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"He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him He that knows not, and knows that he knows not is a pupil. Teach him. He that knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep Wake him. He that knows, and knows that he knows is a teacher. Follow him." (Arabic proverb)
"We know what we know, we know that there are things we do not know, and we know that there are things we don't know we don't know" Donald Rumsfeld (4 Sept 2002) (Woodward, 2004: 171) It is ironic, perhaps, that the initial insight is allegedly Arabic.
This paper is playing around with a conceit: two senses of the term "know". However, it is all in a professional cause. The two senses are those of: awareness of self, (represented by the vertical red line in the diagram below) and knowledge of the world (the horizontal blue line)
There are of course four possible combinations, which are explored below. "Knowledge" but not simply as Bloom understands it: potentially this is the whole cognitive domainYou may find parallels with the witting and willing practice model, and also with the familiar "unconscious incompetence" to "unconscious competence" model, which relates primarily to practical skills: here we are exploring knowledge. Laing's poetic exploration of its interpersonal convolutions cited above (it goes on for another 21 pages), and the citation of the idea by Neighbour (1992) credited as an Arabic proverb demonstrate that it has a considerable provenance.
consummate professionals who make what they do look easy (such as plasterers and chefs and popular novelists and...). Many students start from this position, and although the Neighbour proverb calls them "fools", it is not really fair. Let's go on
So the first move is often to make learners aware of their ignorance. This is tricky, in practice. Unless they are a captive audience it is quite easy to frighten them off. (It is also quite seductive, because it is a chance to show off your own level of knowledge or competence.) On the other hand, it is a crucial step in developing motivation to learn. There are various ways of doing it.
The German teacher's name was Roger Baker (in the unlikely event that he wants to look himself up on the web)In my first German lesson, a young teacher recited a poem to us in German:
it sounded great, but we couldn't understand a word of it, of course. He didn't really need to do it, because we already knew we didn't know any of it apart from a couple of phrases picked up from war films. He was trying to show what we might aspire to, and went on to explain that. (It must have made an impact because I can remember the lesson fifty years later.) You can ask a student (usually either one who is a bit full of himself and needs to be "taken down a peg", or one who is mature enough not to be humiliated) to do something practical in the certainty that he will fail. Only do this if you are confident that when you do it, as you will be challenged to, you can manage it yourself. You can pose a problem which has a seemingly simple answer (political, economic, legalor in Neighbour's case, medical), and then show the problems in reaching that simple solution, which stem from ignorance of the context.
The trick is to show something which is (so far) beyond the students' reach, but not so far beyond it that they will despair. The second trick is to make it interesting. I have deliberately not mentioned strategies for doing this in accountancy. More significantly: In continuing professional development courses in particular, you may be challenging survival-oriented practice in which people have a substantial vested interest: this is the key to the whole un-learning/learning process. See Learning as Loss for more on this. Unless you have to do it, don't. Many learners (particularly those who have signed up for your course of their own free will) are only too aware of what they don't know. The last thing they need is for you to rub it in. Skill in this area is of course a core competence for charlatans. Whether self-help gurus who must convince you of your personal inadequacy or potential ill-health, religious proselytisers who must convict you of sins only they believe are sinful, or salespeople who have to create a "need" for their product, they all have to manage this stage. Study and learn from themjust don't believe them.
A specialist variation on this is the anosognosia of everyday life as Dunning (2005) calls it. See here for a great article on that, which is more relevant to teaching than one might at first think.
This move, from "knowing that you don't know" to "knowing that you know" is what most learning and hence teaching is all about.
(There is perhaps a third possibility here, too, which is the fit with the willing but unwitting category in the model of practice on this site.)
So that's the whole story. Or is it? Is there any connection between the "Don't know that you know" stage and the "Don't know that you don't know" stage? Possibly (but not always). There may occasionally be a cycle: if you don't know what you do know, you probably don't know what you don't know, either. This may be the case for people who are stuck at a survival learning level. They have learned to get by with what they know, to
the extent that they do not give themselves credit for it, or are even unaware of knowing it, as we have discussed. However, they can't take it any further because it is out of awareness, so they are unaware of how they could move on from mere competence or proficiency to real expertise. For such people, because they do not know what they know, they may be unsure of their knowledge, and may be threatened by the prospect of moving on, which leads to a degree of resistance to new learning.
http://www.trainer.org.uk/members/theory/ process/stages_of_learning.htm http://www.neurosemantics.com/Articles/ Unconscious.htm http://www.nlp.org/glossary.html#U The following sources have been cited as its origin, although I have not so far been able to get hold of them to check them out:
Dubin, P (1962) 'Human Relations in Administration', Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1971). A practical guide for supervisory training and development. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. There's a fascinating exploration of the whole story at http://www.businessballs.com/consciouscompetencelearni ngmodel.htm The medical school at the University of Arizona has taken similar ideas further with their Curriculum on Medical Ignorance (CMI) and developed the Q-Cubed; Questions, questioning and questioners project. Here is their "Ignorance Map", which identifies:
Known Unknowns: all the things you know you don't know. Unknown Unknowns: all the things you don't know you don't know
Errors: all the things you think you know but don't Unknown Knowns: all the things you don't know you know Taboos: dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge Denials: all the things too painful to know, so you don't as you see, it goes rather beyond my little model. [acknowledgements to Perkins D (2009) Making Learning Whole: how seven principles of teaching can transform education San Francisco; Jossey Bass p
While it is imperative to us that we are educated and continue to educate ourselves, the truth about ignorance is that it is as important to our growth and survival as knowledge is. Indeed, without ignorance we have no reason to expand our awareness or to seek knowledge. Ignorance and knowledge, while opposites, actuallywork together and must work together in order for us to be able to create for it is from the unknown that the very life that we enjoy today has become known. With all the hubbub about the Qur'an burning started by a fellow that has admittedly not even read it and the hullabaloo about the it's not a mosque people and it's not at Ground Zero I just had to throw my oar in to the proverbial waters. The fact of the matter is that it is a cultural center modeled after the 92nd Street Y to be named Cordoba House and one has to go out of one's way from Ground Zero to get there. In addition, Muslims have been praying at the Ground Zero site for the past ten years because.....they lost friends and family there too!
Positively Ignorant
Ignorance is perceived to be a negative and so it is but that does not make it either bad or evil. Without negative there is no positive and therefore there is no motion and no life. Without exception, none of us would enjoy the places we live, the things we have, our ability to travel and to connect with each other had our ancestors not ventured into the unknown. To be ignorant is to be unaware of and to not know somebody or something. It is the child's ignorance that drives it to know and understand its environment and the people, creatures and things in that environment. It is as it should be.
Negatively Ignorant
Ignorance and a drive for knowledge are innate in humankind and yet we have made ourselves and each other wrong for both. We have argued, fought, killed, maimed, tortured, ostracized, condemned and imprisoned each other for the crime of ignorance. A few years ago I read a letter to our local paper from a lawyer for a client that had been sentence to a long prison term. It has haunted me since. As a seven year old child this now condemned man had been out in the garage with his father who was cutting wood with a power saw. The young lad asked his father a question that many of us would welcome from our children, "Can I help?" This father's answer to that innocent query was to respond with, "You want to help, I'll show you how you can help!" In then grabbed his young son's hand and ran his little fingers through the saw severing four of them. The lawyer expressed in her letter her sadness and frustration that this man was being imprisoned rather than receiving the help that should have been his from a caring society years before he ever got to the point where he was visiting his father's actions upon others. What happens when a person gets stuck on an incident from the past is that they continually dramatize all the decisions, perceptions, and moods experienced that it literally takes over the individual and influences all of their behaviors. It is like a movie reel that just plays the same scene over and over and over again. They do not see who or what is in front of them in present time.
Shocking Ignorance
When a something happens that shatters your world, your trust in others, your dependence upon others, it is a shock, a big shock. To use the young boy in the circumstance above as an example, in his asking the father the question, "Can I help?" he was in a high mood level, very present and had a positive vision and intention. What he got in exchange was an extremely negative mood level, spiritual absents and a negative vision and intention. This caused the boy's game, which was to help daddy, collapse. A shock has occurred when something jars the mind or the emotions with a sudden, violent and unexpected blow. The person has experienced an outrage and a severe offense to all that could be considered decent. Individuals can be put into shock this way and indeed, as with September 11, 200, an entire country and its allies can be put into shock this way. It is an alarmingly simple thing to put an individual or a group into a state of shock and perhaps the most damaging effect is not the shock itself but the decisions the individual or collective make while in that state of shock. They are always, without fail, negative decisions with negative outcomes and consequences. Individuals and groups in shock are very easily controlled and manipulated.
Certifably Shocking
A person in shock is little more than a ball of confusion, their purpose has failed, their dreams have failed, their reason for existence has failed, and they no longer trust themselves or others. Their disrupted minds give conflicting commands and signals to their bodies, their ability to reason and to know or to reach for knowledge has been severely compromised as indeed their whole world as they knew it to be has collapsed in on them. Instead, they sit in a pool of stupidity, trapped life force and extremely heavy, uncomfortable and painful feelings. They can no longer respond to any given situations they can only react. They are, effectively and thoroughly destroyed.
Advanced Ignorance
We have come a long way since our ancestors set sail to explore and acquire knowledge about the world we collectively inhabit but we have come an equal distance in our ability to react rather than to respond to that world and our fellow humankind. The missiles fired by the rifles, long bows and cannons of the past have been replaced with highly technical missiles that would rendered our own ancestors defenseless. However, in our ability to acquire and apply appropriate knowledge to the caring of and for each other in away that serves the whole rather than a select few who, more often than not are quite willing to lead us where we would never follow should we be in our right minds, we remain woefully ignorant.
Knowledge is a double edged sword. It is your own honesty, ethics, integrity and ability to interface with others that will determine how you wield that sword.
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