#SOL16: Bone Deep

A road (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Being a widow is not special or unique. Just this year I am one in 800,000. That is the number of new widows and widowers annually according to the Institute of Medicine.

Death happens.
Husbands die.
Wives too.

And with each of those deaths, a part of those who loved them best dies too. 8 million people annually experience death of an immediate family member. Do knowing these facts relieve the pining, the desperate wanting, the guilt for living on, for coveting life?

There are so many different ways of knowing. Here in the States, we tend to rely on demonstrating our smartness by displaying bits of knowledge. We learn this first at school and I suspect it is a lesson that sticks. Such knowledge is safe. It is a territory already defined.

But there are things that can't be known ahead of experience. There the territory is wild, unplanned. Here you could wander for years. This is the place where grief is bone deep.

Looking Along and At: Ways of Knowing

Tide's Out (Bae Caenarfon, Wales. M.A. Reilly)

I've been thinking about the many ways of (un)knowing and how, as educators, we respond to efforts like the Common Core and other attempts (national and otherwise) to categorize explicit knowledge as if it was a given Truth.  David Kettel in Cartesian Habits and the 'Radical Line' of Inquiry says that in thinking about Cartesian thinking:

a particular spatial image rules our imagination. This is the image of ourselves as looking on at the knowing subject as in every instance a determinate reality set among the realities of the world. This image offers a picture of the act of knowing, of the knowing subject, and of what is known, as such. Our habitual reliance on this image lies at the heart of Cartesian thinking.

Cartesian thought is what gets privileged when we codify, such as the 'content' of standards--making the knowing explicit.  Explicit or formal knowledge is rationalized, organized, and codified--usually outside of our everyday experiences. But there are more ways of knowing and things to know than just what people with power tend to codify (school-based reading, writing, and math and the associated products, such as teacher evaluation and high stake tests). In addition to knowing explicitly, we also tacitly know.  Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) contrast explicit and tacit dimensions of knowing as follows:

Painted Essay Method from Vermont Writing Collaborative.
An example of codified method. 

Explicit knowledge, as we have seen, lends itself well to the process of teaching—that is, transferring knowledge from one person to another. You teach and I learn. But tacit knowledge, which grows through personal experience and experimentation, is not transferrable—you can’t teach it to me, though I can still learn it. The reason for the difference is that learning tacit knowledge happens not only in the brain, but also in the body, through all our senses (Kindle Locations 1012-1015).

What we call tacit knowledge, Keats called 'taking part in the existence of things'.  In Roger Deakin's, Wildwood: A Journey through Trees, I learned that there are woodland people who can "tell the species of tree from the sound it makes in the wind" (pp. IX-X). This way of knowing is not written down (codified) and taught, but rather is learned through experience often alongside a more experienced other. 

C.S. Lewis, in "Meditation in a Toolshed," describes two ways of knowing. He writes, 

"You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it" (emphasis added).  

The woodland people look along trees. They are immersed in the woods and what is important to know is contextual. Knowing about trees is not something they learn by only looking at trees.  Lewis notes, "...you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another."  It is this communion of ways of knowing (looking along and looking at) that is most important--not a single way.  And it this communion that is largely absent from the efforts that arise alongside national standards. (Yes, I know the CCSS Is a 'state' effort, but it feels national, doesn't it?)  

And this is what gets missed when knowledge is codified and handed out like after dinner mints for the masses to digest. The messy thinking that happened to first codify gets left off the translation--as it must. Experience cannot be handed out. It must be embodied.  So there is often little experiential learning that gets occasioned when standards are to be 'mastered' especially when the standards are tied to high stakes testing or as José Luis Vilson suggests are part of a package deal. Vilson writes (from here): 

"The CCSS came as a package deal with the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity measures including mass school closings."

So the authority that accompanies codification of knowledge, the looking at stance, becomes even thornier when multiple agendas converge and are packaged as being truer than our experience. Just think about how irrational it is when people who rarely (if ever) step foot in classrooms are creating and/or are implementing the codification of the 'true' pedagogy, alongside the 'true' content as measured by the 'true' tests. 

This is the true way teach. This is the true content to learn. This is the true way to know if students have learned the true content.  

With all this Truthiness, it gets a bit crowded. So many have game.  

And yet, in determining such Truths, you may find yourself largely missing.  
You are not an actor. 
You are the one being acted upon.  

A by-product that gets fed and populated alongside codification is the belief that the knowledge codified for us is somehow truer than what we experience.  This is the stuff C.S. Lewis told us was the rot.

"...we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything."

Crows Talking, Tacit Knowing

Crows Talking (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I.

I made the image above last summer while out walking.  A cawing, polyphonic nasal sound, caught my ear and had me turning toward it, camera lifting simultaneously, shutter whirling.  Between trees, green with summer, two crows sat on a large branch in the thick of the woods talking.  Between us: an exchange of energy. At that moment, I knew more than I could say.

II.

Later, as I walked on I wondered if perhaps they were mates or neighbors--what they might have been talking about.  Crows, like us, are social beings.

III.

I've always found crows fascinating: these birds whose vocal range is so significant. At 8 I entered a crow calling contest, surprising my family, as we were passing through a town and had stopped for lunch and in the town center there was a small autumn festival happening and on the posted schedule was a crow calling contest and I signed on.  My family cheered me.  I only knew the "caw-caw" of the bird and sounded it loudly--and was even more delighted to hear the other contestants make their varied sounds. They helped me to know that voice of the crow is varied, beautiful.  All the way home I looked for crows and made crow sounds.

IV.

Regardless of living in a city, suburb or rural space--crows have always been a backdrop to wherever I've lived--be it the hooded crow found in Ireland or the black crow I've come to better know here in the States.

V.

Like the humans I joined who imitated the crow, so too have crows been known to imitate human voice. In Gifts of the Crow, John Marzluff (2012) describes a situation in which a crow rounded up local dogs by calling to the dogs in a human sounding voice, "Here, boy. Good dog." The crow lead dogs to a nearby college campus, gathering them beneath a tree. When the students let out of classes, the crow flew low with the dogs following it and their movement disrupted the students as they made their way across a large green, dislodging lunches in the process. The crow returned to eat. A trickster, for sure.

VI.

A Chance of Crows (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Crows, like many songbirds, sing to define their territories and to attract mates.  But crows also interact with regular neighbors, engaging in sustained social relationships. 

VII.

Like crows, we too seek to make meaning--to frame and figure out problems, to talk our way in and out of ideas, hunches, and relationships.

VIII.

Do birds dream?  Songbirds, like crows, do. They rehearse their songs in sleep.

On birds and dreaming: "During undisturbed sleep...The neurons spontaneously fired the same complex song production patterns in bursts. Interestingly, these activity patterns were at slight variance, as if the bird was rehearsing a variety of slightly different songs, sometimes with slower or faster tempos." (from here).


IX.

Here's an idea: Take one field. Add some children. Add some crows.

There's so much to know and (un)know through observation that I wonder why we don't make it a main activity of school.  Keenly watching and at times using tools to help us notice and understand what we notice is the stuff of conjecture, theory making, composing, experimenting, and insight.  It helps us code and fail to code.

X.

There's so much one can and does learn that expressing the 'totality' of it in neatly and logically written standards is rather foolish and dangerous especially when coupled with a manic desire to test public school children constantly and narrowly.  We need to consider Robert Frost and the advice from the speaker of his poem, "Mending Wall" who has this to say about boundaries:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

The very things that are 'walled in and out' through our understanding of standards, Common or otherwise, may be the necessary keys to learning for some.

XI.

Knowing is embodied in learners, their social networks, and in the processes and things that they create. Tacit knowing is the stuff we cannot list or code.  Much of that uncoded knowledge is systematically being diminished from school experiences, as what counts as content is what can be found on lists of things to know via standards. In our hyper attention to standards and the tests that measure students' acquisition of these coded bits of information, what will become of embodied learning?

XII.

Think about the crows who sat on the limb of the tree, calling.  I didn't know what their calls meant at the time or what that scene remembered might mean again and again or how such knowing might find expression.  I could not have anticipated you, dear reader.  It was a nothing moment, and one that was and is ripe with possibility.

Like learning, lifting the camera to make a moment was part reflex, part faith, part cooperation, and part coding. 

XIII.

Reflex.
Faith.
Cooperation.
Coding.

What might it mean for the generation coming of age if the majority of things we teach them to value are limited to that which can be coded?  What might our children learn about intuition, cooperation, community as knowledge?

Might we be teaching them to turn away from hunches, from self, from other? 

Omen (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Authority, Meaning Making, and Information Literacy

Warning: Very emergent thinking on my part!!!

It was with great interest that I read and reread Thomas Mackey and Trudi E. Jackobson's (2011) Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy and would recommend the text to you. The authors provide a critique of several frameworks for literacy (information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, visual literacy, cyberliteracy) and suggest that a metaliteracy framework is necessary as these former definitions of literacy/ies are challenged "based on the emergence of new social technologies" (p. 69).

The authors contend that:

Metaliteracy reinforces stronger connections between information literacy and other literacy frameworks. This approach looks at the foundation principles that unite information and technology, rather than focusing on differences based on discrete skills, distant technologies, or media formats (p. 70).

The authors wish to ensure that a broader definition than information skills be employed.

As I read, I wondered: What do we mean when we characterize something as information?  Do we carry with us an understanding that information is stable? Static? Singularly authored? Is information limited to what we explicitly know? In Mackey and Jacobson's critique, they write about the need to think:

beyond information as a commodity, and instead (focus) on the production of knowledge in collaboration with others (p.68).

Screen shot from Minecraft.

Yet when offering examples of metaliteracy, they situate "information" as a bounded entity; that which can be found and retrieved. And certainly there is information that fits that definition--information based on explicit knowledge.  Yet, what happens if instead of thinking of information as a bounded matter, we situate information along a knowledge continuum that stretches from bounded (a thing you could hold in you hand such as a bus schedule) to unbounded (that which cannot be contained nor is complete, such as an emerging idea)?  Perhaps it is the practice of referring to all of those possibilities as information that is so thorny, especially when we may well think of information as that which is bounded.  In some ways the tensions remind of Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory in which efferent and aesthetic ways of reading represent a continuum of responses to text.

I wonder if the tensions the authors describe might also be influenced by how knowledge is (in)formed: explicitly and tacitly.  It is easy to identify explicit knowledge. It is external and codified and schools of the last century (and many would argue this century) have build curricula on explicitly known information. Explicit knowing is something I can hand to you using a single symbol system.  Tacit knowing is inherently different and less likely to be seen at school. Tacit knowing is bodily-known, experiential, and not yet codified. Additionally, tacit knowing, cannot be represented via a single symbol system.  In fact I would suggest that it is through transmediated representations (multiple symbol systems) that tacit knowledge begins to be codified.

Tacit knowledge is about knowing and at the same time not being able to clearly explain how and at times what one knows. Earlier today I was reading Roger Martin's essay, How To Make Companies Think Long-Term and stopped when I read:

Eliminating stock-based compensation would help reduce the incentive for executive leadership to focus on the short term. But there is a residual problem which has long frustrated me. The answer finally popped into my brain (funny how that works).

Martin's characterization of knowing as the answer popping into his brain suggests a possible bridge between tacit and explicit knowing that occurs when that which you have known but could not name begins to be codified. I wonder if codification of tacit knowledge isn't heightened via the connectivity to and collaboration with so many potential others through social media and online communities.

This idea feels important. How? I'm not sure I can name it as of yet.  But here's my first go at it.

Perhaps the emphasis in redefining information literacy as metaliteracy and expanding the definition to include the participatory nature of producing and consuming information is secondary to understanding the emerging importance of tacit knowledge and how such knowledge becomes codified.  I am not suggesting metaliteracy isn't important.  I think the authors do a fine job at exploring the differences and arguing well for the expanded framework. But I think the tensions the authors describe are more a symptom of the need in social institutions to shift from privileging explicit ways of knowing to privileging tacit ways of knowing.

Here's my working thesis: Through participation and collaboration with others via social media and online communities as well as the development of transmediated (multiple symbol systems) representations, learners' feelings, intuitions, and impressions emerge rhizomatically and collectively. These tacit ways of knowing among people disrupt what it has meant to know, to author, and to consume.  It is these disruptions that signal tension, disequilibrium and creation.