My maternal grandfather passed away of old age during the height of the pandemic. As a man known for his love and abundance of clocks, each grandchild received a clock. My dad picked out a clock in a state of disrepair as a project for him and a gift for me. It happened to be my favorite – a Black Forest cuckoo clock from Germany with hunting and natural elements that draw on my heritage.
My parents live in Michigan so I didn’t actively watch my dad fix the clock, but I did receive frequent updates. As a mechanically minded man, my Dad has always embodied tacit knowledge: That which grows from experience and lives in your body (Thomas & Brown, 2011). When my dad first got the clock, he took it apart to see if cleaning the movement would fix the problem. Once it was apart, he had no clue how to put it back together! He turned to YouTube where he found a video and put the clock back together moment by moment, piece by piece. Unfortunately, the clock still didn’t work so he found a clock shop in Frankenmuth, MI that specializes in Black Forest Cuckoo clocks. There, he purchased a new movement and a few other parts that had wear.
Inquiry
When I talked to him about this process as a part of my research for this blog, I was struck by the complexity of his thinking. He told me that he asked, “How do I solve this problem?” His learning was not so much about knowing how to do something, rather figuring out where to learn how to do something. He also reiterated to me that when he got this clock, he knew nothing about clocks or clock movements.
This is the premise of inquiry learning and the new culture of learning. The process of inquiry “forces us to explore the various ways in which the information we possess can open new sets of questions” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 83). What don’t we know, what can we ask about it? (Thomas & Brown, 2011). Also, “reframing knowledge as a where question underscores the increasing importance of context” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 93). To create context, we must understand the where of a piece of information (Thomas & Brown, 2011).
Passion, Imagination, Constraint
My dad is very passionate about two things: Building and tinkering. He would be the first to say he is not “an academic,” but the New Culture of Learning (Thomas & Brown, 2011) would argue that in this day and age, no one really is in the traditional sense. “In the digital world, we learn by doing, watching, and experiencing” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 76). Up until the pandemic, “almost every technique and practice we have for understanding how we learn has been about the explicit – the content – in a stable world” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 76). When the pandemic hit, we shifted our practice dramatically, and we can and should continue to ride this wave as we move toward learning in a context of rapid change.
The idea of providing constraints strikes me as a key concept in the New Culture of Learning. “If you want to drive an architect crazy, give them a large, smooth, flat piece of land and then watch them spin out of control trying to figure out what to do with it. If you really want to make them happy, give them something that’s impossible to build on” (Thomas, 2012). It is the limitation – the constraint – coupled with a passion that drives the imagination.
The constraints placed on my grandfather’s cuckoo clock were the characteristics of and malfunctions specific to that clock. My dad had to get imaginative with his solutions. For example, some of the woodwork was broken. Dad was able to find the horn for the clock online, but he couldn’t find the specific antlers. He purchased a pair that are plastic and fit perfectly with the coloring and design. No one would know if I didn’t mention it! I hope he’s not disappointed that I wrote it here.
The Collective
The way that my dad used the “collective” – or the vast information resource – included YouTube videos, Google searches, Amazon, and a clock shop. Even though he didn’t interact through creation, his passive interactions – YouTube views, shopping, and google searches – had an effect on the collective information. I think of this as the learning loop. As individual learning occurs in a collective space, it affects the environment which changes in response. Therefore, new learning can and must happen.
Image created by Karin Stateler in Canva.
A rather new example of this is a new web application called Connect Hub that our district uses to track coaching data. Suzana Somers built Connect Hub when she saw a need to track data on instructional coaching. She didn’t have the app that she needed, so she built it! Because our district is one of the founding users, suggestions that we offer Suzana will have a real-time effect on how the app improves. As we use Connect Hub, we learn, we affect the environment, and the environment changes as a result.
Combining Tacit Knowledge, Intuition, and the Collective
I first encountered the concept of tacit knowledge in Jay Silver’s TED Talk, Hack a Banana, Make a Keyboard (2013). He spoke of a Not Back to School Camp, in which the leaders challenged students to build something as long as they made it from items found in nature. A student created a piece he called “fire,” with sticks fixed to the trunk of a tree. When others asked the student how he did it he said, “I don’t know, but I can show you” (Silver, 2013). “He doesn’t know, but he can show you. So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be” (Silver, 2013).
As I reflect on the importance of the collective, I’m going to leave you with my favorite quote from Silver’s TED Talk:
“I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that. But as I’m kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff, I’m realizing that my idea of a perfect world really can’t be designed by one person or even by a million experts. It’s really going to be seven billion pairs of hands, each following their own passions, and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens. And that’s the world I really want to live in” (Silver, 2013).
References
Silver, J. (2013, May 16). Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard! TED. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_silver_hack_a_banana_make_a_keyboard?language=en
Thomas, D. (2012, September 13). A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM. YouTube. Retrieved March 22, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM80GXlyX0U
Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.