Analysis of the Knack #3

In my last post, I asked: How can we instill the knack in today’s world? Is it even something we can teach?

To answer the last question first, we cannot teach it in the traditional stand and deliver university style. We can however create a situation in which the knack can be learned by those who are capable of learning it.

It isn’t the sort of thing which everyone can learn well, though it can be acquired by many of those who do not have it with sufficient effort in the right kind of exercises.

It isn’t the sort of thing which we can write on the board and have students memorize for regurgitation in an exam, so our teaching and assessment needs to reflect that.

It isn’t intellectual knowledge, though some of that will be required to allow its particular application, and there are great conceptual difficulties for today’s students in learning this kind of knowledge.

It isn’t a set of formal techniques, though teaching a formalization of some techniques is very useful as a way in for most students, and is helpful to the most intuitive, natural engineers.

The knack is not so much knowledge as a way of seeing the world. Those who have it find that they apply it to everything. Billy V Koen has written a few (rather philosophical) books about the application of what he calls “The Method” to all of life’s challenges.

His “Method” is closely related to a formalisation of the parts of the knack which are capable of formalization. We can however as BVK does, tell our students that all is heuristic, and we can give students heuristics which allow them a ticket to the space in which the knack operates. These heuristics are not the knack itself, they are just guidance from those who already have it.

The barriers to teaching and learning the knack come in a number of forms:

Firstly, it is not understood by most of those who work in HE. They have had no reason to develop it themselves and intellectual snobbery causes them to dismiss it as inferior “technician level knowledge”.

Secondly, it is effortful, time-consuming and conceptually challenging to acquire. This makes it hard to motivate students who may rebel against such necessarily hard courses in student feedback exercises such as student evaluation of modules and teaching. If the teacher succeeds in motivating their students, other staff may complain about the students being too interested in the module.

Thirdly, it can only be taught and assessed by someone who has the knack themselves. This is a controversial idea in engineering, but thought obvious in more confident disciplines like medicine, architecture and so on, not so terrified to be caught with dirty hands as engineering seems to be.

Fourthly, the required approach to teaching is one which has acquired a well-deserved bad name though misapplication for ideological reasons. Despite Dewey’s creed, Problem Based Learning and similar approaches have been repeatedly proven to be terrible techniques for teaching anything which can be memorised and regurgitated in a traditional exam. They are however related to well-proven ways of teaching the knack of practising medicine, law, architecture and so on.

So we can use them to refine the knack of the natural engineers, and show our middling students into its neighborhood.

It is commonly suggested that we might use philosophy to bring students into the region in which the knack operates, but the suggestions always seem to me to be coming from the wrong direction. Philosophy of Engineering (to paraphrase Feynemann) is of as much use to engineers as ornithology is to birds.

What is needed is absolutely not to make engineering students study the philosophy of engineering, philosophical ethics and so on. They have enough subjects to master, and too little time for anything else as it is.

What might be of use is what we might call “philosophical engineering”, where philosophical tools are used in the same way engineers use maths and other analytical tools. The less airy-fairy parts of philosophy might be used to help students break free of the epistemology implicit in the sharp-edged subjects they were required to learn to get onto an engineering degree.

Whether this would be more effective as a teaching tool than Lego is not known, but it might play more to academia’s strengths. A lot of the problems of engineering education stem from its tendency to teach what can be tested, and what can be taught by non-engineers.

Ultimately, the knack can only come from many thousands of hours of practice. I strongly suspect the number of hours differs considerably between people, and there will always be an important difference between the natural engineers and the grinders who just put the hours in.

It is however rather the point of engineering education to make methods and concepts - which once only a very few intuitive and Stakhanovite geniuses could even conceive of - usable by everyday people. Some will however always be a little more everyday than others.