Our aim in this paper is not to provide a set of prescriptions for the symbiosis of knowledge and information-creativity and innovation since first of all we are not experts and secondly expertise suggests power-knowledge claims. We just want to suggest milder ways of looking differently at education with the helping hand of symbiosis and with the bodies of knowledge and information-crativity and innovation to draw a student’s picture posing both for modern and postmodern artists of education. We do not want to promote the aim of an unconscious reproduction of a student who becomes the puppet of individual self-fullfilment discourses. Neither knowledge nor information, neither creativity nor innovation are in the center, otherwise student may be trapped within dualism again. Since decentering is another trap, a harmonious way in between may be a dextrous symbiosis.
Whose knowledge and whose information we are dealing with, you may ask. Has the rational control and total knowledge by science led us to safe grounds? Can decentered knowledge be defined as information which is not total and all empowering? Definitive information with totalising explanations and with the elimination of differences can equally have oppressive consequences. Education needs critical questioning and a certain degree of uncertainty before structuring new methods after careful deconstructions of the old.
For Usher and Edwards “knowledge is understood as a matter of standing outside or apart from that which is to be known and from the activity of knowing”. (1994:34) Knowledge desires the process of standing outside to be attainable. This notion makes us feel outsiders in the realm of knowledge. Who are the insiders? The answer is natural sciences. ‘A supra-historic, neutral enterprise and the sole mode of acquiring true knowledge’, a phrase borrowed from Bleicher quoted by Usher and Edwards.
That means in a way education should be conveyed by those who are in the knowing position. We are what we are taught. Through learning process we become human and knowledge tames our natural instincts replaced by reason. As modern philosophy of education instructs, we are enlightened and thus emancipated by education. Educator’s first task is of producing and disseminating certain knowledge. Truth is determinate. Nothing goes without meaning. Knowledge is the power which shapes human beings. Knowledge creates the rational human fit to live in a rational society. In postmodernity the absolute power of knowledge and knowledge givers are challenged and undermined. Legislators’ emphasis on the sameness changes into difference. Identities are no longer fixed but multiple. Homogenity turns into heterogenity and diversity. At the age of indeterminate and multiple truth, creativity and innovation denote survival strategies.
As Byrd L. Jones and Robert W. Maloy explain in Schools For An Information Age:
“Information technologies make it possible to assess diverse learning approaches and achievements so that students practice making choices on a daily basis. A growing inequality of incomes affects households and makes the equalizing functions of public schools more important than ever.” (1996:346)
Economical problems still play a crucial role in distributing knowledge and information. Those two protagonists, knowledge and information, try their best in acting for the social welfare to get the Nobel prize or Golden Globe awards in the end. But is it possible to write The End at the end of this movie? Is human progress not a continuous search for the best? “Postmodernism is marked by uneasy doubts about human progress, the singularity of truth, and the likelihood for compromise among conflicting interests” argue Jones and Maloy in Schools For An Information Age. They add to this that: “The affective domain-personal interactions involving emotional and volitional responses- are awkwardly handled in most classrooms. (1996:359)
A powerful and errorless computer cannot be a better friend than a trustworthy colleague who shares in mistakes and learn together from them. Instead of a selfish individualism, emphatic patterns of social interactions may bring equality in teaching and learning. One of the new graduate teachers in Jones-Maloy class wrote in the description of a future class in 2010: “We really do need to break down those classroom walls and make the world a classroom and everyone who is a member of that world, a teacher” (1996:11)
Borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition , as long as no self is an island, each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile more than ever, knowledge and information find their validity in humans interacting with each other.” (1984:15)
The interaction among inventive, emphatic minds can make the right hemisphere of our brains active. It is where nonlinear, intuitive and holistic actions take place. The out-of-date left hemisphere although sequential, logical and analytical need not be parallysed forever. As Daniel H. Pink examines in A Whole New Mind, the brain metaphor can be used to interpret our present and to guide our future.
“...Today, the defining skills of the previous era-the ‘left brain’ capabilities that powered the Information Age- are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous- the ‘right brain’ qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness and meaning- increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders. For individuals, families and organizations, professional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind.” (Daniel H. Pink:2005)
It seems credible that a whole new mind may be gotten by joyful plays with inventive ideas. Thus we can create the right human minds capable of communication since for Pat Kane, “play will be to the 21st century what work to the last 300 years of industrial society-our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.”(quoted by Pink) Even Albert Einstein is for play while he appreciates games which for him are the most elevated form of investigation. A good education system depends on using games appropriately in teaching and learning. The mind gets its best food through games. Strict authority allowing no games in learning makes the best part of the mind starve. The key to success is to risk applying unconventional habits. We are our risks. All humans may not be ideally set up to understand great thoughts, but they are ideally set up to understand them if presented in game forms. It is what is understandable that is useful.
Ayten Suvak
(To be continued)
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