Reconstruction 10.2 (2010)


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Editor's Introduction

Expertise vs knowledge; expertise as knowledge :

<1> This project has too many strands to even begin to suggest where it started. However, it really began to take shape during an afternoon spent scouring libraries and bookstores with a friend who teaches in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at a local secondary school. He teaches physics and chemistry but had been given a new course, "Theory of Knowledge," or TOK as they call it in their shorthand. He asked what I thought of its title and aims and I had to be honest: "It is the most pretentious sounding thing I’ve heard in a while." He agreed. Where does one begin teaching Gr. 12 students, no matter how talented, the "theory of knowledge"? Yes, they meant one. Apparently, there is one theory of knowledge and in 375 minutes per week over the course of a twenty-week semester, it is to be delivered and faithfully so. Alternatively, one could endeavour to teach them all theories of knowledge in order to ensure that students would be able to question any knowledge claim they encounter. Who would undertake such a task? Who could? Small wonder, then, I was finding students who made flat statements like, "I know all about Northrop Frye. I read his essay in high school." I have never forgotten that one because one section of the second chapter of the Anatomy of Criticism was understood as being everything. Yet, it was not surprising. We had more to teach them and instead of increasing the time available to do so, the institutional structures were compressing schedules. Ontario even managed to eliminate a year of high school without finding a way -- even a money-making one -- to replace it with two-year schools or something like the CEGEPs in Québec. Eventually, we hit upon trying to teach critical thinking and the cogent expression of that thought as our two primary goals; neither of us trusting epistemologies nor being satisfied with ontologies. Admittedly, we both avoid defining a "theory of knowledge," let alone "the" theory of knowledge.

<2> At the same time, I had been teaching a class called "Modern Countercultures," which was beginning to outstrip its original mandate. It was supposed to cover "Modern" manifestos -- Dadaism, Vorticism, Futurism, etc. -- and end with only the briefest mentions of the 60s and "the counterculture." However, the students showed little inclination towards Post-Expressionism and so I was beginning with the 1960s and working my way to the present. Even though I had moved things temporally closer, it was not close enough. They always seemed stuck on the significance of a technocratic society and a technocracy. This was just the way things were meant to be, they told me. I even had students tell me that it was important to have experts to tell us how to do everything so that we would never be improper or worse, unfashionable. I was also teaching on a campus that had seen one protest in the ten years I had been there: the day they cut the shuttle bus service that formerly circled the campus. Now students actually had to walk to class. Thomas Frank seemed to have answers for why Johnny could not dissent. Unfortunately, he had no answers for my students. I went back to my friend with my observations. What, then, were we teaching them and what precisely did they know?

<3> Moreover, why was it that they would question everything we taught them, but were so unquestioning of the other "experts" they encounter. When people ask, usually in the most condescendingly impudent dinner party manner imaginable, "What’s a culture doctor do?" I usually tell them the truth: our culture is a terminally ill patient and I can only treat the symptoms. Worse, I can only spot them as they appear and they are forever changing. In addressing one symptom, John Knapp, clearly a fearless and experienced educator, with heaps more of both than I’ll likely have, offers a solution for the teaching of that threatened skill, critical reading: structure your lesson around the students’ own tendencies rather than forcing them into yours, the curriculum’s or even the novel’s. Another symptom, as David Prescott-Stead notices in his delightful and wonderfully insightful essay, is a culture that has forgotten how to write cursively. Our students print everything; that is, everything this is not typed into a computer. One effect is that they cannot complete exams in two or even three hours. Indeed, our cultural obsession with speed, progress, pushing ahead has produced many paradoxical situations. Scott Francisco calls this the "Innovation Paradox" and tries to document its creep while offering solutions. He literally sends people back to the sand box to rediscover creativity and innovation. Interestingly, the federal granting agencies, at least in Canada, no longer offer as much money for research aimed at discovery. Instead, the emphasis is on "innovation," which is their code-word for taking something that already exists and figuring out another way to sell it. Progress, indeed.

<4> My own offering tries to determine whether we are producing de-skilling by emphasizing data mining instead of learning. Masking complexity, especially under the guise of convenience, has a tendency to compartmentalize the labour, cheapen it and eliminate opportunities for autonomous thought. In addition to that rosy list, Kirsty Best finds that masking complexity through pass cards, codes and other information-based systems also constrains use. It seems governmental rationality is more than just a critical fad. It happens to be an institutional policy, as well. That said, Jason Tocci writes about the mastery involved in playing video games. More than that, he considers the role of the contemporary arcade in shaping consumption but also in shaping players. There is something performative and corporeal to knowledge and expertise. Which bring us to the reviews, which consider the mind and the body as objects of knowledge and as sites of expertise. Indeed, as Lori Martindale explains in the first of her reviews, Paul DeNicola’s re-imagining of Kafka spends much of its time reminding us that the stability of being is constantly disrupted. In the second she takes great care to consider Bruce Nauman’s recent exhibition, Topological Gardens, and its contemplation of "technological slaughter." Finally, there is a review of Maria Plochocki’s wonderful study of the body’s impact on knowledge, and its pursuit, in detective fiction. The difference is that Plochocki only studies bodies that are absent. Somehow, though, they manage to mean, if only to the detective.

<5> This is a fitting final piece for a project that began with musings on how to know since its primary focus is those who know how to know. Would that I shared their talent. Finally, I need to thank many people for their help, contributions, inspirations, comments and criticism as this project unfolded. As always, I am grateful. I’ve never claimed that anything I’ve managed to do was right, good or even worked. It’s just what I do. You help make it better and probably offered the best bits:

I also have to thank Michelle and JP. That wasn't bad at all.

Marc A. Ouellette



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