Getting to know ITERATA
ITERATA is an independent, non-profit Institute dedicated to developing and promoting a new vision for an educated world—a vision that recognizes the need for a fresh consideration of what an education is for, of what it means to be educated, and what educated people can do in a technoscientific era. The work of the Institute is to turn this vision into new and actionable approaches to how teachers teach, how students learn, and how education is organized from pre-K to gray. This work is carried out by the core leadership team aided by an international network of fellows and partnering organizations. The focus of the work begins from a novel approach to how individual and collective experience can serve as a resource for thought and action, and as the basis for a new kind of education.
When we look for harbingers of tomorrow’s educational needs, we see a number of large-scale and global trends changing what education must provide and, more fundamentally, what education is for. Examples are not hard to find; here we take just four, each of which shows a significant emerging trend that is not being effectively addressed by current educational practices, and where a new kind of education seems required. After listing these examples, we explain how they each call for a new kind of education.
All of these examples present a common challenge to current education. In each case, what is called for is a kind of thinking that is situated and contextual, and therefore quite different from the kind of abstract, technique-governed thinking that is emphasized in current education. The strength of modern education lies in teaching learners how to apply methods to solve problems. This is obviously true when the problem is scientific or technical, but this basic approach is also routinely overextended to problems like interpreting a sonnet, solving a social conflict, or handling an emotional concern.
ITERATA is motivated by the recognition that the four trends we cite above and many others like them are not the kinds of technical problems that current education assumes them to be. More than this, each of these trends seems to be arising precisely because the way we have been educated has begun to fail us and we are having to identify new ways of addressing things. Generally, we are taught that solving a problem means finding the appropriate method to handle it. But applying methods to solve problems first requires that we extract something from the real world and decontextualize it so that it can arise for us as a kind of problem, that is, as something ready for analysis and solution by one or another method.
Returning to our examples:
The mission of ITERATA is to develop that new kind of education and to implement it across the full spectrum, from Pre-K to Gray. Let us be clear, our goal is not to replace existing education, nor is it a call for revolution. But it is not also a call for reform. Just as the issue our examples highlight seems to be everywhere, so must it come to be recognized everywhere in the education system. This means more than simply adding courses or modifying existing curricula or pedagogy, it means changing the overall conception of what education is for. For 200 years, education has been about promoting the value, power, and necessity of instrumental reason, and the world has benefitted enormously and in many ways from this reliance. But the automatic reliance on and unquestioned faith in instrumental reason that education still fosters is both no longer justified and is in fact also a recognizable contributor to many of the world’s greatest challenges. Addressing tomorrow’s educational needs will require re-situating and re-contextualizing instrumental reason itself, re-grounding education in human experience rather than instrumentalism.
Such an education will allow people to think as their situated selves about their contextualized problems. Those who practice the kind of situated thinking we are proposing understand reflectively, and from their own experience, how to work from the widest possible array of contexts. Attending to the world as you are living through life allows you to step back and not immediately declare every issue a “problem” in the classic instrumental, technique-solvable sense. Some issues are wicked problems; some issues are too locally contingent for any general method to address; some moments call for creativity and redefinition rather than problem solving; some matters call for collective effort even to adequately identify the task to be shared, and for this, too, there is no general method or analytic procedure. Many issues simply don’t have instrumental solutions. Seen in this light, methods and the ability to use them do not go away, but are re-contextualized as available, but not always necessary or appropriate.
ITERATA will encourage the recognition that coming at the world directly from experience instead of through an instrumentalist framework is itself transformational. It makes you the kind of person who can be affected by what you are living through before you decide it’s a problem and what sort of problem it is. Addressing the world in this experiential way has a cumulative effect on who you are and how you see things. It is an education that fosters this orientation that seems to be what is called for to address the kinds of issues that our examples point to. It is in this sense that what we envision is a transformational education.
Learners who practice situated thinking also decide and act in an experientially informed rather than instrumental way. Clearly, it is experientially informed thinking that allows for decisions and actions that are responsive to the global kinds of problems described above; but this is no less appropriate for many decisions and actions in everyday affairs. After all, wicked problems, local issues, moments calling for creativity and collective effort are no less a part of ordinary life, and no less inappropriately handled by instrumentalism and method-driven decision making. It is in this sense that our new kind of education will foster responsive action.
We recognize, however, that in our technoscientific age it is difficult to explain the value of the kind of education that ITERATA is proposing. In a world dominated by instrumental, method-driven thinking, the very idea that some problems that are too ill-formed or contextually embedded for any method to solve, that call for creative re-thinking instead of solutions, or that require a kind of collaborative practice that first re-contextualizes how we normally understand expertise – such an idea can seem poorly informed or merely out of touch. The challenge faced by ITERATA, therefore, is not to replace instrumental thinking but to prevent it from functioning as our age’s default position. To do so, we must re-open and re-value the space created by human experience and show how thinking that arises directly from that experience can be brought to bear on some of the most difficult problems facing humanity, as well as everyday issues in our personal, social, political, and family lives.
To quote an unexpected ally in our effort:
“There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best … initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic.” Pope Francis, 2015
STRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS
ITERATA is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization with comprised of a board of directors, an advisory board, an executive director, a small support staff, and an international network of Fellows. In order to limit expenses and to enlist a broad array of talents, perspectives, and areas of expertise, the core of the work of the Institute is carried out by the Fellows.
ITERATA benefits from ongoing discussions with scholars and experts in relation to our work and in the development of the Fellows Program. Institutional affiliations of those scholars include: Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Stony Brook University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Boise State University, the University of Chicago, Simon Fraser University (Canada), University of Twente (Netherlands), Oxford University (UK), and Bogazici University (Turkey).
Partners: Institutions, organizations, and programs that have agreed to or have expressed interest in serving as experimental or pilot sites for the Institute’s pedagogical or curricular developments include: the National Forum for Higher Education and the Public Good, The National Center for Institutional Diversity, The National Cancer Institute, and The Philosophical Toolbox Project.
Founding Leadership
David A. Stone, President. Dr. Stone holds interdisciplinary BA, MA, (interdisciplinary forensic psychiatry) and Ph.D. (philosophy of science and technology, artificial intelligence) degrees from Boston University. His professional experience includes research and teaching at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Tufts University School of Medicine, as Founding Director of the South East European Research Center, and as a university administrator. Dr. Stone has published and taught in 6 different disciplines, including ideas that form the basis of ITERATA. Most recently, he served as an American Council on Education Fellow and is presently the vice president for research at Oakland University.
Robert C. Scharff, Executive Director. Dr. Scharff holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. He is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and has also as taught at Stony Brook University, the University of Oklahoma, and the US Air Force Academy. Dr. Scharff is a member of several editorial boards, served as Editor-in-Chief of Continental Philosophy Review for 12 years, and publishes extensively in philosophy and technoscience studies, including in areas and on topics that form the basis of ITERATA’s conception of its mission.
Support: ITERATA seeks support for both general operating expenses and the fellowship program.
Contact: info.iterata@gmail.com
ITERATA is an independent, non-profit Institute dedicated to developing and promoting a new vision for an educated world—a vision that recognizes the need for a fresh consideration of what an education is for, of what it means to be educated, and what educated people can do in a technoscientific era. The work of the Institute is to turn this vision into new and actionable approaches to how teachers teach, how students learn, and how education is organized from pre-K to gray. This work is carried out by the core leadership team aided by an international network of fellows and partnering organizations. The focus of the work begins from a novel approach to how individual and collective experience can serve as a resource for thought and action, and as the basis for a new kind of education.
When we look for harbingers of tomorrow’s educational needs, we see a number of large-scale and global trends changing what education must provide and, more fundamentally, what education is for. Examples are not hard to find; here we take just four, each of which shows a significant emerging trend that is not being effectively addressed by current educational practices, and where a new kind of education seems required. After listing these examples, we explain how they each call for a new kind of education.
- Increasingly we find ourselves confronted by issues that cannot be framed as well-formed problems. Problems like poverty, hunger, obesity, climate change, violence, and homelessness are what are called wicked problems, as are large-scale goals like world peace, sustainability, and human well-being. Wicked problems lack the hallmarks of well-formed problems. They lack widespread agreement on the nature or even the existence of the problem, its causes, and even what would constitute a solution.
- As we outsource more and more of our manual labor to machines and robots, the wealth generating capacity of our economy increasingly rests on activities related to what we call interhuman attention. Today, wealth is primarily created by those who spend much of their work days engaged with others in meetings, discussions, and email chains. But managers across sectors now routinely lament that employees struggle with how to work creatively with others in ways that actually create value.
- The effort to advance the pace of innovative development from scientific results has given rise to a new activity called translation, for example, translational medicine. But early hopes that a science of translation could be established have evaporated.
- There is clear recognition that many of the problems we face, whether locally or globally, can only be resolved by collective efforts. More and more, teams of experts are being called upon from across disciplines and professions to solve problems by working collaboratively. Experts are also being asked to work more directly with members of the community. But in all these cases, disciplinary and professional training often turn out to be an obstacle to working across the boundaries that separate disciplines and professions.
All of these examples present a common challenge to current education. In each case, what is called for is a kind of thinking that is situated and contextual, and therefore quite different from the kind of abstract, technique-governed thinking that is emphasized in current education. The strength of modern education lies in teaching learners how to apply methods to solve problems. This is obviously true when the problem is scientific or technical, but this basic approach is also routinely overextended to problems like interpreting a sonnet, solving a social conflict, or handling an emotional concern.
ITERATA is motivated by the recognition that the four trends we cite above and many others like them are not the kinds of technical problems that current education assumes them to be. More than this, each of these trends seems to be arising precisely because the way we have been educated has begun to fail us and we are having to identify new ways of addressing things. Generally, we are taught that solving a problem means finding the appropriate method to handle it. But applying methods to solve problems first requires that we extract something from the real world and decontextualize it so that it can arise for us as a kind of problem, that is, as something ready for analysis and solution by one or another method.
Returning to our examples:
- If we look carefully at what makes wicked problems “wicked,” it becomes clear that there are no “methods” for their solution. Addressing them requires situated understanding and attention to context, not their conversion into a type of problem where all the parts can be synthesized and addressed together in one general way. Thus, it appears that wicked problems call for a new kind of education.
- We see this same issue with interhuman attention. There are no methods for collective, interhuman problem-solving. The matters we take up in meetings, discussions or emails are always local, situated, and contextual. Efforts to frame them so that some tool for meeting management or planning can be applied to them, fails to engage the capacity of the group to think creatively and collaboratively from their shared situation. There are approaches that can foster creative engagement in interhuman attention and that can help people drive and control their own creative efforts, as well as the creative efforts of groups. But here, too, an education that stressed the importance of such approaches would be a new kind of education.
- A similar issue arises with translation. It was initially thought that there could be a genuine science of translation – that we could outsource how to do it to some set of methods and best practices. But it has turned out that all translation is local. Effective translation requires working situationally, from within the specific context, where each instance is different. This kind of thinking cannot be outsourced to a method and thus also seems to call for a new kind of education.
- Finally, the need for interdisciplinary and cross-professional practices seems to raise the same issue. Because methods are discipline and profession-specific, it turns out that working together and communicating effectively in cross-professional or interdisciplinary teams is often very difficult – and there is no meta-method for how to do it. Working effectively in such teams requires everyone learning how to step back from their method; to stop initially assuming that their expertise already defines the mission; to think, speak, and listen from their situated experience of the matter at hand; and to come to recognize that everyone in the group needs to do the same thing. Once again, this kind of approach seems to require a new kind of education.
The mission of ITERATA is to develop that new kind of education and to implement it across the full spectrum, from Pre-K to Gray. Let us be clear, our goal is not to replace existing education, nor is it a call for revolution. But it is not also a call for reform. Just as the issue our examples highlight seems to be everywhere, so must it come to be recognized everywhere in the education system. This means more than simply adding courses or modifying existing curricula or pedagogy, it means changing the overall conception of what education is for. For 200 years, education has been about promoting the value, power, and necessity of instrumental reason, and the world has benefitted enormously and in many ways from this reliance. But the automatic reliance on and unquestioned faith in instrumental reason that education still fosters is both no longer justified and is in fact also a recognizable contributor to many of the world’s greatest challenges. Addressing tomorrow’s educational needs will require re-situating and re-contextualizing instrumental reason itself, re-grounding education in human experience rather than instrumentalism.
Such an education will allow people to think as their situated selves about their contextualized problems. Those who practice the kind of situated thinking we are proposing understand reflectively, and from their own experience, how to work from the widest possible array of contexts. Attending to the world as you are living through life allows you to step back and not immediately declare every issue a “problem” in the classic instrumental, technique-solvable sense. Some issues are wicked problems; some issues are too locally contingent for any general method to address; some moments call for creativity and redefinition rather than problem solving; some matters call for collective effort even to adequately identify the task to be shared, and for this, too, there is no general method or analytic procedure. Many issues simply don’t have instrumental solutions. Seen in this light, methods and the ability to use them do not go away, but are re-contextualized as available, but not always necessary or appropriate.
ITERATA will encourage the recognition that coming at the world directly from experience instead of through an instrumentalist framework is itself transformational. It makes you the kind of person who can be affected by what you are living through before you decide it’s a problem and what sort of problem it is. Addressing the world in this experiential way has a cumulative effect on who you are and how you see things. It is an education that fosters this orientation that seems to be what is called for to address the kinds of issues that our examples point to. It is in this sense that what we envision is a transformational education.
Learners who practice situated thinking also decide and act in an experientially informed rather than instrumental way. Clearly, it is experientially informed thinking that allows for decisions and actions that are responsive to the global kinds of problems described above; but this is no less appropriate for many decisions and actions in everyday affairs. After all, wicked problems, local issues, moments calling for creativity and collective effort are no less a part of ordinary life, and no less inappropriately handled by instrumentalism and method-driven decision making. It is in this sense that our new kind of education will foster responsive action.
We recognize, however, that in our technoscientific age it is difficult to explain the value of the kind of education that ITERATA is proposing. In a world dominated by instrumental, method-driven thinking, the very idea that some problems that are too ill-formed or contextually embedded for any method to solve, that call for creative re-thinking instead of solutions, or that require a kind of collaborative practice that first re-contextualizes how we normally understand expertise – such an idea can seem poorly informed or merely out of touch. The challenge faced by ITERATA, therefore, is not to replace instrumental thinking but to prevent it from functioning as our age’s default position. To do so, we must re-open and re-value the space created by human experience and show how thinking that arises directly from that experience can be brought to bear on some of the most difficult problems facing humanity, as well as everyday issues in our personal, social, political, and family lives.
To quote an unexpected ally in our effort:
“There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best … initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic.” Pope Francis, 2015
STRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS
ITERATA is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization with comprised of a board of directors, an advisory board, an executive director, a small support staff, and an international network of Fellows. In order to limit expenses and to enlist a broad array of talents, perspectives, and areas of expertise, the core of the work of the Institute is carried out by the Fellows.
ITERATA benefits from ongoing discussions with scholars and experts in relation to our work and in the development of the Fellows Program. Institutional affiliations of those scholars include: Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Stony Brook University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Boise State University, the University of Chicago, Simon Fraser University (Canada), University of Twente (Netherlands), Oxford University (UK), and Bogazici University (Turkey).
Partners: Institutions, organizations, and programs that have agreed to or have expressed interest in serving as experimental or pilot sites for the Institute’s pedagogical or curricular developments include: the National Forum for Higher Education and the Public Good, The National Center for Institutional Diversity, The National Cancer Institute, and The Philosophical Toolbox Project.
Founding Leadership
David A. Stone, President. Dr. Stone holds interdisciplinary BA, MA, (interdisciplinary forensic psychiatry) and Ph.D. (philosophy of science and technology, artificial intelligence) degrees from Boston University. His professional experience includes research and teaching at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Tufts University School of Medicine, as Founding Director of the South East European Research Center, and as a university administrator. Dr. Stone has published and taught in 6 different disciplines, including ideas that form the basis of ITERATA. Most recently, he served as an American Council on Education Fellow and is presently the vice president for research at Oakland University.
Robert C. Scharff, Executive Director. Dr. Scharff holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. He is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and has also as taught at Stony Brook University, the University of Oklahoma, and the US Air Force Academy. Dr. Scharff is a member of several editorial boards, served as Editor-in-Chief of Continental Philosophy Review for 12 years, and publishes extensively in philosophy and technoscience studies, including in areas and on topics that form the basis of ITERATA’s conception of its mission.
Support: ITERATA seeks support for both general operating expenses and the fellowship program.
Contact: info.iterata@gmail.com
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