“The Virtues of Not Knowing”: How “Unknowingness” in Pedagogical Partnership Prepares Student Partners to Navigate Complexity, Uncertainty, and Change in Pursuit of Equity
Drawing on Eleanor Duckworth’s (1987) timeless essay, this article lifts up the words of student partners who have, through working in student-faculty pedagogical partnerships, developed a mindset and mode of engagement that allow them to find in not knowing first challenge, then fulfillment, and ultimately commitment to navigating complexity, uncertainty, and change with an equity orientation. The article illuminates how pedagogical partnerships matter in preparing students for a complex, precarious, and uncertain world.
Despite the reality that capacity to navigate uncertainty and change rather than prepare for any kind of fixedness and stability (Ilgen et al., 2019; Renn et al., 2011; Yurkofsky, 2022) is what is required in and by the world, educational institutions, including higher education, continue to focus on knowing and certainty, particularly knowing the right answer. As former SaLT student consultant Sarah Jenness (2013) writes: ‘school militates against uncertainty because we focus on getting the right answers as an end product as opposed to learning as a continuous phenomenon’ (p. 2). …Considering both her own learning and what matters most in education, Jenness (2013) concludes: ‘maybe what we need as students are spaces and relationships that let us sit with uncertainty and learn from it rather than rush from it to the “right” answers (p. 3).”