From Ignorance as Deficit to Ignorance as a Way of Knowing: To Journey Humbly, Curiously, Creatively and Compassionately

Abstract

Traditional public schooling tends to privilege knowledge and knowing, and work with it in ways that are compartmentalized, dual and hierarchical. Within this paradigm ignorance is most often defined as a deficit; a hole to be filled with more knowledge. Employing the work of contemporary scholars, thinkers and educators in fields as widely divergent as ecological sustainability, curriculum scholarship and biological sciences, as well as writings by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and 17th century philosopher René Descartes, this work complicates contemporary views of Cartesianism and reconfigures ignorance as a positive and generative way of knowing. Engaged in a way informed by Hermeneutics, Narrative Inquiry and Buddhist philosophical and spiritual principles, the hope is to open space for an epistemology of ignorance characterized by humility, curiosity, creativity and compassion that is sensitive to ideas of a deep and conscious complicity, interconnection and interbeing.