are we getting the most value out of curiosity, what's a career path for your students or for students here at the university or the high school students for that matter where they're going to need that curiosity to be successful?

Jen: Everywhere.

Adam: That was the right answer. There was a correct answer for that.

Jen: Well, I mean with technology evolving, with the evolution of AI, with things like that, people being curious, people being creative, these not maybe necessarily the mathematical skills or the coding skills and things like that, but these other pieces of humanity are the things that are going to be really important. So I think that curiosity and creativity are two things that are going to be paramount in individuals wanting to succeed in the future.

Adam: What are kind of the things that help and hurt curiosity for people that are learning to be curious and to kind of mobilize that curiosity? I want my student, I want my child to maintain their curiosity going into adulthood. What helps them? What hurts them?

Jen: New experiences, time to explore those new experiences, talking to people, personal connections, different sensory experiences, exposure to new things. If you don't know anything exists, if I didn't know that Petoskey stones existed, I wouldn't be curious about what makes them or anything like that. I don't even know that they're there. But once I know that they're there, once I've been exposed to it, then I am fascinated and I want to know why there are different colors, why they sometimes are light or dark, why you get pink ones, why they're bigger or smaller, how the structures came to be, deep diving into that, and then how do you find them? How do you polish them? How do you display them? My kids joke that my house is landscaped and not decorated because I have so many rocks places. I didn't even know I liked rocks until I got to Michigan and started finding these things on the beaches. And then I was fascinated. Most people have stories about kids that are fascinated by dinosaurs.

Adam: Yeah.

Jen: Think of the third grader that knows every single type of dinosaur, how to say the name properly, and something about them, They're curious, they want to know, and they dive deep into it and they have this intense learning experience because they want to know more. That's a really huge sign of curiosity. And then it can lead to interest and then it can lead to careers and it can lead to other things, or it can just make you a really well-rounded human being that's interesting,

Adam: Right? Well, that's part of what we do in higher ed too. I think. When I talk about the value of education with people who work in education, I think one of the commonalities that we tend to fall on is it's learning how to be educated. It's learning for me because I agree with what earlier in the conversation you said, sometimes you lose a little curiosity as you get older because I called it the doldrums. You didn't, but you get into the doldrums of certain adult routines. But knowing what you don't know and knowing how to learn how to shed a little light on the part that you don't know, I think is something that you do learn if you're getting a good education going forward. So sometimes that education isn't just about pouring information you remember into you, it's giving you the skillset to remain curious. In this case, I think it's an appropriate word for it, right? I mean.

Jen: Yeah, I would say you never pour information in, you just provide ways for people to socially construct what they want to know.

Adam: Yes.

Jen: You can't pour it in because it just goes right out on the floor. But I think that that's one of the most important skills we can give young kids through adults is how to learn, how to find the information that they want to do, how to navigate the information system. Exponentially, we have so much more information available to us quickly than whenever even we were young, not so many years ago. And in the next 25 years, the information that people have access to is just going to explode. There's more people here, there's more people producing it, there's more access to it. So being able to really navigate that, find out what you want to know is going to be an important skill. I think that's going to be one of the skill sets that people need as a go forward with jobs and things like that. But I see curiosity just embedded as an innate human quality that people need more of.

Adam: Do you think that people give up a curiosity, do you think, talking about that doldrum a little bit, is there a way to restart that learning process for yourself? If I'm a middle-aged person and I'm sort of like, man, I've been coming into this job and looking at Aaron Mills for the last so many years, I, there's no surprises left here for me. What do I do to break myself out of that other than sabotaging Aaron and getting him fired?

Jen: I would say read something new. Go somewhere new. Try something new, take a risk. What really surprises me in talking to adults that I've met over the past couple of years is the number of people that are afraid to try something new and try something new by themselves.

Adam: Give me an example. What's something new you'd want them to try?

Jen: Go downtown and go to a paint and sip or an art class or go to a poetry reading or go hiking somewhere you haven't been before or listen to a podcast. And a lot of that I think comes down, the doldrums you're talking about, I think comes down to routine and being comfortable, but it also comes and being in your comfortable place. But it also comes down to being afraid of taking risks. And it also comes down to time. I mean, leveraging your time to be able to explore new things is difficult, especially when you're younger and if you have children and you have big job responsibilities and that kind of thing. And I think that's what puts humans into the doldrums you're talking about. Besides the fact that you already know a lot of things and you don't know maybe as many things that you want to learn about.

Adam: It's harder to stumble on things when you reach a certain life experience or certain responsibility matrix, right? You're sort of like, I'm always managing these things and I've already done all of these things. So you have to seek it out a little bit more. I mean, it is easier to be surprised by information or experiences when you're younger. It just is, right? Yeah.

Jen: New hobby, I kind of laugh because the whole time I've been getting older, about every three, four years, I would have this new intense hobby where it wasn't enough to just knit a scarf. I had to go and get yarn and knit 17 scarves of different kinds with different stitches and different needles. And then I'd be like, okay, I've got six scarves half done and I'm not done, but I'm done with this and I'm moving on. And then I would can vegetables for three or four years. And I think that that's one of the things I consider myself a curious person. And I think I've had these experiences my whole life where maybe I was in a classroom and teaching the same kind of things and had kids and really, really busy, but I would have these really intense hobbies that I wanted to learn about and cycle through. And eventually I maybe come back to them and finish up the projects. But I mean, for the most part it was just this really deep learning experience. And I have to say, I love my job, now. Most projects that you do have a three or four year kind of span, and so I just pick something else I want to know about. And so every couple years I'm starting a new project and I'm learning deeply about these new things, and that kind of really fits well with my mental set of really needing these new experiences in order to have a kind of happy, joyful, fulfilled life. And that ties into, I do a lot of research that ties science curiosity into the stuff that I do into different teaching ways and students processes in the classroom, how students learn to code and create things and making experiences. A lot of these areas I see curiosity as a way to kind of foster the desire. And I think it ties into career paths then too, because more curious people, research shows more curious people do tend to end up a lot of times in science or STEM fields, which is something we need as a nation to be able to have our students have all careers available to them and not just limited them to ones that are easy or ones that they have a liking to when they're younger. This exploration allows you to fit into the job force. Now people are not taking one job and being there 30 years that they're taking a job and moving to the next job and things like that. Where I think you have to keep learning and keeping learning ties into being curious.

How do you measure curiosity in a classroom or workspace?

Adam: Through your research, how are you measuring that curiosity and innovation that you see in a classroom or in a workspace?

Jen: There's a lot of ways people look at curiosity. Most of it has been either self-report scales or it's been people observing and saying “These behaviors are curious.” So the problem with a lot of the scales that have been developed in the past are they're very topic-specific. Do you want to know more about why the sky is blue? Why the butterflies fly? If you already know that you're not curious about it.

Adam: Right.

Jen: A colleague and I, Heather Zimmerman and I, developed a scale for science curiosity that looks at not only science practices, like how you do things, do you enjoy mixing things together, do you like solving problems, do you like challenges, things like that. And also with the embracing and stretching coming from Kashdan’s work, what else if they like to take risks, if they like finding out information, if you hear a word you don't know, do you look it up? Those kind of things. We developed a 12-question scale and it's been used all over the world, translated into a bunch of languages that we feel gives you a fairly good measure on how students see themselves as being curious. What we're actually currently doing now though is I'm looking at the behaviors that other people have measured or observed, and then looking at scale scores and trying to map those out to see really what it looks like in a classroom. That can really depend on the student, whether they're really extroverted or not, how they kind of go about doing things. But for example, one of the things that I talked about was earlier when we started talking about curiosity was looking for multiple answers. So for example, if a student's in a classroom, and I'm having them do a challenge for how do you create something that'll throw a ping pong ball the furthest, do they get the answer and move on or do they get the answer and then they try to get better? Do they try to refine it? Do they look at different materials, things like that to kind of look and see how that aligns with their score. And what we're finding, just kind of preliminary stuff, is that the students that do these more iterations that want to use different materials, swap out materials that ask more questions, do you tend to score higher on the curiosity scale. So that in itself doesn't really matter. What we want to look at is change. So what we want to look at really is how do you create experiences that foster this? And that goes back to something we talked about earlier as well, like giving them open-ended experiences, new experiences, allowing them to personalize their learning in certain ways. All of those kind of things can lead to gains in curiosity. So one of the projects I was involved with from a few years ago had students using personal DNA that we did not have access to. Their parents had access to it, but looking at that and trying to learn genetics based on that, personalizing it to themselves, and then creating research projects that were either based on their family trees or based on some genetic characteristic that they noted that they wanted to learn more about. And then we tied that all back into how do you learn genetics? How do you learn predictive power of it using the punnet squares and using other things that would be taught more in a biology class about genetics, but allowing that personalized piece. And when you do that, when you allow this personal exploration, when you allow them to follow pathways that they're interested in, we do see a lot of gains in curiosity. So some of these things can be then embedded into classrooms and out of school learning experiences so that we can teach students how to learn themselves, teach students what they want to figure out, and then try and tie that in to career choices and things like that. I think that curiosity is really the driver of whether people go into certain areas or not, because our small study research shows that there's a really big correlation between science curiosity and people that think of themselves as scientists, And there's also a correlation between science, curiosity and their test scores. But test scores of wanting to be in science are not correlated for that group of students. So curiosity is like the linchpin between, I really love science and I want to be a scientist, and I really scored good on this test. I know from personally, from teaching chemistry and physics for 23 years, there's a lot of students that got a hundred percent in my class pretty close. They scored off the root scale on everything, and I'm like, are you going to go to school for science? Do you want to go for engineering? No, I want to be an English teacher. No, I want to be a writer. No, I want to go into history, but you do really good in science. You do really good in math. I don't like it. I don't want to do it. That's not what I'm interested in. And so there is a correlation also between curiosity and interest, interest and motivation and things like that. So setting students up so that they can explore things and be curious about what they want to be curious about and giving them opportunities to see things that they can be curious about in areas they're not personally inclined to think about as, I think, a way to expand their horizons and let them see opportunities and also hopefully get more students interested in science.

Adam: So do you think that on some level that curiosity can be more important than just aptitude?

Jen: Oh, yeah.

Adam: Right.

Jen: Oh yeah, a hundred percent.

Adam: It's kind of the ‘Cs’ get degrees thing. I mean, not that I want to encourage that, but to some extent if you're plowing through it and you're kind of fumbling but you're enjoying it, you may have a better career outcome in that thing. You got ‘Cs’ all the way through in.

Jen: I won't say that ‘Cs’ will get you into med school, but there's a lot of people that go to med school because they're tenacious and they love it and they want to do it, not because they were the very, very top student in everything. And even in med school, you get your degree and you're bottom of the class, top the class. Nobody knows the difference, but they survived it. They got through it. There's something that drove them to do that, and I think that that works for careers, it works for getting through school, but it also works as being just a really interesting human being.

Adam: The motivation the motor is-I always joke when I hire student workers in our department all the time and I say, I'm hiring motors. You could be pretty rough. I want you to want to do it really bad. That matters to me almost more than anything for a student worker. We keep five. So we have however many students here, and I get five of them every semester and it's motor, and to me that is curiosity, I guess is the word I would use for it now that we've had this conversation. But I want someone who's curious about what they're going into. I don't need them to have great grades or even have that polished of work. I need them to want.

Jen:  What I want is somebody who wants to know the why.

Adam: Yeah.

Jen: I don't care as much if you get the right answer, I want you to know why that answer is right. I want you to want to know why that happens and the story behind it. And if you think about it that I think the curiosity is just, I don’t know, as I've said before, I think it's innate to being a really good human being and an interesting person.

Adam: Right? An empathetic person probably too. You don't want to just disagree with something at face value. You want to know why you disagree with it point, why don't I understand this? Why don't I empathize with it?

Jen: Good point, good point.

Adam: Yeah, I mean, but that's hard, right? And it's really hard when we get older. I find working with younger people and just my own kids are kind of rapidly approaching the age of the students that I work with here. For me to be empathetic to some of the things that they do or say or feel that I don't initially understand, I have to explore that and understand why they got there. And it's left me as a person who's middle age and I spend a not unsubstantial amount of time, sometimes defending younger generations to other people my age by going, they're not idiots. They're very smart. It's there's a difference in the way we're engaging the world, and if you only want to go, I don't like the way that works. Then you’ve self-determined that you have absolutely brought no additional information in to validate that. And it's not that students don't sometimes make me smack my forehead, but there's usually a reason that they've gotten to be different than I have. They have a different life experience, a different trajectory, and empathy. It's empathy through curiosity. This might be a departure from the topic a little bit, but I feel like you have to be invested in a generation that's entirely different than your own because you want a future that's good for them. Otherwise, why are you working here? Do you know what I mean? So we have to have some shared experience. So I'm going to give you my life experience and skills so that you can hopefully apply them what you're doing. But if I don't take some of that back from you, then our common goal is not going to feel so common, and it's very easy to do it. It's just by sharing that experience. But that could be curiosity, I think about what other people feel or think.

What's one small thing you can do to be more curious?

Adam: As a final takeaway. What's that one small thing you can do to become a more curious person? How can you regiment yourself to do it, to be more curious?

Jen: I would have to say that the best way to kind of build some curiosity into your life is to just open the door to learning something new and trying something new. That could be learning a new word, that could be talking to the person beside you in the grocery store line, that could be going somewhere you've never been before or really just taking a risk and riding that rollercoaster again.

Adam: Oh man, I'm not getting on the rollercoaster again. I'll go on another ride, but it won't be the roller coaster.

Jen: Yeah.

Adam: Jen, thanks so much for coming in here. Still not going on a rollercoaster. Hopefully we can talk again soon about something else in curiosity or AI or education or something.

Jen: That would be awesome. This is a great experience. Thanks.

Adam: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for stopping by The Search Bar. Make sure that you like and subscribe so that you never have to search for another episode.