Re:We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know (2016)
by jfengel on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:35AM
(#20574722)
Yeah, not quite sure what it's doing here. It's kind of a glimpse into a domain that's quite foreign to a lot of the regulars.
For us, you can sort of think of this article as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sociology is a very different approach to academics than we generally get in STEM. The things you learn are more complex and more open-ended. It's not like a science class, where the correct answer is already known and it's up to you to learn it. Even the best ideas are open to critique, because they're very preliminary.
Learning to learn in that environment felt very unfamiliar to me. I would throw up my hands on the first day in class, because it felt clearly wrong. And it was, but that didn't mean that there wasn't something to learn. The field advances by discussion, but constructing that discussion is difficult because it's potentially open-ended and very prone to being derailed.
So the article is kind of interesting on that score, if only to see what other people have to be told. Though I'm not sure it'll inspire really good discussion here, either.
For us, you can sort of think of this article as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sociology is a very different approach to academics than we generally get in STEM. The things you learn are more complex and more open-ended. It's not like a science class, where the correct answer is already known and it's up to you to learn it. Even the best ideas are open to critique, because they're very preliminary.
Learning to learn in that environment felt very unfamiliar to me. I would throw up my hands on the first day in class, because it felt clearly wrong. And it was, but that didn't mean that there wasn't something to learn. The field advances by discussion, but constructing that discussion is difficult because it's potentially open-ended and very prone to being derailed.
So the article is kind of interesting on that score, if only to see what other people have to be told. Though I'm not sure it'll inspire really good discussion here, either.