Gaining Insight Through Tacit Knowledge: Achieving Full Understanding From Learning and Teaching - Paperback

by Ted Spickler (Author)

Students tend to steer away from classes that have a high technical content such as science, mathematics, engineering, the medical professions and anything where equations (how about economics?) play an important role. My message is deceptively simple; in order to gain real comprehension over a difficult subject, you need to know how your brain works. One successful approach to understanding your mind applies the philosophical viewpoint of Michael Polanyi's tacit theory of knowledge. This book introduces the need for your mind to create "tacit integrations" and explains how to attain what we call the "Aha" experience. Useful to teachers, coaches, and students, this learning methodology explains the behaviors needed for the attainment of full comprehension in either formal or informal learning situations. Polanyi was a brilliant research chemist who in later years turned his attention to explicating a personal philosophy of science. His self-reflections on how he created discoveries in chemistry offers illumination today into how our own minds work. The recognition of a subconscious level of mental activity (intuition and insight) is becoming a contemporary research topic and this book finds parallels between Polanyi and recent breakthroughs in cognitive psychology and selected neuroscience research. His tacit theory of knowledge, largely ignored among educational practitioners, is still alive today within knowledge management, medical training, and theological philosophy. This oversight is a shame and needs corrected. If you have no idea what is meant by a tacit integration (along with the necessary background for understanding it), you are missing valuable insights that show how you can put your brain into high gear. The tacit theory of knowledge informs constructivism and brings alive the dichotomy between explicit and implicit learning (also declarative and procedural knowledge). Polanyi died worried that his work would die with him. Let's not allow that to continue! Discovering how to apply tacit knowledge in learning and teaching can be a rewarding experience.

Author Biography

In 1964 Ted become assistant professor of physics at West Liberty University in West Virginia. He became chairperson of the physics department, taught astronomy, intermediate physics, and took over the physical science course for students in the elementary teaching degree program. It was apparent these students were afraid of science and as the typical textbooks were clearly inappropriate, Ted discarded the book and created a new two-semester course sequence using inquiry-based, hands on science learning. The students responded well and as a result, Ted became interested in the problems of the psychology of learning. He began a doctoral program in educational psychology at West Virginia University receiving that degree in 1983. An unexpected opportunity sent his career off in a new direction-becoming manager of the new computerized "Laboratory Information Management System" at the New Martinsville Plant of Mobay Chemical Corporation. During his time in New Martinsville Ted volunteered with a Mobay chemist and a math professor from Bethany College to create an experimental hands-on, after-school science program for all fourteen elementary schools in Marshall County, West Virginia. The success of this effort depended in part on receiving a coordinated set of grants, one from the US Department of Education and the other from the National Science Foundation. Mobay (subsequently known as Bayer MaterialScience) took notice of the after-school science program and transferred Ted to Pittsburgh as one of their Science Education Coordinator's helping to guide the corporate science education outreach initiative called "Making Science Make Sense". Bayer collaborated with the National Science Foundation and Ted became involved with NSF's "Local Systemic Change" initiative (introducing kit-based science teaching in school districts around the country). The partnership included associated programs sponsored by the National Sciences Resources Center of the National Academy of Science. Through these links Ted was able to help gain several NSF grants (totaling six million dollars) that triggered a local systemic change initiative in the five counties of the northern panhandle of West Virginia and another one in two counties around Charleston, South Carolina. His interest in problems of education continued at Bayer as a corporate trainer for Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement, ISO 9000, and Root Cause Analysis. Ted retired from Bayer in 2008.