Students and instructors at Iowa State have taught me that leaving my learning comfort zone behind and moving into the unfamiliar territory of new learning styles opens up windows and doors in my mind. Developing and practicing new learning styles allows beams of sunlight to illuminate the dark spaces in my gray matter, and it’s rather exciting.

Students learn in a variety of unique ways. Our five senses help us navigate through the world as we soak up sights, sounds, tastes, sensations and smells. The reason that I gravitated toward print journalism as my first academic love is because I thrive on the printed word. The ABCs are in my blood. Letters and words pump through my arteries, veins and heart with the rhythm of life.

Despite my love of the written word, I moved into the terrain of tactile and visual learning during the spring 2005 semester. At the beginning of the semester, I was afraid to disturb these untapped areas in my brain, but I trusted the message of a quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt on the side of my coffee mug: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Caffeine and Roosevelt’s quote did wonders for my confidence level!

Visual communication and photojournalism courses had a strange effect on me. I found myself in an alien learning environment: Images with no words, or words accompanied by profound graphic subtexts.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but I didn’t have the training to interpret the picture’s worth. Just as I was about to panic, Eleanor Roosevelt and two wonderful instructors came to my rescue.

The wonders of the visual world unfolded in front of my eyes. I learned that seeing the color red can cause our blood pressure to rise and our respiration and heartbeat to speed up. Cool colors like blue and green tend to relax us. Blues and green are often associated with nature and serenity, while red and orange reflect heat and excitement.

Frederic Brenner, in his photography book “Diaspora: Homelands in Exile,” quotes Fernando Pessoa in his introduction:

To see the fields and the river

It isn’t enough to open the window.

To see the trees and the flowers

It isn’t enough not to be blind.

As the semester progressed, I was slowly learning to see what was outside my own window.

When I looked through the lens of a camera, I understood that the world is in constant motion. Life is changing at a pace much faster than my mind can fathom. I trained my eye to notice light and shadow. Recently, at the 4th of July parade in my hometown, I moved up and down the street shooting photos of Uncle Sam in sunlight and shade, experimenting with a new medium I find all together intoxicating and puzzling.

An anonymous quotation tells us that “Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” As students, it’s important to be aware of the tunes that we hear in our own minds and the learning styles that come naturally to us. At the same time, it’s vital to open ourselves up to the tunes and learning styles of others.

By doing something that we are scared to do at least once a day, it becomes gradually easier to unlock the doors and windows in our minds and exchange darkness and fear for sunlight and illumination.