The third eye
Lotte Ahlstrand, National Institute of Working Life
The third eye – a special kind of awareness, or perceptiveness that skilled persons in their practice sometimes acquire after many ears of experience – a metaphor for practical skills that are based at experience but at the same time are more than experience, because you must have a personal ability to use and learn from experience.
Her own background – 12 years work in day nurseries and then university studies as a mature student – made her aware of the different traditions of knowledge. The problem was that the formal knowledge and also the academic language are considered being of greater value compared to practical skills and every-day language.
After the university studies Lotte started to work as a leader for a project about apprenticeship in child care, working with 20 women who were really experienced in professional child care. They started to describe their experience-based knowledge, to get answers to some questions, like "Why do some people become more skilled than others, having similar experience, working for similar time?"
The method was reflection about concrete examples from their work. By describing and reflecting on examples of what they did and how they did it, they put a pinpoint on advanced skills, which usually are not valued as skills.
This work gave Lotte Ahlstrand some clues and affected her way of looking at knowledge:
- Knowledge is a movement, always on its way somewhere.
- Women were experts on learning rather than knowing. They were skilled in using their experiences and mistakes, in order to learn what they need to handle a situation.
- A part of being skilled working with human beings is the ability to see many dimensions in a problem.
To illustrate the different aspects of knowledge, a dialog between a daughter, Anna, and her dead mother was read. What Anna is talking about, her mother is. It is a difference between knowledge limited to be only in mind, and knowledge in one’s whole body.
A Norwegian philosopher, Kjell S Johannessen suggests an alternative perspective, talking about three different aspects of knowledge:
- Proposional knowledge = knowledge of facts
- Can be expressed in general terms, theories, rules and principles
- Possible to describe and define exactly
- Possible to learn theoretically, like reading a book.
- Skill knowledge = knowledge we have in our hands and bodies, handicraft skills
- Knowledge of familiarity = ability to judge and act in many different situations that might occur
- To be able to handle the unique, and unpredictable.
- Not possible to define in a precise way, you must use examples.
- We can develop our knowledge of familiarity by reflection and through dialogue with colleagues. The problem is that possibilities for dialogues seam to be limited in the working life of today.
Practical and theoretical
knowledge do not have to be each other’s opposite.
We need them both, they complement each other.
Knowledge of familiarity and skills knowledge are
sometimes called silent knowledge. What we can do
is more than we can say or explain.
