Personal Blogs

I have been presented with various views on the nature of knowledge as part of the course I am studying and in my own slow way I have been mulling them over. Now I have been asked to write about my personal view of knowledge (properly cited etc.) and I was eventually drawn back to the great Terry Pratchett’s description of teachers as “liars to children” (Pratchett, Stewart, & Cohen, 1999).

A couple of ways of thinking about knowledge were shared. (Burnard, 1996) listed  these: Propositional Knowledge (facts and stuff), procedural (how to do stuff) and personal knowledge (experience of stuff). Then an alternative view was presented by Moon & Leach, 2008. They kept the first three with slightly different names (formal, procedural and informal). However Moon and Leach also added impressionisitic and self-regulatory knowledge.

The way I initially envisioned these was by thinking about a skill like driving. In order to drive you need to know what the pedals do, what road signs mean etc. (propositional). You also need to know the physical process of driving (procedural). But to drive well you need to have learnt things like how to anticipate the actions of other drivers, which is personal knowledge. To be a good driver you need all three types of knowledge.

We also looked at what how knowledge is acquired. Does knowledge represent fixed truths that are uncovered by the application of reason, logic and rational thought alone (rationalism)? Is knowledge the result of our experience of the outside world phenomena and established through empiricism? My initial feelings were to go to these. The other ways of looking at knowledge (Dewey) is that knowledge is constructed through experiencing the world in dialog with others. The final view is that knowledge is the process of “enculturation rather than cognitive development”. It took me a while to get my head round what that meant and so I initially rejected the second two views, probably prematurely.

But this brings us back to the Pratchett quote. He isn’t saying teachers deliberately deceive their students but that simplified or edited versions of what is currently understood are presented in order to help students learn the shape of subject or field. That understanding principles and ways of reasoning are more important than particular facts or theories, since (especially in science) these are constantly changing and being adapted. That acquiring the culture of a field, what it values and how it evaluates ideas and evidence, is crucial to mastering a subject.

Reflecting on my own subject (Computer Science), while there is a comfort in the idea of objective knowledge, limited to facts and procedures discovered through a mix of empiricism and rational reasoning, this isn’t what I actually teach, except in order to pass exams. Mastery in my field comes from ways of thinking rather than specific knowledge. Acquiring those ways of thinking, how to decompose a problem, how to identify ambiguities, requires a base of propositional and procedural knowledge but needs to progress rapidly from that. As a wise student once said to me “The difficulty of becoming a programmer is learning to think like a programmer”. He was right. And learning to think like a programmer is enculturation.

References
Burnard, P. (1996). Acquiring Interpersonal Skills: A Handbook of Experiential Learning for Health Professionals, 2nd edn. London: Chapman & Hall.
Moon, B., & Leach, J. (2008). The Power of Pedagogy. London: Sage.
Pratchett, T., Stewart, I., & Cohen, J. (1999). The Science of Discworld. 

Create a blog post of around 250 words that makes an argument for or against arts taking up more space on the curriculum.

The question (I think) relates to a deeper question – what is the purpose of education? The course has presented various suggested answers to that question, some of which I may discuss elsewhere, but if I may be indulged I will start with my current thoughts (which are changing all the time).

I think education has both a social and an individual purpose.

The individual purpose is to equip the learner with the “capabilities” described by Amartya Sen. To butcher a very elegant concept the basic idea is to give learners the skills and knowledge (or people generally the resources including skills and knowledge) they will need to be able to choose how they live their lives in ways that are meaningful to them.

The social purpose is to ensure that society is made up of individuals who are capable of contributing to the good functioning of that society. This means that they know and understand social norms such as free speech and tolerance, can contribute economically, culturally and socially, and have an understanding of the culture and history of their society.

Fortunately these two purposes largely overlap, though not totally. So how does this relate to the arts? I hear you cry. My answer is that the arts provide skills and knowledge that allow an individual to live a fuller, more enriched life, to understand their culture and if we take a purely economic view (which I would discourage) then as well as the obvious fact that the creative sector is a major employer there are also a wide variety of jobs that don’t require specific skills but do need people with the analytic, creative and social awareness that studying the arts provides.

Including the arts on the curriculum provides the opportunity for learners to try things they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to try, to gain a broader understanding of the culture they will live in and to gain a wider set of thinking skills with which to approach the world