WAYS OF KNOWING

How do you know?
How do you know you know?
How do you know what you know?


Story is one way we negotiate our world and communicate our experiences. In story we can meander around the facts and the details. We may even have forgotten the actual details or stretched the facts. We may have completely changed the names and places and conversations in the original event--- yet we can still tell the story-- the true story.

Truth does not always reside in the facts.

During the CAWP Summer Institute, we have been privileged to hear several powerful stories in which the writers readily confess that the words are based on real events, yet not all the facts are accurate.

We still heard the Truth in their stories.

Sometimes we just know.  We cannot explain why and how we know.  We just know.


Women's Ways Of Knowing: The Development Of Self, Voice, And Mind 10th Anniversary Edition, a landmark book first published in 1986,  explores five powerful ways that women come value and to know what they know.   This book considers the intuitive, sometimes metaphoric ways of knowing that differ from the linear ways of our male counterparts, yet are valid just the same.

Deborah Tannen has looked at ways we speak -- our language may also differ in ways that  modify how we share what we know.

Sometimes what we know gets in our way of understanding something wondrous, marvelous or miraculous.  Such is the case in The MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH  by Julius Lester .  His knowledge of eagles their power, and their potential to kill, led him to not trust the knowledge and Truth that his wife had witnesses or what he saw with his own eyes.  The book ends with a tragedy that results from this clashing knowledge:

And that is how murder came into the world.  The man knew too much, because he thought he knew what he had never seen and never experienced.  

 How do we know what we know?
 Does it allow for new knowing?

In Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through the Power of Language, G. Lynn Nelson uses a river as an analogy for all of our life experiences.  He suggests two ways to know the river. We can observe and measure and number. We can calculate and analyze. We can record the facts and details.

...Or we can jump into the river.  We can submerge ourselves in the wet. We can  immerse ourselves in the ripples, the swirl, the sounds, the floating, the buoyancy.


Earlier this month, READ WAVE posted on  Facebook, a related quote by Dave Barry about the ocean:

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you’ve been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

Submersion and immersion give us ways to jump into knowing-- knowing by experience, knowing by doing, knowing with your hands and feet and skin.

Like Nelson, Jallaludin Rumi, the renowned Sufi poet, also recognized two ways of knowing, in his poem, Two Kinds of Intelligence.  He distinguishes between the child who "memorized facts and concept from books and what the teacher says" and  the other kind of knowing that is "fluid and flows from within you."

Oliver Wendell Holmes measures are knowing and intellects in stories---not the ones from above but floors in a building. Heather Rader opened a Choice Literacy article on Intellect with his words:

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story people. Two-story people compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story people idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.

How many stories are you?

Context forms and informs our knowing. Context creates the potential for exposure, encounters, and possibilities. Context also limits the same.  We all know the folktale about the blind men who encounter an elephant. Each touches only part of the animal and believe it to be the whole of it. So they come away variously believing that an elephant is a pillar, a snake, spear, a cliff, a fan or a rope. Only the last man moves around and over the animal, encountering more aspects of  the elephant-- enough to sufficiently discover its totality.

Ed Young has created a beautifully vivid version of this traditional folktale,Seven Blind Mice.

What do we know?

How do we know ?

How do we know what we know?

Where do we know? and When?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Write about a time when you knew something that you just knew. You may not have be able to explain why and how you knew. How did your knowing affect other people?  Did your knowledge conflict with someone else's knowledge?

Write a poem about several different ways of knowing or intellects that you use.

Write about a time when context limited or enhanced your knowledge.

WHOSE STORY?

What is the truth?

Who tells your truth?

We all know the story of the Seven Blind Mice.  
They found an unusual something by the pond. Each variously went to investigate.
Each returned with a different conclusion about what it was.

A pillar. A snake. A spear. A great cliff. A fan. A rope.

When the  seventh mouse got to the something, she ran from one end to the other, up and down, to each side, and all around.  

She concluded that when all the parts discovered by each mouse  were considered together, the something could only be an elephant.

Our stories are like that sometimes.  We may each know a piece, a part, a sliver of the story.

Our version may not match the story of the same event told by our friend or spouse or other family member.

We tell stories based on the lenses we wear,  the individual perspectives from which we observe the world and experience our lives. (See related previous post Wrapping Our Words in a Container Lining.)

Perspectives can vary in many ways.  

Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne allows us to have a look at how differently we each see people, places and situations.  This book allows us to see how our various perspectives encounter and confront each other, interact and negotiate meaning, and ultimately, determine how we act. 

Each individual voice in the text is given its own style, feel, and font.

Each individual sees the people and events in the park through distinct lenses.


How is your voice distinct from that of others? 

What font would represent your voice?

Our creative voices are just as distinct as our seeing, hearing, living voices.  We construct and represent our ideas to the world. 

In Once Upon A Cool Motorcycle Dude by Kevin O'Malley, a boy and girl have to collaborate to tell  a fairy tale to their class.  

The results will delight all ages as the two wrestle with their very different perspectives of what should happen in a fairy tale and how it should be told. 

As their joint tale unfolds, speech bubbles allow us to peek at their thoughts and gain insight into their conflicting creative processes.  Again, changes in fonts illuminate different voices in the story.


As we think about perspectives, we  often delight in discovering the other side of the story, we usually want to know what other involved parties are thinking.

The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! by A. Wolf as told to Jon Scieska gives us a humorous opportunity to think about the other side and to consider alternative motives and causes of actions in this familiar tale.


Who do you believe?  

How do you determine truth?

Sometimes it is our own perspectives that will differ depending on our continuing experiences and development.


In Marianthe's Story: Painted Words and Spoken Memories by Aliki we follow the growth  of Marianthe's  language, and power to give shape and words to her story, as she initially paints her story, gradually learns English, and finally, gains more confidence in her abilities to use this new language to tell her story. The text is comprised of  two distinct, yet related stories.  

 


How are our stories different if we use art, or music or some other sensory form other than words to tell it?

What are advantages of using these forms? What are advantages of using words?

In my classroom, one of my major goals in teaching Social Studies and current events, as well as just fostering our living together in community, was always to have as many voices as possible openly heard and critically examined.  This applied to the people and situations about which we read, as well as to ourselves.

There are many books that support that work and allow students to look at many sides.

Witness by Karen Hesse and Bull Run by Paul Fleischman are two excellent examples of such texts.

In Witness, the citizens of a small Vermont town , tell their stories in poetry, as the Ku Klux Klan comes to their town in 1924. The characters include a young African American girl, a  young Jewish immigrant,  a bootlegger, a preacher, an unmarried farm woman.. and the list continues to include black and white, young and old, upstanding and criminal, those who support the Klan. those opposed, and those who are targeted.  Beliefs and reactions are shared by each in poems.

In Bull Run, the first battle of the Civil War is recounted in short prose pieces by 16 participants, from all walks of life--Northern and Southern, male and female, white and black, young and old. 

And finally, I always relied  on Phillip Hoose to provide my students with a child's perspective

no matter what period or events we were studying in history.  We Were There Too! Young People in U.S. History provides accounts of many children and teens that participated in our history.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Reflect on a recent event in your life or current events in  your community.

Write a short  poem or prose piece about this event.

Now think about other people who participated, witnessed, or were in some other way involved.

Write another short poem or prose piece from their perspective.

Try writing more pieces, so that you have several about the same event.

What did you discover by examining different  perspectives through your writing?