Educators: Don’t be Afraid of Giving Away Too Much
There are many reasons to give away information freely. But as professional educators we might be afraid of giving too much of our knowledge away. What will pay the bills then?
Well, consider this: There are many ways of knowing.
Actually, according to cognitive scientist John Vervaeke there are four ways of knowing.
Propositional knowing is the one people often think about as knowing — and even Knowledge as such. It is the kind of knowing that can be put into words, as statements and beliefs.
Procedural knowing is knowing how to do things. You can’t drive a car from just reading a book about it.
Perspectival knowing. Procedural knowing is closely related to perspectival knowing. To be able to carry out procedures, you need to know what is more important in a given situation. You need perspective.
Participitory knowing. This kind of knowing is perhaps the most abstract in a sense, even though it’s really the most fundamental. To put it in the language of cognitive science, it is about having the optimal grip of the agent-arena relationship.
So, in every given situation, you are an agent in an arena. Me writing this text is one such agent-arena coupling. You reading it is another. In a sense those are two different arenas because we are divided in time and space, but in another we are co-creating a common arena — especially if it leads to conversation — so that the subject-object dichotomy disappears or collapses into unity.
Now, what we do as teachers, coaches, and therapists — the real craft — is not to supply propositions. Our main expertise is to help with the other kinds of knowing.
Of course there are propositions involved. We are offering different kinds of statements in everything we teach, but what our clients want and need are our perspectives, our know-how to transfer procedural knowing to them, our participatory support to make them have a more optimal grip on their agent-arena relationship in the area they are struggling with.
Participatory knowing is very hard to share in the area of content; of blog-posts, YouTube videos, and thoughtful social media updates. Procedural knowing takes practice and often some kind of feedback, and most perspectives are obtained through reflection over time. This is why I buy books from authors who write blogs, even though I know I will find all or at least most of the information in their respective blogs. The book transfers more perspective which makes it easier to choose the right procedures.
So based on this I am now publishing all the material I have written from courses I have taught earlier. Just editing them so they are more like blog posts, with more examples and more stories.
There are detailed descriptions of procedures in those blog posts (example here, Norwegian language), but I am confident that in this age anyone who is looking for propositions of procedures can easily find them anyway. But not with my point of view. And also, for me, it’s a matter of legacy and mission.
There is a good one hour talk by Vervaeke which is a good introduction to his work in my opinion. He talks about the four ways of knowing here too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5iGCW3fDb4
If you like his thoughts and style, I can heartily recommend the full series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. This lecture series is 50 episodes of one hour each, and I think it is absolutely stellar!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY&list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
