Beliefs & Knowledge

Current State of Schooling, Society, & the Environment -- Exploration 1

Developed by Jeff Bloom

When we think about "beliefs," we typically consider ideas that are primarily involved in religion, spirituality, or some sort of personal philosophy. These ideas are certainly part of the scope of beliefs, but beliefs also include a much larger range of ideas or assumptions. We believe that what we see is real, true, and infallible. We believe that our thoughts are real, true, and infallible. We believe that there is a real, solid, and established "me." We may believe that what we read in a book, a newspaper, or on a website is true. We may believe that the Moon moves from east to west around the Earth, since it rises in the east and sets in the west. And, we have whole range of beliefs about animals, plants, men, women; about people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds; about how we are supposed to act and relate in different situations; and so forth. Many of these beliefs may be difficult to describe or even notice in oneself. They often just appear to be self-evident truths. Our beliefs and assumptions act as filters for our perceptions and frameworks for how we make sense of our worlds.

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Story

When I look at a spider, I see what I think is a spider. I eliminate, without even noticing, whether it is a Black Widow or Brown Recluse. And, then relax and observe it for a bit. On a field study with my university students, a group of students calls me over to the edge of the stream. They point to a large spider stuck on a rock surrounded by water. After a few moments of looking at the spider and its predicament, I stooped down and put my hand out next to the rock. The spider immediately walked over onto my hand. As I stood up a young male student screamed and ran off. The rest of the students tagged along as I walked the spider to a safe location, while repeatedly asking me if the spider was going to bite me. My reply to that question was, "I'm not doing anything to upset him. And, I just saved his life. He has no reason to bite me." The difference in beliefs and assumptions among people affect the way we react and think about all sorts of things. In this case, it was about spiders. Our filters can trigger a fear response or trigger all sorts of other types of responses. For me, having a "cage" put over my head and moved into an MRI triggers an uncontrollable fear response, even though I consciously and rationally know that there is no issue where I'm going to be in any kind of danger. But, in an MRI, I am just like the student who ran away from the spider while screaming. Everyone has a multitude of filters based on beliefs and assumptions of all kinds. They affect how we see or react to other people, to dogs, to cats, to what we read or hear, and to everything we think and perceive.

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The problems that tend to arise from the dynamics of beliefs and assumptions range from issues with communication between individuals to global misunderstandings and conflicts. If I said:

"My child learns best in schools that are highly structured."

what does that mean to you? What does "learning" mean? What comes to mind when you think of "learning?" What does "school" mean to you? And, what does it mean for a school to be "highly structured?" What this sentence means to me is probably quite different from what it means to you. Think about the possibilities and variations in meaning. We will explore the ideas of learning and schooling later on, but for now ponder possible meanings.

How do you think the meanings of the following words or phrases differ among people in your own community and in different countries and cultures?
• mask • religion • inner city • safety • security • health • hunger • risk • trust • courage • home • family
What sorts of conflicts arise from conflicting beliefs and assumptions between individuals, between groups, between cultures, and between nations?

We will explore more about the nature and dynamics of beliefs in the Learning Salons, but in the meantime, you may find it interesting to investigate some of your personal beliefs. The following are by no means a complete set of activities for exposing your beliefs. However, they may provide a glimpse of some of our beliefs that go mostly unnoticed.

EXPLORATIONS

If you are doing some of these activities during the times of the Covid-19 Pandemic, please adhere to wearing a mask and maintaining appropriate social distancing, especially when inside or around large groups of people.

1. The challenge with this activity is to maintain some awareness of what you're thinking. It may help to place some degree of focus on your body, breathing, and the whole environment around you. You can walk at a normal pace or sit on a bench or something of that sort. It this is during a pandemic, try to select a location that isn't too crowded, but has some people walking by. You may be able to do this activity during normal outings, such as while shopping or going to work. As you proceed with this activity, try to notice how you react as you pass by other people. Are you attracted? Do you try to avoid them? Are you making judgments about the people you see? What kinds of judgments? Try to jot down your observations when you get a chance. If your time is limited in any one place. you can repeat this activity in different settings.
   
2. Try paying attention to the misunderstandings that arise in conversations with people. Sometimes such misunderstandings are pretty apparent. You or the other person my feel perplexed or react very differently from what might be expected by the person who uttered a particular statement. If that occurs or if you just want to check in on the meanings of certain words in a conversation, just ask the other people what they mean by a certain word or phrase. Share your meaning with them, as well. Such diversions in discussions can be amazingly illuminating. Afterwards, jot down your findings and share them with others in the forum or comments section.

There are no right or wrong answers to the questions posed in the above activities. And, coming up with answers for some of these questions may be very difficult. However, the process is important. Have your ideas about beliefs changed? Have these activities brought up other questions? Did the activities spark new insights?

Again, the notion of "knowledge" will be explored in greater depth in the Learning Salons, but for now, we can dabble with the basic nature of what we might mean by knowledge. As you may guess from the previous exploration of beliefs, what we think we know may not be real, true, or infallible. I do need to insert a note here, that beliefs are part of our knowledge. Although beliefs may be explicit, they may be subtle. And, these subtleties can have a huge effect on what we consider to be our knowledge or what we know. But, in addition to the relationships between beliefs and knowledge, there are many other aspect of knowing that we rarely consider to be a part of "knowledge."

What we know is based on a wide range of past personal experiences with the world in which we live, with other people, we a variety of objects, and, to a lesser extent, with the "knowledge" we were supposed to learn at various stages of schooling. In addition to all of these experiences that have contributed to what we know and believe, we also have all sorts of emotions, aesthetic reaction, values, imagery, humor, fantasy, expectations, and so forth that are intertwined with all sorts of conceptual or factual knowledge. Much of this dimension of knowing may have arisen as you explored the previous "belief" activities.

I suspect that pretty much everything we know has in some way been a social creation. All of us put our own unique spins on this knowledge with the range of emotions, aesthetics, beliefs, and so on intermixing with our own unique ways of connecting new knowledge to pre-existing knowledge. Although we may share similarities in knowledge within a specific culture or social grouping, there is variation across individuals.

In terms of our discuss on schools, society, and environment, our focus is more on the shared aspects of knowledge and belief. Such shared characteristics of knowledge tend to manifest in and characterize larger social contexts. We share the "scripts" of how to talk and act in certain contexts. These scripts, at their best, allow us to function without expending as many cognitive or even physical resources for certain repetitive tasks. At their worst, the scripts allow us to avoid real contact with others. We can hide our vulnerability and our humanity behind the scripts.

Our scripts and assumptions about life and living do not always hold up outside of our familiar social and cultural contexts. Even within the U.S. and Canada, more subtle versions of these script and assumption differences occur as we move from one location to another. These variations also occur from one context to another. A corporate executive or federal politician dropped into a public middle school classroom and told to teach will not have the scripts, knowledge, or beliefs to know what to do. This executive would be facing a huge culture shock. And, yet these are the very people who have a tremendous impact on what happens in schools and classrooms, as well as in all sectors of society, and in how we relate to the natural environment.

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Story

In the mid-1990's, I went on my first trip to India, followed by visits to Singapore and Malaysia. Up to that point, my whole experience of "culture shock" involved moving from one part of the U.S. to another, from the U.S. to Canada, and from one part of Canada to another. These moves certainly involved culture shock, but not to the degree of going from Canada to first-stop Mumbai, India. I knew I was in store for a shock. In fact, it started as I I was flying across India at night, looking down, and realizing I was about to step into a whole new and radically different context.

The smell of Mumbai was the first shock. I was warned that the smell would engulf me once the plane doors were opened, but that person lied. The smell actually penetrated the plane on its descent into the Mumbai area. It took weeks to get the smell out of my clothes. The smell was some combination of exhaust fumes, industrial pollution, body odor, sewage, and death. But, interestingly the smells disappeared as soon as you moved out of the metropolitan area. In the country, the air, which was hot and humid, was clean and as refreshing as hot and humid could be.

One of the biggest realizations I had about the culture shock was that none of my scripts worked. I had to think about everything and rework how I did things. I couldn't brush my teeth in the same way. I used bottled water to moisten and clean my toothbrush. I had to take extra care not getting water into my mouth in the shower. I couldn't fill up a glass of water from the tap. The grapes that were left for me in my hostel room could not be eaten, but the oranges and bananas could be eaten. But first, I cleaned the orange skins with an iodine solution, since I had to handle the skins while I ate the orange slices. As a foreigner, I had to think about pathogens to which locals were immune. In one instance, I was stopped by a colleague as I reached for the glass or water during dinner at a restaurant. It was my automatic script in action. After she stopped me, she ordered a bottle of water.

In one school we visited, children sat on the dried cow dung floors of villages houses, which served as classrooms during the day. The girls were dressed in pink and the boys in blue. None of what I was now a part was at all familiar. As a teacher in the U.S. and Canada, if children sat on the floor, it was on carpet, otherwise they sat on chairs at desks or tables. However, the teaching was familiar. It followed in the teacher as knowledge authority tradition, where the teacher spewed out information, while children took notes. But, the familiarity pretty much ended there.

In Malaysia, where many of my scripts worked and the basic context was familiar, I was caught embarrassingly off-guard, while I turned myself into the classic ugly American. I bought what I thought was a thank you card, only to find that it was a sympathy card once I took a better look back in my hotel room. I went back to the shop, where I had just purchased the card. They wouldn't let me exchange the card. All purchases were final. For what probably cost me 50 Canadian cents or 30 US cents. I made a complete fool of myself vehemently arguing with the poor people who had no idea why I was upset. The culture shock turned around and bit me in the butt.

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Both beliefs and knowledge of individuals, communities, cultures, and so forth contribute considerably to the nature and dynamics of our current situations of schooling, society, and environment. Schooling, society, and the environment are all combinations of intertwined complex systems. We have been influenced by René Descartes' notions of positivism - there is one absolute truth that can be determined through science, reductionism - we can understand the whole of something by understanding the parts, and mechanism - all of nature can be understood as a mechanistic system. Developed and developing societies are framed in these three worldviews or paradigms. From such perspectives, we think that we can separate each system, such as school, society, and environment, and tweak each system to "fix" it. But, it doesn't work that way. From the perspective of complexity, where truth is dependent on multiple perspectives, the parts are only a small view of understanding the whole, and only machines and inanimate objects operate mechanistically. The natural world works in unpredictable and nonlinear ways. Just about everything in our world is interconnected with, intertwined with, and interdependent upon everything else. Our knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, and so forth are all intertwined with all other complex systems in our world.

EXPLORATIONS

1. Can you find any examples of specific assumptions, beliefs, or other knowledge that seem to appear in people's views of schooling, society, and our relationships to the environment?
   
2. What particular assumptions can you find that appear in the news media, in advertisements, from politicians, from "leaders" of particular movements, and among the general population that seem to perpetuate the way we think about schooling, society, and the environment?

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