I felt lost in the flow of concepts and abstract thought exchange at our last Sunday's discussion.
This confusion was relevant for my process of learning. Ongoing uncertainty and lack of solid answers are giving me the chance to ask questions and find their intrinsic value in the context of my whole experience as a learner, as the book 'Knowing knowledge' suggests.
I had already made a conclusion and firm point to myself of what information, knowledge, learning and doing represent for me, I thought. The conversation took me to unchartered waters where I reiterated my tendency to like structures and organized content delivery.
Knowledge can be a trap if you codify your language and you manage to interact with others truly by means of that code.
Knowledge without empathy leads you to intellectual elitism and intellectual elitism is the antithesis of culture dissemination.
The process of learning is taking me to sharpen my tools of communication, whereas the empathic ability of people involved in a conversation with my language of learning is getting tested by new patterns of cultural and identity vocabularies.
I have always perceived the expression of one's artistic identity as ephemeral. Now I understand why somebody may consider arts as commodities, like someone said during the Skype call. Commodity was a new term for me anyway, which I had to search on the dictionary and find its definition. I tried to reflect on the social implications this statement involves. In Western society being an artist IS a commodity. It might be not, however an artist could be facing strong expectations from our society to be awarded with the recognition of his/her role as an artist.
Video making and artistic performance: my observation is the spectator who films a performance silently undertakes the role of a performer. The filmed performer becomes spectator of his/her own performance when he/she watches himself/herself in a video. So the context or the perspective through which one thing is observed can change individual roles, of course.
One's role is defined by the knowledge a person has built around her life learning experiences. The value that underpins the perception of our role may be filtered by our past process of learning, by our sedimented habits of processing information by following unidirectional trajectories.
How much flexibility have we developed in building our conviction about our knowledge, and then, being able to dismantle it? Is our artistic role defined by the concept we have of ourselves or is it altered by what the others see of us? Do they see a doer? An artist? Their art? Their perceived commodity of being an artist?
I took part to an inspiring webinar on online teaching, which offered me a new insight on the idea of watching and being watched. I will discuss it further in my next blog...
Hi Paola:)
ReplyDeleteI have been reading your blog and i wanted answered before but unfortunately i could not. I found it really interesting especially when you talking about knowledge and how lack of empathy can lead learner to intellectual elitism. I agree with you at some point and I think that the word elitism came along with democracy as a political system with negative impacts and the main arguments against that word are that is opposes equality, diversity and populism. But if we look in favor of this word than we can see us as a part of qualified learners, leaders, smart people qualified in their field who promoting knowledge, intelligence, understanding and awareness. The problem with words and their meaning is always debatable and has many meanings, and understand what you wanted to say regarding elitism and actually you are totally right cause knowledge without empathy lead to aggressive, opportunistic and one way of thinking and without that we can not questioning. Like Voltaire said that is the questions asked, not the answers offered, that reveal the quality of thought in others. Without doubting, asking , questioning we do not make a progress, we becoming that frog who jumped in the bucket of milk and since she did not find the answer she drown herself. Intellectual elitism could (if we look benefits and qualities of the whole meaning) represent a variety of characteristics such as education, critical thinking, curiosity, openness to ideas and that is all how i see essential to human progress in multiple ways.
Ergo, i want to conclude and just suggest that knowledge without empathy Can lead to non critical mass and people who are ready to listen but not ready to hear.:)
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