Experiential Learning and Pondering the Nature of a Boggart

In Book 3, although Defense Against the Dark Arts is not a new class per se, the new teacher Professor Lupin starts out by teaching the class what to do when encountering a boggart. He uses what I would call guided experiential learning. First he starts out with a short description about the boggart peppered with some Q&A for those who have done the pre-reading. (Hermione always does the pre-reading. It’s unclear if anyone else does.) Then he walks them through how to prepare themselves, in particular by having Neville help him with the first example. This is a needed confidence booster for poor Neville who has long suffered the taunts of Professor Snape! Professor Lupin also steps in to prevent potential chaos from taking place when he anticipates that the boggart might change into Lord Voldemort if it turned its attention to Harry. The class is clear, well-organized, connects theory to practice, and best of all it gets everyone up and moving around to actually “do” Defense Against the Dark Arts. If only we had more teachers like Professor Lupin.

In earlier literature, the boggart was usually a denizen of a bog or a marsh (like the hinkypunk in the books). However, in the Harry Potter world, a boggart is a shape-shifter that hides in small dark spaces. The most interesting thing about the boggart is what it does when it encounters a person. The boggart somehow recognizes the deepest fear of this person and shape-shifts appropriately. How does the boggart do this? It’s like mind-reading of a sort except that you might not even be thinking of your deepest fear at the moment, hence making this power more subtle and more powerful (and also more uncanny). The dementor’s power seems closely related – it can extract memories from its prey (that are not necessarily being thought about just prior to an encounter), and then projecting it into the person’s consciousness.

Let’s think about shape-shifting for a moment. From a material point of view, one needs to do several things: (a) move the atoms around so as to form an object of a different shape, (b) add or remove atoms as needed from the surrounding environment to match the composition and size of the new object, and (c) do this all very, very quickly. There isn’t necessary an inherent difficulty with (a) and (b). The troublesome part is the time factor because it would require a large overall burst of energy – actually many very specific, small bursts of energy to reconfigure the atoms in exactly the right way. If magic is akin to manipulating electromagnetic radiation, then this could all work. How such specific manipulation takes place is still an open question. The shape-shifting activity of the boggart has many complements in the magical world. Professor McGonagall teaches her students how to Transfigure one object into another. Animagi can change their own shape. Objects can be “conjured” out of thin air, for example when Dumbledore causes sleeping bags to appear while the staff search Hogwarts for Sirius Black in Book 3. One might even argue that the creation of matter can take place in the appropriate energy field given Einstein’s famous E = mc².

Perhaps a better way to think about the boggart is as the projection of a nightmare into viewable physical space. It’s unclear that the boggart actually actively physical harms its prey, and instead the harm is self-inflicted by the viewer that the boggart is “attacking”. The boggart, fittingly, is defeated essentially by disbelief (by considering it to be ridiculous or riddikulus), and when destroyed it explodes “into a tiny wisps of smoke and [is] gone”. It’s also unclear if the boggart actually takes on the physicality of the nightmare. Perhaps the boggart’s display is related to a holographic 3D-projection. There are several ways one can achieve a similar effect with modern technology. Of course the hard part is how the boggart accesses the nightmare of its prey in the first place, let alone convert it into the appropriate bits of information for a hologram.

That’s a lot to ponder. I’d like to end the post by commenting on Professor Lupin’s end of year “exam” in Defense Against the Dark Arts. He sets up an obstacle course with the creatures the students have learned to encounter throughout the year. This reinforces what they have learned, but it is also very practical. Experiential learning again, in the context of an exam! The closest thing we have in our chemistry curriculum is a “Practical” exam in our lab courses. I do wish that we could better integrate the lab portions of our introductory level chemistry labs with what the students are learning in the lecture. We do make the effort to have many cross-points, but it’s still challenging because of the material that needs to be covered in lecture and the techniques that need to be covered in lab. In our more advanced courses, the integration is much stronger (and in a sense easier as the students have learned the basic lab techniques) and one can now design creative lab sessions. In any case, I’m glad to be reminded of good teaching and learning experiences!