Day Eighteen - Narratives, Metaphor and Robots

Day Eighteen

This is the closest I have come to not posting.  My day started at 2:30 am Dubai time after 3 hours of sleep and I am still going now at just after 12:40 am Dubai time the next day. 

I am, however back in Finland, so between those two points were taxi rides, a flight, two train rides and a bus journey.  So now I am home, in the kitchen, at the table with the white page of a MS Word document staring at me.  But fear not, as I do have some things to say today – this is not a space filler.  Having said that, I have no notes or plan, but rather some thoughts to share that I had during my flight.

Narratives and Metaphor

I would describe myself as a storyteller.  I think it was a part of my practice from the first time I ever taught although I gave it no real conscious thought that I can recall.  It just always seemed a very natural thing to illustrate whatever the content I had to teach by use of a narrative of some type.

At times these would be more formalized into ‘case studies’ especially in business.  My original subject area was business and finance and then I branched into economics, touching on a wide range of business subjects along the way of my career in education.  In all areas, even when teaching basic accounting, it seemed to give context and meaning if taught through the medium of a story.

https://pixabay.com/en/narrative-history-dream-tell-794978/

Story and metaphors, the second most used technique I have. One of course does not preclude the other.  During the early years of my career I do not think that I reflected much on this, it was just the way I did things.  As I became gradually more self-aware of elements of my practice then I began to reflect on these techniques as part of the pedagogical process.  In both cases I do believe that they can be used as part of the bridge and scaffolding between what students already understand of the world and their construction of new understanding.  Where it is more challenging is when the new knowledge actually challenges existing understanding or even contradicts the way in which the student believes the world to work.  This period of cognitive dissonance can be very uncomfortable for students as they struggle with the new knowledge or view of the world.

During my flight home I started to read “We Robot: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data” by Curtis White, which in turn introduced me the ideas of Hans Vaihinger and his Philosophy of As-If which was originally called the Philosophy of Scientific Fictions.  This started me down what I think is going to become a ‘rabbit hole’ on thoughts about narrative in philosophy. 

It is early days, but so far I am enjoying White’s book and his premise about the use of stories that are not truths of the world, that are used and presented as truths that we all come to accept.  It connected with me in particular with regard to the world of economics and finance which I do believe is presented as a story for the populace, but one that is far from the truth, if of course there is such a thing as objective truth.  I am particularly enjoying his critique of the writing of Tyler Cohen and in particular his book “Average is Over”.

As I say this is early days and my thoughts are still forming.  I feel sure that future posts are going to return to this.

Voice

One final point in this slightly overlong post, about the voice of the writer.   I think that my blog so far has experimented a little with different voices or styles, and I feel sort of fine with that, they are all me and are not fake.  I noticed that White also does that, which I found reassuring.  He is at his funniest when writing about the most serious matters, something that I really liked.  He also openly discussed the writing style of the book with his reader, which I liked.

This may also be something I return to.

And with that… it is late and I bid thee good night – ‘Abide’ dear friends.