Module I: Knowledge Structures and Moral Order

1. Module I: Knowledge Structures and Moral Order • Knowledge and Experience • Knowledge and Practice • Multicultural Perspectives: Deconstructing Orientalism • Historical Perspectives: Deconstructing the Enlightenment • multiple perspectives of the processes that shape the production of knowledge (and representations), and its circulation; how knowledge creates epistemes (schemas for processing of information) and how epistemes can be critiqued

2. Module I: Knowledge Structures and Moral Order • experience: knowledge built through community memory and immediate reality, localization of experience in contrast to ‘hyperreality’ of mediated experience; communities seek autonomy and self-reflection • practice: formal knowledge systems (education) vs. informal knowledge (situational); legitimation of knowledge through traditional modernist science regulates what can be said under the flag of scientific authority; practical knowledge is excluded from this discourse yet it is the practical knowledge accumulated through work / practice that may influence the creation of knowledge and innovation; practitioner research vs. expert research (practitioners closer to purposes, cares, everyday concerns, and interests of work); need to acknowledge the progressive impact of practical knowledge

3. Knowledge and Experience: deCerteau “The grand narratives from television and advertising stamp out or atomize the small narratives of streets or neighborhoods” (deCerteau, pp. 142-3)

4. Knowledge and Practice: Lave JPF mathematics in action vs. story problems and the classroom context Cases: bowling, Weight Watchers, abandoning problems (supermarket calculations of prices)

5. The Theory of Practice: Social Practice Approach • Cognition is “socially situated activity” • Comprises of person-acting, activity and setting • Person experiences the self: • As in control of activities & interacting with the setting • As generating problems in relation to the setting • As controlling the problem-solving process • Investigation for cognition should be located in everyday activities of the lived-in world

6. Case Studies • Adult Math Project • Shoppers correctly computed to decide best-buy items 93% of the time but did poorly on arithmetic test 59% of the time • Weight Watchers Study • Dieters substituted equivalence for measuring activities • Money Management Study • Creation of different stashes of money demonstrated the assembly of quantitative relations in situationally specific ways

7. Conclusions • People learn most effectively in the lived-in world when using all their physical senses through hands-on experience • Knowledge transfer is not effective when done out of context • Problem solving activities are not always a quest for the ‘right answer’ • Problems may be redefined in the course of solving them, leading to different problems and resulting in new or changed knowledge • Need? / caution regarding the predictive value of school testing for success in the workplace

8. Implications (for Information Work) • Knowledge is not a compendium of facts but a process of knowing (librarians need to grow already acquired knowledge to evolve that base) • Knowledge does not have to come from a think tank to be of value / knowledge created by just plain folks in everyday activities has value • Be on guard for pre-conceptions since the self is socially constituted • Give your own examples of knowledge acquired in everyday activities

9. Source (for Lave): • Edith Beckett and Margaret Eng presentation slides (Spring 2004)