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Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole: Innovation and Change in Context

When Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1946), she begins an adventure during which she tries to make sense of a context quite unlike the one with which she is familiar. In fact, when the hookah-smoking Caterpillar asks, “Who are you?” Alice first replies, “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then” (pp. 49-50). Poor Alice does not know even who she is within her new context of Wonderland. We recall Alice’s experience of “tumbling down the rabbit hole” because it reminds us of the disorientation that often occurs when we ignore context as an element of our teaching practice. Many of us can attest to the confusion we experience when a tried and true learning activity fails to accomplish our intended aims (or just falls flat), and we only then realize that the context in which we are using it has significant differences from those of previous iterations. We have expectations for what will happen during the activity based on multiple iterations of running it, but the context that informs what happens and why differs from prior experiences in important ways: our students are different, perhaps the classroom or physical environment is different, or cultural norms are different. We, too, are never precisely the same instructor stepping into the classroom each time. We have forgotten that context matters until such an experience reminds us that it does. This “contextual difference” is one of the reasons we ask authors of Instructional Innovations to provide a