We get to know a great many things from birth to death merely by being there! Think of wonderful acquisitions such as knowing our home language and specific cultural ways. Of course, there are also things which took a great deal of learning and teaching, or deliberate effort on the part of parents, siblings, and teachers in both informal and formal settings : for example, memorising facts and pieces of text, writing, reading and later gains though schooling such as mathematics. And there are even things we ‘know’ and yet we have no idea where this ‘knowledge’ comes from! For example, even small babies try to avoid loud noises and bad smells.

We engage the world and people around us through our five senses (hearing, smell, taste, touch and vision), as well as through the joint effort of all five thus making out a kind of ‘sixth sense’. Apart form sensual knowing, we also get to know many things through the way our minds/brains organize reality and what we experience (e.g. people understand the world in remarkably different ways from other animals who might even have better sensory equipment, e.g., the eyes of birds of prey, or the noses of bloodhounds).

A big question for those interested in knowledge (what it is and how we obtain it, etc.) has to do with certainty. In other words, are we able to rely completely on our senses, brain, and even other processes and activities involving our presence in a situation? (Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#Cognitive_illusions to see some of the ways in which we are tricked.) And, a question for those interested in the application of Cognitive Science to learning and teaching has to do with improving on what we do spontaneously, and how we teach in situations where the learners, tasks, and teachers are not all from the same history or context.

‘Cognition’ is a concept everybody involved in the teaching, training and development courses and programmes advertised on the Skills Portal should be familiar with. It refers to ‘knowing’ (in opposition to feeling/emotion, and wanting/motivation) – the three ‘faculties’ involved in human actions. Cognitive Science, i.e., the study of mind and intelligence, or the brain and the processes involved in learning, thinking, perception, memory and problem-solving, is probably the fastest growing body of knowledge outside (but related to) the various biological studies of us (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/ ).

This alone would make it a required knowledge-base for those involved in teaching, etc, but in addition, not all cognition is the same: there are better and worse ways of engaging a task or situation. And this is the second reason for wanting to place ‘the cognitive wherewithal’ for change and successful exchanges on the agenda of those interested in the management of knowledge.

As long as we engage familiar, well-known tasks and situations, all is well with common sense as a body of tacit, implicit guides for action, or even as a set of explicit rules about what to do. The sense we use commonly or usually, and the ordinary judgments we - like others of our kind - make in order to get by from day to day, keeps us firmly in familiar territory: what our parents knew, and probably their parents before them, and what we know now ... This shared sense is, however, not a good basis on which to tackle unfamiliar tasks/situations (this is also probably the very reason behind many people’s fears of the unknown and their resistance to change and new things, generally).

Living in the world with its abundant electronic connections across vast distances and thus enabling communication between previously separate people and places, means that only ostriches with their heads in the sand can avoid new things. We encounter new things and unfamiliar tasks all the time – things and tasks with histories different from our own. The question is, then: how best to prepare ourselves, or equip others and organizations, for dealing with change and, in particular, exchanges between our familiar situations, and foreign/alien/unfamiliar places, people and things.

From the way we dress for work; and from taken-for-granted parts of our lives such as who goes to school, where and why they go to school, and what we take a ‘school’ to be, to the way every social role (mother, teacher, expert, judge, policemen, business woman, etc.) is fulfilled by its occupant, shows that our lives are silently governed by a kind of format that developed over a particular time and in a place. Simply put, we do not generally parent nowadays like we did 200 years ago – think of corporal punishment in this regard. (Visit the Dictionary of the History of Ideas at http://etext.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html , and take a special look at the entry on ‘education’ at http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-08 .)

The point is that newcomers to a task, or people from a different culture to the one in which a specific task is embedded, require that the demands of the task or the new situation be made explicit to them in the terms of the task’s own history. Consider a young, Jewish woman from New York, say, wanting to become a Sangoma in KwaZulu Natal; clearly she cannot just step into this role without a great deal of change, also deliberate teaching, learning and effort. The point to note in cases where we are concerned with equal access to different/all kinds of tasks is that those closer to the history of a task, say someone from KwaZulu Natal wanting to train as a Sangoma, will fare much better than our New Yorker – unless trainers or teachers deliberately intervene to close the gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Teaching, to be effective in situations of unfamiliarity, has to be specifically focused on overcoming the gap between what the learner/neophyte/stranger already knows and can do, and what the new task demands in its own terms; teaching has to, in effect, ‘scaffold’ the learner’s engagement. This kind of scaffolding, moreover, is only possible if the teacher has explicit knowledge of the demands of the task.

Instructors who know what a task demands, and who can use these demands as pointers to shape and form his/her teaching or training, will facilitate goal-directed action. That is, action aimed at a hierarchy of mean-ends, towards the ultimate goal or solution of the problem. In other words, the guide structures each step towards the goal by way of a careful support of the actions of the newcomer. This kind of teaching essentially involves the instructor/teacher/guide in concerted and ongoing task analysis, so as to work out situation-specific scaffolding to overcome the gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Moreover, this kind of guided action will rarely be possible through a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of teaching specific content or problem-solving skills generally; the one ‘size’ ends up fitting no one very well. (Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_analysis for an introduction to task analysis.)

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