Unknown Unknowns (what I told my students today)

I started class today with this clip. 

There was nothing political about the topic. Nor was the lesson today about weapons of mass destruction, or Baghdad, or the Middle East, or diplomacy.

And it wasn't about Donald Rumsfeld.

It was about the most foundational component of my 8th grade world cultures course...it was about recognizing that our own experiences are an aberration from the norms of human experience.

This classroom needs to have a culture of its own. It's already starting to take shape, but it needs each of us to have a sense of heightened awareness...heightened sensitivity.

There are things we know. 

We know lots of things.

And there are things we think we know.

We think we know lots of things.

And there are things we know we don't know.

And there are things we don't even know we don't know.

We are naive, oblivious, and completely in-the-dark about most things in the world.

And I include myself in that statement.

And all of those things matter. 

You see, my hope for this class is that you will grow to trust that each of us comes into this classroom with the best of intentions. That we are here to learn, here to share, and here to listen. Nobody wants to offend, alienate, or provoke. Nobody wants to make anybody else hurt.

I believe this.

But in order for us to do that effectively, we have to trust each other and recognize that if someone doesn't know something--if they have literally never learned it before--that's not their fault. If somebody has a stereotype about a group of people, or thinks they know something, but your experience differs, it is your responsibility to help them understand it better; to illustrate the oppositional perspective. 

In this course, we need to aspire to be more culturally competent, more aware, and more curious versions of ourselves. We can never learn it all. There will always be unknown unknowns...but this course is about raising our awareness so they can be known unknowns...so we can begin to recognize that the things we know--the lenses through which we experience the world--are such a smidgen of a much bigger human story. 

Most of the world is an unknown unknown. If we can recognize that simple fact, perhaps the mere shifting of awareness can orient the world toward grasping that our planet can be a  known unknown, meaning that our own ethnocentric perspectives are but one version of reality; "other cultures are not failed attempts at being you" (Wade Davis).