Smelly Knowledge

If it just so happens that you have not cleared this blog from your RSS stream, this is not a mistake: after some consideration, I have decided to dust off and restart the Smelly Knowledge blog. If you just happen to stumble upon this for the first time, I bid you welcome.

I was once accused of being an “academic” — and over time, that prescient “Anymouse” became correct in their assumptions. I am now a third year doctoral student in the Curriculum and Instruction program in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College in the Science and Technology Education Program. For the 2009-2010 academic year, my wife was named a Mandel Jerusalem Fellow. We packed up our life, our house, and two children and are now living in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem, Israel.

While here in Israel for the fall semester, I am lucky enough to participate in an independent study with Dr. Dennis Shirley. He and I are treating this independent study as a way for me to expand my base in educational philosophy and social research. My hope is that I will become a part of the conversation around developing a humanistic approach to science and technology education and curriculum, so I will be reading through a good deal of work in philosophy and the human sciences. I am now using this blog–in part–to sort through what I am reading, and to develop a better conception of what a “humanistic approach to science and technology education and curriculum” actually means. I will be taking cues from James Donnelly and Glen Aikenhead, but I hope to infuse an approach with the works of the thinkers I am most interested in–such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Martin Buber, Erich Fromme, and Steven Jay Gould, among many others–as well as direct some more attention to technology in education.

I have little doubt that these thinkers could have foreseen the ways that science and technology have become a part of our society and our educational system, and most of these thinkers are not considered “educational thinkers” (even though most–if not all–wrote about education). Following the lead of the story of Isaac in Genesis, I will dig these wells and sources of wisdom anew, mining their depths and exploring their possibilities for these times. This is quite a fitting metaphor for a year in Jerusalem.

As luck would have it, we are renting our apartment from Professor Emeritus of Jewish Education Michael Rosenak. His shelves are full of wonderful books, so I will be drawing from his library for my independent study as well as the occasional foray into other areas. Of course, I will be interacting with more than books–I am setting up meetings with educational faculty members here in Israel, and my conversations with them will be part of this sense-making process.

Lastly, I will occasionally write a post about the balagan that is life in Israel. Israel rarely fails to surprise me despite the steady march of globalization and what some might call the inevitable rise of a “flat world.” Of course, these posts will be from an entirely American in Israel perspective rather than the studied emic perspective of an anthropologist. It is often frustrating, but almost always illuminating, as I negotiate the linguistic and cultural landscape. (I lived in Israel for two years about 10 years ago, but have lost much of my ability to speak Hebrew at a functional level–as of yet, my brain is just not operating in real time.)