Epistemic Flow

It is not only because it is spring that I feel that aspects of myself that had been Persephonean are blooming; indeed, the contact with death this summer had also contributed to that feeling I am departing from: of being closed up under the earth, but still breathing - nourishing hope, and cultivating within myself those ideas that I feel to be life-giving. (Colleagues would say to me, as if I were living in the lap of luxury: how great that you are focusing on those ideas, we don't have time to - to which I would reply, I don't have time for anything else...)
And all of a sudden, I am seeing the ideas I had been cultivating everywhere else: as if all that time I had been stuck in the underworld, people above had been playing in colour.
One example is the podcast I referenced yesterday, which I finished today. Here is a link (very hard to link directly to specific podcast episodes! that should really change!) to the episode of The Moment where Koppelman interviews Godin.
Godin gives one of the best illustrations of epistemic fluency I have ever heard. (Epistemic fluency is something that I decided as of last year to include among my course objectives.) Godin says he once interviewed job candidates (before the age of the internet) by asking how many gas stations there are in the US. He notes how some would not even engage with this game, saying "I don't have a car", and getting up and leaving the interview. On the basis of how interviewees answered this question, he could gauge what it would be like to work with them.
That question is a great illustration of epistemic fluency, which can be defined as "learning how to solve problems when the correct answer is unknown". I am pretty sure that I got that definition from this 1972 CONARC paper. I have condensed the guidelines to accomplishing this (given in the paper) as follows:
1. learn/ask/define what the job is
2. learn/ask/define what resources are available
This fits in with the "approach to topics" that I give that draw on rhetoric.
I would just like to point out in closing how once again my hunch that all of the tools that had once been taught in language/literature classes are now taught more practically (cf. phronesis) in business classes. More than once, I have found myself even taking ideas for pedagogical approaches from studies that have emerged from business schools (a favourite author includes Peter Goodyear, who has a hefty tome about epistemic fluency).

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