Ontario

Not knowing by Guy Ewing

I remember
how his body relaxed,
how he began to recognize
letters, words,
how his nightmares began to
fold into themselves.

But what
can I tell you?

What do I
know?

Knowledge,
how does it bleed
out of fear,
hope,
what we did,
said?

Will it keep bleeding?

In the research in practice workshops that we developed last year at the Festival of Literacies, we talked about “ongoing knowledge creation” in literacy work, “literacy worker knowledge” and how it can become “research knowledge”. But as I continue to discuss these workshops with my colleagues, I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable using the words “know”, “knowing”, and “knowledge”. Perhaps literacy work and research in practice are about continuous discovery, not “creating knowledge”. “Knowledge” is a noun representing a state. If there were such a state, it would entail a kind of forgetting of what we actually experience in literacy work, the dynamism of each moment of discovery. For those moments to happen, we have to not know, not expect, be open to what we might see, hear, feel. And if this is true of literacy work, it should also be true of research in practice. If knowledge is a state, it couldn’t “keep bleeding” out of experience. It would be blood collected in vials and labelled. We need research in practice that doesn’t bleed anything, lets the blood keep flowing in our whole selves, describes, speculates, doesn’t pretend to know.