Summary - Chapter 7: Knowledge and Learning

KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING

COMMITTED KNOWLEDGE: THE MODERN PAST

KNOWLEDGE RELATIVISM: MORE RECENT TIMES

KNOWLEDGE REPERTOIRES: TOWARDS NEW LEARNING

Dimension 1: Ways of knowing

• Strong commitment to one way of making knowledge and the body of knowledge that has been created that way; for instance, religious truths, empirical truths, rationalist truths and canonical truths

• Scepticism and caution about whether any one way of making knowledge

can produce ‘truth’, including epistemological relativism, cultural relativism and postmodernism

• Developing a range of things you can do to know

• Purposefully balancing the methods of a range of committed knowledge approaches with the caution and respect for differences of knowledge relativism

Dimension 2: Ways of learning

• Following a method and learning its inherited truths

• Being authentic, true to one’s own subjectivity, identity and self

• Social cognition and collaborative learning as aspects of human nature

Dimension 3: Sites of learning

• Special sites, institutions and roles for privileged knowledge making and formal learning

• Learning closely connected to, and influenced by, experience and identity

• Distributed knowledge, with more people as active knowledge makers, and trust based on the kind and amount of work they have put into their knowing