Reflection: The Power and Pathologies of the Ways of Knowing

The great thing about our ways of knowing is that we NEVER use only one way.  As a knower, I am constantly recieving (or gaining) input throuh my sense perception, my ability to reason, the use of language through communicaiton, and even my emotional state.  For example, when we sit in the doctoral room and have our discussions, each of us enters the room with a current emotional state. Unless one of us stays the night in the room and slept all day, each of us has emotional encounters throughout the day that may shape how we feel.  Additionally, we use perception to see each others' reacitons to material and hear responses to both concrete and abstract questions.  We reason with each other and even ourselves to make connecitons and conclusions, and then we use language to responed with a hopefully appropriate answer.  We use these ways of knowing to gain knowledge about research and the world around us.

However, each of these ways of knowing can create problems of knowing for us throughout this process.  For example....let's say that I have a faculty meeting before our Tuesday session and that faculty meeting focusses on English II End-of-course data and standard 6 of the NC teacher evaluaiton rubric.  Let's now say that the topic of discussion invovles the importance of data and a "hard" scientific approach to reserach and how it's the BEST way to come to reach conclusions or generalizations.  If this were to happen (and it doesn't because I have to leave too early to attend faculty meetings on Tuesdays), my emotions would clearly hinder my gaining of essential knowledge.  My emotions and reason are so closely linked, that one can get in the way of the other.  Sometimes I let reason win, and sometimes I let emotion win, but must of us teater somewhere in the middle of the Emotion-Reason continuum.

In terms of reserach, the positivists say that emotion serves no purpose in the gaining of knowledge, but what I find ineteresting is that a researcher would not be interested in that data if he or she were not somehow attached to this information emotionally.  If we don't care about it, what's the point in knowing it.  I find it interesting that I started to write this post before watching Kitchen Stories, but I left the post at this point so that I could watch the film.  Apparently the creators of this film agree. It's human nature to want to know people's stories, and we feel awkward and unnatural being positivistic. Emotion both hinders the empirical research but then inspires the observed to do the observations.