A wise old own sat in an oak,
The more he heard, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that old bird?
English Nursery Rhyme. Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. (1951) p. 403
I have been quiet on BlogJune for the last couple of days because I don’t really have a lot to say. I don’t think it is because I am disengaging.
I’ve spent the last 15 years or so in positions where I shared what I knew. A lot. Where I tried to model vulnerability and openness to learning by publicly modelling not-knowing, but having a go anyhow.
After the shock of my position being made redundant and all the readjustments and uncertainty that involves, I finally got to switch off that constant scanning the horizon for updated knowledge in my teaching and research areas.
While I happily still keep up with the discipline, for a decade I felt like I was letting my students, employer, profession and work colleagues down if I didn’t at least ATTEMPT to know all there was to know about library, records and archives technology and its implications.
I did this while teaching a unit where I constantly reassured my students that knowing facts was far less important than knowing disciplinary concepts and language, where disciplinary information could be found, what authoritative evidence looked like and building networks of knowledgeable people with whom they could nut things out. Knowing who, how and what to ask being far more important than building a large network of interlinking facts carried solo in one’s head like an encyclopaedia.
Not knowing something was never a problem, I told my students. Not knowing when and how to fix that knowledge gap was.
Yet…
I felt that I needed to keep up-to-date with all the things, all the time.
I probably didn’t actually have to.
I also felt like I could not advise students to be curious and ask questions and build knowledge collaboratively if I was not doing the same. Much of the content on this blog was around trying to do that. Showing my “working out” as I tried to make sense of disciplinary knowledge.
I no longer feel like I have to walk with my head in a huge cloud of interlinked, constantly overflowing, knowledge that threatens to spill and float away if I don’t hold it aloft. I don’t have to seek, gather and integrate every new piece of vaguely-relevant knowledge that drifts past. I don’t have the same motivation to share in the way I did.
It’s not that I’ve stopped caring. It’s that my personal relationship to how we create and maintain disciplinary knowledge has shifted to more of a listening role.
(As I previewed this post, I noticed the owl in my header image staring out like it has for the last 15 years or so. “‘Yes”, it blinked at me, “you’ve finally caught up”.)