Pedagogy of lateral meaning making

According to established norms of academic pedagogy there is a measurable hierarchy of information, hierarchy of analytical capacity, hierarchy of process, hierarchy of understanding, hierarchy of perception, hierarchy of knowledge, hierarchy of thinking, hierarchy of imagination, hierarchy of language and visual, hierarchy of priority and hierarchy of evidence exit in every individual as student. It assumes a structural ascend in this framework of efficiency of efficacy. 

Tragically in this era of lateral meaning making from information overflow, hierarchy of comprehension and knowledge build up in an individual does not remain a measurable ascend curve anymore, rather it is operationalised as a cloud of flux where everything is put together, one that can be recollected at the press of an imaginary button; a button driven by passive interest (passive interest because one is confident that the relevant information, knowledge, skill set are there located somewhere that one can retrieve whenever required through a menu driven structure) and strong aspirations. 

Today’s students are good knowledge managers than the embodiments of knowledge itself. The one who is familiar with the menu driven tools and techniques of knowledge extraction, manipulation and application are the one who is better equipped to be “successful” in our capacity driven economy and its society than as compared to the embodiments of knowledge or the perceived ‘master’ that academics envisage. 

Unfortunately this ambiguous learning curve of flux is what pedagogues across the world are still trying to assess through their linear or structural measurements! 

(I am not getting into the discussion of whether it is right or correct that a selected few becoming the absolute owners of knowledge resources like Internet platforms and the "master" intellectuals while the other large section end up only as end user operators. But none other than the academics themselves have created this complication by linking societal needs as capacity benchmarks to knowledge accumulation, so this would require a lengthy paper to understand the scenario).

The problem is not the resistance to change, but the issue is that we haven't moved forward from the 15th century European humanist idea of knowledge delivery and its methodologies in academics. We as academics are yet to grapple with the transition of theory dependant knowledge (hierarchy) to process dependant knowledge as 21st century's institutional knowledge.

In arts this dichotomy becomes much larger as the process of imagination often are the translation of individual experience. The time span with which this transformation of human knowledge taken place from embodiment to operation is yet to be fully understood by human mind (as discussed above -the post seventy technology accentuated knowledge positioning in human life) so that a body of experiences can be measured from expressions.