It was a real pleasure to meet everyone yesterday. I thought it was useful to think of the people in the room not just as individuals (though everyone is) but instead as an intersection, the intersection of their various communities. I am always excited by the crazy chicken-and-egg paradox: do communities shape individuals, or do individuals shape communities?
I was impressed by the AWESOME list of words we have for "community" or "group." I wish I had that paper now! But we obviously are so very sensitive and attuned to the types and nature of our communities (brigades, clans, families, units, neighborhoods............).
My argument -- it's an experiment, not a fact -- is that it's the communities we live in that give us the license and reason to make knowledge. I was driving my son (16) and his two friends in the car this morning and they were talking excitedly about new video games (World of Warcraft? Breach? MindCraft?) and I was so very much outside their conversation. But they were putting new experiences together, valuing the whole process, coming to categories, claims, implications, theories, and the like -- and all the while were creating themselves AND their communities. So that's what communities do, that's their function: to create discourse, to create knowledge. It doesn't have to be schoolish or academic knowledge, but it is valuable knowledge nonetheless. To whom is this knowledge valuable, where does it do work, where does it get traction? In the community.
Yesterday we talked about how a discipline and a major (same thing, seen from different perspectives) is always making knowledge, always abuzz with new claims, viewpoints, asssertions, and terms. I said that the really interesting ideas come from the points of TENSION in a discipline. Evolution/Creationism, for instance, is a point of tension in Biology (or was). These points of tension can be discovered in key terms and concepts. What are the key terms of your discipline?
How is knowledge made? By an active and often contentious discussion. The practice and study of how knowledge is made -- is that rhetoric?
First- I believe that both theories coincide: communities shape the individual as much as the individual shapes the community. One would not exist without the other. One person can make a great impact on the community. Likewise, the community one lives in may drastically alter and influence who that person become in life.
ReplyDeleteSecondly- I believe that knowledge is made everyday, without it even being acknowledged every time.
Nicole, I agree: the community and the individual shape each other. Of course, a community is nothing without individuals. I wonder if the same is true for an individual: we have to belong to communities in order to be "ourselves."
ReplyDeleteMaking meaning and knowledge is probably our most natural and sustained activity. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't try to make sense of things in just about every moment of the day. Interesting claims you make.