Monday, October 17, 2016

Bernie's Blog Week 8: Fordham Futures: Career Epistemology

     It has been said that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. I would add a third. "That all twenty-first century Fordham graduates will be thinking for a living their entire lives." I believe this to be a non-negotiable proclamation. Only politicians seeking votes are actively promising the return of manufacturing jobs, there will be no manufacturing Renaissance in America. Robots and 3D printers will play a big part in how we make things moving forward, and the application and coordination of these computers will certainly involve thinking for a living.
     You are living in a time of chaotic and dramatic intergenerational demographic shifts. Not since the industrial revolution, when young people left their family farms to pursue manufacturing opportunities in urban centers across America, has our national economy experienced such uncertainty and ambiguity.
     Since the end of World War II, our economy has been evolving and revolving toward this idea, concept, knowledge economy that we find ourselves in today. From 1945 through 1975, the United States' economy operated as the most successful 'manufacturing monolith' in the history of the human experience. In 1945, we were the only industrial nation left on the planet, both our allies and enemies were decimated by the war. Ironically in 1975, it is the Japanese and German car industries, with smaller and more efficient cars, that begins the end of our global manufacturing dominance.
     Also in 1975, the microchip begins to enter the mainstream marketplace initiating what would become a full-blown 'knowledge economy'. A knowledge economy that has been growing for the last forty years, and with the arrival of algorithms, analytics, and 'big data' has developed into an idea and concept economy.
     Jeffrey Selingo in his 2016, There Is Life After College emphasizes that in our current and future liberal arts techno driven economies every job will be a tech job.
" Indeed the last decade has seen the rise of the 'digital humanities', a combination of classic humanities disciplines and computing. This has opened up new jobs and careers...in data visualization, digital mapping, and curating online collections. The same is true in journalism, where reporters who can manipulate massive databases to discover stories and illustrate anecdotes with solid statistics...Call it the new liberal arts, where digital awareness is just as important as rhetoric, writing, and critical thinking."
     Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which determines, 'How do we know what we know ?'. Epistemology is the study of the origin, processes, and validity of knowledge, beginning with questions of what we know and how we come to know what we think we know.
     My first introduction to epistemology came in 1977, through the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson's text: Steps To An Ecology of Mind. Gregory Bateson, arguably one of the finest social scientists of the 20th century, devoted his life's work to the development of a global epistemology, which would identify an integrated account of the capabilities of all living things to assimilate, organize, and communicate information. To form his theory, Professor Bateson relied on a wide range of intellectual fields, from anthropology to electronics, from psychology to mechanics, and from biology to philosophy.
     Gregory Bateson was a synthetic thinker of the highest degree, possessed with the ability to detect and analyze pattern independent of substance. He was able to locate and extract patterns existing and operating within a wide range of systems. Professor Bateson provides you with an excellent example of how to identify and track patterns and ideas within the systems you encounter in your academic experiences as you navigate your careers through the highly competitive realities of the 21st century.
     Jesuit education and Bateson's theory begin with noticing a difference. The difference stimulates and provokes our minds to activity, and the energy for this activity comes from our physiology. Your next step is to recognize that these differences begin to generate differences between the differences in the form of communication. Communication loops fueled by recognizing the differences that stimulate your internal awarenesses and connections, as well as, direct interaction with the world of work as you develop your own career epistemology.
     Professor Bateson believed that his integration of concepts elicited from one branch of research would assist in expanding possibilities where solutions and ideas are derived from other branches of knowledge. Through this multi-layered integration, evolutionary change can be viewed as an individual learning experience that integrates objective viewpoints into a subjective perspective from which we are able to operate across different logical categories in search of more relevant patterns of knowledge.
     Effective individual career epistemology development embraces integration and continually searches for patterns that identify what you know and how you know it. Through this integration you discover that your career is part of the interconnected and interactive context of the world of work. As you search for the parts of your experience that help you form your individual career epistemology you need to examine your multiple levels of knowing, how you know what you know. You need to search for the primary differences and distinctions that define your experience. Once you have established and identified these 'distinctive differences' you can place yourself in a position to organize the patterns of your experience which will help pave the way to identifying and understanding your career epistemology.
     In order to respond to this continuous evolutionary integration you need to develop an adaptive design. Where form and function collapse into an essential unity at both the microscopic or macroscopic level, where you place your experience in the larger context of the world of work. You need a flexible and adaptive design that assists you in describing how you think, and how you act. Flexibility is essential to this design if you are to manage the interactions between the parts of the mind that are triggered by your discovery of the differences around you. It is these differences that are the essence of your experience.
     You are surrounded by the need for flexibility in the interconnected quantum realities of the 21st century. And if you are to swim in this quantum soup you need to find flexibility in as many places as possible. As a counselor, teacher, and student for the past forty years, I have seen flexibility and collaboration fuel an interdisciplinary evolution of the social and physical sciences into a comprehensive celebration of the liberal arts, this transforming learning and teaching into the most interconnected of experiences.
     "The challenging part is coming up with structures that have the element of looseness to them, which means they can expand in any direction, go anywhere from anywhere - or come from anywhere - but also, have enough form that we can lock into something". These words of guitar guru Jerry Garcia, as he describes what it is like to make music with his bandmates, mirrors the words of leadership guru Margaret Wheatley as she outlines her parameters of structure. " How do we create structures that move with change, that are flexible and adaptive, even boundaryless, that enable rather than constrain ? How do we simplify things without losing both control and differentiation."
     Ms. Wheatley and Mr. Garcia share an affinity for the creation of community through communication. And though their disciplines differ, their sense and understanding of the promise and power of flexibility in the creation and development of structures remains refreshingly similar. This flexibility enhances your awareness, your understanding, and your ability to discover your unique career epistemology, or in other words, how you know what you know.

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