Learning as Open Conversation

A core practice in any of the forums that we create through our institute is dialogue. We have a commitment to dialogue. To learning through interaction.

There are many beliefs that we are enacting through this commitment, and we are learning to articulate some of these.

In recently reading from Sylvia Gherardi's Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning, I found a framing that helps contextualize some of this commitment and belief. Gherardi gives attention to "conventional wisdom of organizational learning -- information delivery from a knowledgeable sources to a target lacking that information." This is nothing particularly new, but it does describe a deep habit in western culture learning. Further, it shows up in the way that we design conferences and learning forums.

Gherardi further describes three views of science production: 1) idealist -- a form of rhetoric of scientific writing which relies on the emotionality tied to the idea of universal and disinterested knowledge, to knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. 2) militant -- the imposition of language and form such that some knowledge achieve hegemony while others are marginalized. 3) the production of science as an open conversation in which diverse discourses on knowledge meet and clash, each of them with its own system of representation (its own grammar and syntax).

It is this latter position that we give our attention too. We simply ask the question, what else is possible for us to advance forward if open conversation were our mode of discovery and practice?