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Anyone in the world
I have Wept, now I may Think
1:26 a.m. - Tuesday, December 2, 2008
My RC class was from 7:00-9:30 this evening, and I had two great 6-minute client sessions, and during the second I wept as my heart broke for a friend. I am now thinking more clearly than I was before. Wonderful!
And now I've read parts of an essay that make me leap from my chair proclaiming the joyous truth and wonderful promise of the ideas therein!!
I am reading "Perspectives on Dialogue: Making talk developmental for individuals and organizations" by Nancy M. Dixon (1996, Center for Creative Leadership), and her language leads me to believe that she practices Re-evaluation Counseling (though she never mentions it in the essay). I have read the preface, the introduction, and the end of the final section of practical observations and dialogic practices in the workplace, and during that reading I have come to a few thoughts. Here's the first:
Tacit to Explicit and Back for Liberation: Ethan Roland introduced me to the concept that there is tacit knowledge (practiced, unstructured, unconscious, undocumented) and explicit knowledge (spoken, written, consciously recognized). People learn tacit knowledge through experience, and they learn explicit knowledge through instruction, and perhaps through reflection on and evaluation of their experience.
Ethan told me that the article he read about tacit/explicit knowledge argued that the most important processes in this realm are the transformation of knowledge from tacit to explicit and from explicit to tacit (that means that tacit-to-tacit and explicit-to-explicit aren't as important). We both wondered "Why would that be the case? It makes sense, but we're not quite sure why it makes sense." Now, I am looking at a chart in the middle of this essay, and it says that Paolo Freire's purpose with dialogue is "To free groups and individuals from the tacit assumptions that keep them oppressed" (p. 27).
Ah ha!!
I connect this with an essay I read a year and a half ago (while studying sovereignty and democratization with advising from Alejandro Velasco at Hampshire College), "Emergent Publics: An essay about democracy and social movements" by Ian Angus. Angus wrote about the process of democracy as the process of new social movements constantly arising and speaking their truth and thus changing society's perception of reality -- in other words, the social movement is a group of people taking their tacit knowledge (their life experience) and making it explicit to the rest of society (usually with a demand that justice and humanity must be sought). And, to continue the cycle beyond what I remember Angus writing, I think that real change is achieved when the rest of society takes that newly-explicit knowledge and makes it tacit or (if that is not possible because I can never completely feel and know any experience but my own) begins to integrate the shared explicit knowledge into actions and thus builds new tacit knowledge that includes the explicit knowledge shared by the social movement. (Hurrah! Some sense, some meaning!)
Perhaps you wonder "When has that happened, eh?" Well, it's happened in me -- the many things I've learned about racism and the many times that people have shared with me about the effects of racism on them and me and us, and the many times that I've reflected on my experience and seen racism more clearly because of that reflection... all that explicit knowledge has lead me to new tacit knowledges, practiced knowledges, ways of interacting that I cannot completely explain in words yet others can sense when they interact with me (I have been told this a few times). And that, I suppose, is tacit knowledge, enacted knowledge, embodied knowledge. And that is transformation in me. (Now I carry on the cycle, here in these words and in other activities, by making my tacit knowledge explicit and sharing it along with the explicit knowledge that has been shared with me. Often I share that second-hand explicit knowledge with a first-hand explicit addition of "What this means to me, how I have re-shaped my life based on my understanding of this," and that personalization is what really touches many people. Perhaps by 'personalization' I mean 'creation of meaning' or 'meaning-making' -- I say 'perhaps' because I read those phrases and don't quite know what they mean.)
So, liberation necessitates the recognition and articulation of our tacit knowledge (personally, institutionally, and culturally), and our integration of the shared explicit knowledge of others into our tacit knowledge.
Whoa.
(...so... got you thinkin'?... write a blog post in response, and include a link back to this post... or write a forum post and link back to this... here's the link to get to this post: http://gel.gaiauniversity.org/blog/index.php?filtertype=site&filterselect=0&tagid=493)
[ Modified: Tuesday, 2 December 2008, 08:06 AM ] |
