When the Light Goes Out: Ignorance and Multiplicity in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

If education is the movement from dark to light, what does it mean for the light to go out? Following this question, this paper examines how conceptions of ignorance inform and are embedded in ideas of learning and pedagogy. Through historical and contemporary examples, I ask how an understanding of ignorance as absence frames some forms of teaching and learning, how ignorance might be understood differently, and how a different formulation of ignorance creates possibilities for imagining teaching and learning otherwise. The framing of ignorance as absence articulates a distance between knowing and not knowing that defines what I call explicatory spacetime. This arrangement positions ignorance as a social problem and schooling as a solution aimed at closing the gap. I point to ways this framing persists today in research and practices that posit the acquisition of positive knowledge and the eradication of negative ignorance as a foremost educational responsibility. Engaging work across science and technology studies, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of education, I argue that alternative conceptions of ignorance often maintain associations with absence. Building from this scholarship, I ask how reframing ignorance through multiplicity, that is, within a field of possibility out of which a thing called knowledge can cohere, offers a different framework and pedagogical arrangements. Finally, I explore how reframing ignorance in a spacetime of multiplicity opens possibilities for understanding and enacting pedagogical encounters.