Learning – Part 2

Adam (00:12): Hello and welcome to Yarn Library Podcast where craft, knitting and all else fitting come to ponder and laugh. My name's Adam Cleevely...

Georgia (00:19): And my name is Georgia Denham. You can find us both on Instagram where I'm Tulipurl and Adam is Cleevely Knits. And we are back for part two, which we kind of optimistically thought could always be one episode, but actually our origin stories with craft and knitting pretty, pretty interesting.

Adam (00:34): Interesting to us at least.

Georgia (00:35): Yeah.

Adam (00:36): Just a caveat.

Georgia (00:37): But I think you found some of my, well, my stuff interesting.

Adam (00:40): I did Georgia.

Georgia (00:41): You found your stuff interesting. Um, no. Yes. Yes. I found, I found, I found your stuff interesting. I promise. I promise. No, I do. I've, I mean, that's

Adam (00:49): Hi Freud.

Georgia (00:51): Our whole meeting, our whole friendship was probably developed through my interest in your learning and knitting and origin stories. So...

Adam (01:00): No, I'm not, I'm not belittling that I, yeah. I hope someone else finds it interesting, but I'm desperate to start this episode.

Georgia (01:05): Start, start, start. Okay.

Adam (01:07): Because...

Georgia (01:07): ...Continuation...

Adam (01:07): ...We left off at a point where I really wanted to come in because you were talking about how people learn and are taught composition well that was one angle you were going on, but you were also talking about how, in institutions, your understanding was that in established institutions you have these six week training programmes where you are paid to learn, learn.

Georgia (01:27): Well, one of the ways. Basically what I was trying to say was that at the start of my PhD, the goal was to look in an interdisciplinary way at lots of different ways of learning, because I wanted to see, okay, "how are these other disciplines approaching learning and development?" And " is there anything that we could draw into composition of music?" Not all of those things are gonna be relevant because of various, structural hierarchies around finance or you know, employment, that kind of stuff. And so that's what I was kind of meaning. And I had this perception of like, "oh, I wonder what it's like in, say, a tech company when you get onboarded into some software?". But you've got quite a bit of experience of that kind of thing

Adam (02:01): On boarding people. So, the company which I was responsible for running, I was chief executive for eight years or something, I dunno, I grew from one or two people up to, we were thirty or forty people. And obviously you are dealing with not only the growth of all those employees, but also there's churn-over time. So there's a lot of people, you go through the recruitment. And one of the most important areas, certainly one of the areas I feel really passionate about is in customer services, and I could, I could talk for hours on that and I'm not going to.

Georgia (02:28): Mm-hmm.

Adam (02:29): But it's, it's just something where I feel very strongly about how you deal with people and how you treat people. Um, it may not surprise you that I have very, very high standards when it comes to that. So one of the things, we had this extraordinary interview process to try and find the right people and actually we came up with empathy tests because that was one of the things that was most important to us as a business and was being able show it to customers. I digress. When it came to training, what we did is we composed, as you are alluding to a lengthy and proper training programme where someone spends a couple of weeks learning and learning and learning about all of these things before they then go into the process of actually sitting down and doing the job.

Georgia (03:13): Yeah.

Adam (03:13): And manning the phones and after, I dunno how long it was, but it, we'd run this for a long time and the training course was getting better and better and higher standard. It got lengthier and the result was a very high standard training course. But the feedback actually that we got from employees when we talked to them about it...

Georgia (03:33): Yeah.

Adam (03:33): Was different that actually they felt a really high level of anxiety the first time they had to go on the phone.

Georgia (03:41): Mm-hmm.

Adam (03:41): Because they had all this learning. Then they had the stress of, "oh gosh, I've studied that over the last however long, and now I have to put all of that into practice.

Georgia (03:53): Yeah.

Adam (03:54): And we started collapsing that. So then it became a goal to, "okay, we're gonna get someone on the phone after, after a week". And that eventually came down to a day, and the goal was day one, day two, someone is on the phones.

Georgia (04:08): Mm-hmm.

Adam (04:09): And we totally changed our system to be able to let someone learn on the fly, fully supported from our organisational point of view it takes no extra resource. Well, I mean, it took, we had to compose a new rig because what it meant is we had to be able to answer the phone with two people on the phone and someone to explain that if and when it went wrong, they could just say, look, I'm sorry I don't... this is my first day, I don't know how to handle this, but I've got someone else here who's heard and they're gonna help you now.

Georgia (04:38): Yeah.

Adam (04:38): So that bit was seamless. But you've got an instructor there one-on-one anyway.

Georgia (04:44): Mm-hmm.

Adam (04:45): Why not do that live on the phone? And the result was, it was transformative in terms of empowering people to get on with the job. They knew what their job was on day one, and they also, it also put into context all of the learning they were doing alongside it. I can't speak (Georgia: "I'm getting giddy" ) I can't speak for big companies how they do it, but that's how I learned how to teach people.

Georgia (05:07): Mm-hmm.

Adam (05:07): Certainly in that environment, that was, that was by far a better way of doing it.

Georgia (05:11): Yeah. So this is making me giddy because the thing that I'm like super, excited by what you are saying. There, there's so much, uh literature that is like totally backing up what you're saying. Not that you need the literature to say like, "oh yeah, yeah, that's the right thing". But the idea that learning is not confined to explicit knowledge, but you are also gaining through experience. That's a really important thing. And the example I'm thinking of now is medical training-

Adam (05:36): Mm-hmm.

Georgia (05:36): And how there are different approaches to medical training. If anyone's got any familiarity with medicine or knows about medical courses, there are different types. So some places will do it in a quite a strict, like they'll have three, usually three preclinical years where you're doing everything out of a textbook. There's kind of a running joke in Cambridge that if you meet a medic here and they're like first, second, or third year. You know, they're not gonna save your life because they've been doing all the theory.

Adam (05:59): It's, it's the same at Oxford. Like it's, it's, you have preclinical and which is all the anatomy how all that works.

Georgia (06:04): Yeah.

Adam (06:04): And sort the biology side.

Georgia (06:05): And then you get thrown in on clinical. Now there are so many people who will defend that and will say "oh no, it's important to learn that way because you have the theory. If you're gonna go on to be a researcher or a consultant or whatever, then you get a lot from learning things in that explicit way. But people who do "case-based learning" and "problem-based learning", so CBL, PBL (Das, et al. (2021), Thistlethwaite, et al. (2012)). They're having that integration of those two things early on. So they're having clinical experience, they're going into placements pretty early on in their medical training. They'll often learn through a scenario. So you'll have a work group and you'll be given a problem at the beginning of the week and the anatomy teaching of that week, the different training of that week will all be sort of incorporated and bound in with that problem.

Adam (06:47): Yeah. Yeah

Georgia (06:47): And so it becomes very person centred and realistically centred on what you're actually gonna be doing when you're a doctor. So when I would talk to medics who had done that kind of case-based learning stuff, where they'd had more like interaction with patients earlier on where they'd been on placements, they were really benefiting from what you're describing of like having someone on the phones. So, yeah, it's that kind of integration and I think unfortunately people think that it's an, an either or, or it's very black and white. That you can either be very, very, like, "okay, I'm just gonna drill this technical information" or the alternative is it's a free for all and you just learn on the job, and actually having an integration and weaving those two things together...

Adam (07:25): Yeah.

Georgia (07:26): They back each other up.

Adam (07:27): That's, I mean, that's exactly what I think is impactful. And the other, the other place that I think about that is how children learn at school and there is this awful problem I think in... in life that people feel like however they were educated is the way that the next person in line must be educated. So if I was taught to do the job in this way, or I was taught 'English' in this way or 'Maths' in this way, that is the way I'm gonna inflict it on the next person. And I think that's a really negative thing because it doesn't allow for the progression of whatever how, however you want to teach. But it is something coming back to knitting. It is something which I believe is really present as a like, "well, this is how I learned to knit and therefore this is the way you are going to do it".

Georgia (08:09): Yeah.

Adam (08:09): Whereas if you look at children who are allowed to do "play-based learning", it's not for everyone. It doesn't work in every environment, all the rest of it, but "play-based learning" didn't exist really 30, 40 years ago.

Georgia (08:21): Montessori maybe?

Adam (08:22): I was trying to catch, like, I didn't know the exact date. I haven't done my research, but like yeah.

Georgia (08:27): Montessori's old... but I suppose in a way Montessori isn't necessarily play (Lillard, 2013)... sorry, I'm in tangent anyway. Right. I get what you mean.

Adam (08:33): But yeah, that there is so much more of that in education now, but it absolutely isn't the whole thing.

Georgia (08:37): Mm-hmm.

Adam (08:37): You don't get to get to GCSE on, whatever qualifications still on "play-based learning".

Georgia (08:44): Yeah.

Adam (08:44): Whereas one of the joys that I've had in terms of knitting is that he's basically going back to "play-based learning".

Georgia (08:50): Mm-hmm.

Adam (08:51): That's all I'm doing. Or so much of the time I'm thinking like, "well, I want to do a thing. How do I stretch myself? Or what's a new technique I've not done? Or...

Georgia (08:59): Or at least that your engagements- sorry, I'm interrupting you- but your engagement with those more dry technical resources is passionately motivated by your wanting to play more. As much as you're saying that it's all play-based, I know for a fact that you've got so many technical books and that you love stitch dictionaries and you love all that kind of stuff. If you were to look at it in those like black and white terms. You could say, actually Adam is doing a hybrid of the two, but then it's, it's, you don't see that as the boring, dry stuff that you have to force yourself through doing.

Adam (09:27): No, because it's because it's an active choice of mine...

Georgia (09:30): Yes.

Adam (09:30): ...Because I want to be, because I'm, I'm choosing to learn something.

Georgia (09:33): Yeah.

Adam (09:33): The difficult thing is I'm being very specific about 'I want to learn knitting'. Like when sometimes I pontificate on Instagram and say "oh, what should I learn next?" or whatever, like these other things come in like people say, oh, learn about spinning, learn about, x, y, z, crochet technique and I can, I can think about that for all of about a quarter of a second, and my brain's like, 'nah, mate'- not doing that. You know, that's, that's again, something that there's a, there's a nuance here that I am in a luxurious position where I am fully allowed to 'play-based learn' in that environment that I create for myself.

Georgia (10:04): Yeah.

Adam (10:04): Whereas unfortunately for doctors, though, probably fortunately for the rest of us, they do have to learn... something about anaesthetics.

Georgia (10:12): That's why I find looking at the medicine stuff so fascinating and why it's really, fruitful, ground for thinking about learning and there's a lot of really amazing learning research that happens in medical context because there's that clinical essentialism for knowledge and that there are standards that you have to reach. When you need to know something because someone's life depends on it, people think a lot about those medical environments. Um, and that comes down to the actual, like the practise of the medicine and also the learning, because when you're a medic, you continually do training, like always. So I've, I've ended up incorporating a lot of, medical context, or like medical learning research and stuff and practise research weirdly.

Adam (10:56): So have you read Atul Gawande's books on..

Georgia (10:59): No.

Adam (10:59): On on Medicine? So, oh my goodness. Atul Gawande is, just the most fascinating author. And so he... he's a medic, and he has this wonderful origin story as to why he started doing this research, but he was really interested in the practise of learning and the structure and formality that exists in medicine and why medicine fails, why it kills people, when it kills people, and how that happens. And particularly because he was a surgeon, he was interested in why that happens and he had near misses in his theatres. And 'The Checklist Manifesto' (Gawande, 2010) is an incredible book because he goes away and talks about the difference in attitude- and it's slightly different from learning because, but it comes onto about relationships- he talks so much about the interpersonal differences between pilots and architects and builders, and then compares that to medicine and doctors.

Georgia (11:59): Mm-hmm. This is ringing bells now for me...

Adam (12:01): And it is absolutely fascinating and about the humility of doctors and about the way in which they learn, the way in which they're taught, and then the kinds of attitude that brings into the workplace and where that's helpful and where it's not helpful.

Georgia (12:13): Mm-hmm.

Adam (12:14): What's fascinating is the long story short, is that other, other practises, other professional practises, have this very mature way of, understanding or, or unpicking where, where they have near misses and faults and so on and then going back and addressing the learning, addressing checklists and so on and medicine, up until the point where he was doing it, didn't really.

Georgia (12:36): Yeah.

Adam (12:36): And so he worked with this international team to create this checklist, which certainly if you've had an operation in the last 10 years, you'll absolutely have gone through a checklist. It's about 20 point checklist is not big, but that checklist saves thousands of lives.

Georgia (12:50): Yeah.

Adam (12:51): But he is the guy and his story as to why it happened- and if you love his writing, then he's written other books as well- it's, it's absolutely fascinating.

Georgia (12:58): That's totally up my street. Maybe this is why I got interested because my mum from her nursing background, she went into public health and she had a really wonderful opportunity to work with... Their name's rhyme, so it's Andrée Le May and John Gabbay. They are a really amazing pair of researchers who came up with this idea of 'Mindlines' as a framework (Gabbay and le May, 2016). In the original study they were using ethnographic studies to look at how gps were going about their practise and where the clinical guidelines didn't necessarily match the realities of what was going on and how they navigated or went around those things and where their knowledge and their experience was coming from. And it was a way of accounting for the various ways that someone who people would consider to be like a good gp, how they were practising. It is not saying like, oh, a good GP doesn't have to use a checklist. It's saying the GP will use a checklist and then when they would need to order, when the system says that you need to order X, Y, Z, but, where you are working is rural and doesn't have one of those, this is what they do instead. And so it was a way of articulating and recognising the legitimacy of those practises.

Adam (14:00): Where this became really fascinating for me as well and why I latched onto it is because I'm not a big fan of formal learning, I was never gonna go and do another degree. One was absolutely enough for me. It's just not me and I can't, that formal learning process and all of the schooling that I did

Georgia (14:15): Mm-hmm.

Adam (14:16): Was really, really hard work. And it's not, it's just not my learning preference, and what, what really spoke to me in those books was starting to understand how and where formal learning is, just something which... why I don't like it. The thing that I really can't stand and that I find really difficult is where ego's attached to it.

Georgia (14:37): Yeah.

Adam (14:38): And that is so much of what Atul Gawande in his books talks about so much is that where there's ego attached...

Georgia (14:44): Yeah.

Adam (14:44): That's where systems fail and that's where human interactions fail.

Georgia (14:48): Mm-hmm.

Adam (14:49): Absolutely not in medicine, it's in flying planes, but you know, airline investigations are a big, they have a big formal process as to how they do those. But again, there are cultural differences. Different countries have different rates of airline crashes. Most airline disasters happen when you have a problem and then you have a second problem on top of it...

Georgia (15:08): Yeah.

Adam (15:08): ...The first problem is usually surmountable and if you can't deal with the first problem and a second problem occurs, that's when things fall apart.

Georgia (15:15): Mm-hmm.

Adam (15:15): The only way to solve that is with great communication. And he found, or, or the researchers before him had found that basically where you have ego attached to the role of captain and co-pilot or pilot, co-pilot where there is a difference there in status and that has to be formally recognised. If they're calling each other Mr. Or whatever like that

Georgia (15:35): Mm-hmm.

Adam (15:35): Then that creates emotional distance, all sorts of distance between them. (Georgia: yeah) The airline industry has worked hard to reduce those barriers between pilot and copilot in order that you foster better communication skills where you have that lack of ego between the two roles. You have better communication and the accident rate decreases.

Georgia (15:55): Yeah.

Adam (15:55): And that has been shown. And that's what he brought into medicine and that's what happens in other industries.

Georgia (15:59): Yeah.

Adam (16:00): And bringing that back to knitting again, that is what kills knitting for me, is when I hear or I see ego in knitting that you can't do that because, or you have to do this first.

Georgia (16:13): I wanted to ask you about when you were teaching your kids.

Adam (16:15): Yeah.

Georgia (16:15): Because you've talked about that recently. I'm thinking about how you interact with your kids and how I would interact with the child trying to teach them to knit. I would be encouraging, and it's not about like being all like namby-pamby and gold stars.

Adam (16:28): The easy thing to do, the easy thing to do is always to tell a child, you are doing it wrong, do it the way I've told you.

Georgia (16:35): Wait, what?

Adam (16:36): Because that the easy thing to do is to just, is to reject their creativity, to reject the structure that they want to follow. Don't listen to their way that they want to learn. You don't give that child that opportunity.

Georgia (16:49): Yeah.

Adam (16:49): You just, you do the easy thing, which is "I know how to teach you because this is the way I was taught".

Georgia (16:54): Yeah.

Adam (16:55): And therefore, that's the way I'm gonna teach you how to do it.

Georgia (16:57): Yeah.

Adam (16:57): Do it my way and thank you, I'll have an easy time. It is a huge mental load when a child comes to you and says... well, it happened to me yesterday actually.

Georgia (17:05): Okay.

Adam (17:05): This is gonna date this when we were recorded this podcast, but at the date of recording, I was at a yarn show yesterday...

Georgia (17:11): Mm-hmm.

Adam (17:11): Waltham Abbey Wool Festival. There was this fascinating experience because a child, eight, ten years old came up to the stand and they had this knitted beanie on, and they were very, very quiet, just gentle child. They were obviously looking at the patterns.

Georgia (17:24): Yeah.

Adam (17:24): And I said " where did you get that lovely hat from?" They said, "oh, I knitted it" with, I dunno, it was said with this sort of quiet sense of like confidence, little bit of pride, but just like it was just stated, I made it. That's how it works. And then I found out they'd only just learned to knit this Christmas, so that's like four weeks ago...

Georgia (17:42): Decent.

Adam (17:43): You know, straight into a beanie. Brilliant. And then they're looking at what can they knit of my patterns and the one that they wanted to knit was 'Winter Frost', which is probably, I dunno, it's, it's up there as one of my two harder, hardest patterns.

Georgia (17:57): Mm-hmm.

Adam (17:57): I would say you need to be an advanced knitter to do it. That's what it's labelled as. Just because it has a novel stitch, it's got lace in it's got all sorts of tricky bits and bobs, it's got some brioche. And this child was picking it up and I just said to them, well, well, "have you tried it on yet?". "No". But then there was this beautiful moment because I picked the scarf off the stand and they, there was sort of this disbelief in their eyes, both that they were gonna get to try it on, and I couldn't understand why that would matter to anyone. But then once it was on them, there was just this, this glow in their eyes of

Georgia (18:32): Mm-hmm.

Adam (18:32): Like "this is something I could make" and I just like... if you want, fine, go at that point and go and tell a child "no, you can't make that. You've only made a beanie. Go and make another beanie and practise your stockinette. I think it was in ribbing. Or you can do the hard thing, which is what I did at that point. So, full disclosure. Well, I'll tell you what happened next. So I said to them, so "this pattern is hard" because it has a lot of complicated techniques in it, and it's in fingering weight yarn, it is probably a hundred hours of work for a decent knitter.

Georgia (19:10): Mm-hmm.

Adam (19:10): And my concern for a child is like, it is a long, it is a long-term project you're committing to.

Georgia (19:16): Yeah.

Adam (19:17): And regardless of your child, that is a, it's a big thing to go to. And I just said, I said to them, " what about this do you really love? What about this pattern do you really love?"

Georgia (19:25): Mm-hmm.

Adam (19:26): And we, and we talked about it and one of the things that they really liked was the snowflake.

Georgia (19:30): This is so good.

Adam (19:31): They loved the snowflake stitch. And I said, well, "have you looked at this other pattern over here?" Because it's got that same stitch in it.

Georgia (19:38): Mm-hmm.

Adam (19:39): But it's in worsted weight. You're gonna finish it in less than a quarter of the time.

Georgia (19:44): Mm-hmm.

Adam (19:45): Why didn't you try this one on?

Georgia (19:46): Yeah.

Adam (19:46): And tell me if you like it. And then they started looking at that and playing with that. And then that's got huge holes in it and they then we started talking about how you knit huge holes into knitting and then they became fascinated in that too. And that was the one that they then got excited about. And then they said, "okay, that's the pattern I want".

Georgia (20:04): That's so cool.

Adam (20:05): So on the one hand: no, I didn't deliver on enabling them to knit the hardest pattern, and I hope what I did was the right thing. I mean, God knows what the right thing to do is at that point, but I tried to just see what they were passionate about, what it was, and then enable that in a way that was as accessible as possible to them and that's what I was trying to do. But that's hard. The easy thing to do is "no, go and learn stockinette".

Georgia (20:31): The thing is, when you don't know, what you don't know, and you go into the situation and say, I wanna knit this. Like, I don't care how hard it is, I've got the belief, I've got the willingness and another person might read that as that child having a big ego or being overly confident. And I'm not saying I agree with that, but what I'm saying is if you were to like, shut down that child and tell them "what you done that for?", or, 'insert discouraging statement here'. If your reaction, in that instance was "oh no, no, that's, that's far too difficult. I don't have any patterns here for you". What I'm trying to say is what's the motivation behind someone having that reaction to a child? I wonder if people are viewing that as like overconfidence or something like that. It's really sad to reward that curiosity with such negativity. I think it speaks more of the person who would maybe be delivering that criticism that they in some way would perhaps feel insecure about the... the willingness to be so adventurous as a learner?

Adam (21:23): Yeah. I mean...

Georgia (21:23): Or as a beginner

Adam (21:24): Linking up with what we've said before about, about medicine and other disciplines. I think it is, it's patterns of learned behaviour. It's cultural as well, and it is just a pattern of when I'm presented with this thing. What, what do I do that's familiar to me. As humans, that's we are trained to follow patterns that we've seen before and not do the new thing.

Georgia (21:44): Mm-hmm.

Adam (21:45): Inevitably when someone else wants to learn something new that isn't on our path, that we can't place on the pattern that we've set out, you've got work to do if you want to go and meet that person somewhere else and take them, help them on their path.

Georgia (21:58): Yeah.

Adam (21:59): That's mentoring. That's not teaching so much.

Georgia (22:02): Yeah.

Adam (22:02): Teaching, I guess you're following more of a specific path 'cause you need a specific outcome.

Georgia (22:06): Mm-hmm.

Adam (22:07): This kind of play-based learning where someone wants to learn a craft in their own way to do their own thing. That's kind of... that's different.

Georgia (22:14): Well, I mean, you said like play-based learning, but another way that you could conceptualise it... there's a really influential anthropologist called Jean Lave. I think it Jean as opposed to Jean. She worked with another person called Etienne Wenger as well. In 1991, they release this book called "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation" (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

Adam (22:33): Mm-hmm.

Georgia (22:33): They introduced this concept of "legitimate peripheral participation" as being a way to understand learning as existing within a "community of practise", and it was a way of accounting for interpersonal relationships and the importance of them for learning. So that it wasn't just saying that learning was this cognitive process in the brain and that's all we needed to understand, or it wasn't just saying that it's a set of, precise instructions, like you were talking about that course earlier on. It's about saying that learning is all of these different things that come into play. The whole origin of this concept, it actually came from the fact that Lave had a background in observing craft, so she did anthropology of craft. So, when we've talked before about like craft terminology kinda getting mixed up and so everyone just saying, "oh, craft" and then it becoming something else.

Adam (23:17): Yeah.

Georgia (23:17): " Apprenticeship" was a real, like buzzword at the time in the late eighties, nineties for researchers in learning.

Adam (23:23): Because of course, apprenticeship is a, is a way of giving people a, i guess it's a, is it less structured? Is that a fair way of describing?

Georgia (23:32): It can be very structured.

Adam (23:33): But it's also, it's on the job learning.

Georgia (23:35): It's a structure... there are structures to that learning. And so... that was one of the things that Lave was doing was that she was observing apprenticeship and craftspeople and seeing " hmm. This isn't a written down curriculum. They haven't got these like formalised tick box exams".

Adam (23:48): Hmm.

Georgia (23:49): But they go through these different experiences- they'll help with this job and they'll do this and they'll work with this person- and then they come out of apprenticeship, all of them, basically arriving at a point of practical qualification in the sense that they are qualified to do the job. How is it that's happening? They came up with this idea so that you could account for learning in the broader way that we are describing, that it's not black and white and it's a mix of things. And one of my real sadnesses is that these ideas... I mean, it was 1991 when they released this. It has a real impact in lots of different fields academically and also in practise and things like that. But people, still hark back to thinking that learning has to be black or white. And it's like, I wish that more people knew about this, this theory and about their ideas because it's like we're operating like 30, 30 plus years behind almost.

Adam (24:38): I mean, for me I think it's so contextual. I think if you ask someone the question of how did you learn to cook? Or you know, or people think, I can't cook 'cause I've never learned, well, okay, how- not many people actually go to cookery school.

Georgia (24:52): Yeah.

Adam (24:52): You don't necessarily need to have taken home economics and that doesn't make a great bolognese but that experience of why are you interested in food or why did you learn to cook, probably comes from, "do you know what? A parent nurtured that with me".

Georgia (25:05): Mm-hmm.

Adam (25:06): I watched a parent cook as a child. I participated in that. I wanted to learn to make a cake. I was allowed to do that. I made a, you go through that process.

Georgia (25:16): This is reminding me of like a horrific situation where I was trying to describe my research to someone in quite a formal situation. Oh gosh. I was trying to talk about this concept of tacit knowledge, right?

Adam (25:26): Mm-hmm.

Georgia (25:26): Which is this idea of the hidden knowledge that's in something. Where someone can't necessarily articulate what it's...

Adam (25:30): You don't know you know all these things, but it turns out you do.

Georgia (25:33): Yeah. But it's, and that's becomes a very important concept within craft research, because you have to be able to account for these, these hidden moments of skill that often are taught through observing or through practical doing. And so I was trying to talk about this in relation to composition and how there was a disconnect between, people just not recognising tacit knowledge that they had or that there was an expert blindness as well. That when people were really experienced in something, they wouldn't necessarily think that something was important because they were so experienced in it that there was a disconnect. And this person used an analogy of cooking, right? And then they were like, well, "I just don't think that we need to worry too much about thinking about composition like this too much. It's like cooking. Like when you cook, you don't need a recipe. You just need like a good tomato and some pasta and some herbs. And a good olive oil. And then you can make a dish. And people who need a recipe, they're just overthinking it". This person was Italian.

Adam (26:26): And not a pastry chef, as an example.

Georgia (26:29): Yeah. And so I was sitting there and everyone was agreeing with this and I was thinking this is like the very manifestation of the tacit knowledge problem I am trying to point to. And you are rebutting this by pointing to (an) example of your tacit knowledge from your cultural experience of being Italian and not having an awareness of where you learned to cook a meal.

Adam (26:52): A hundred percent. That also makes me think about, when you think about really experienced knitters, I think from the outside point of world, outside point of view, in the world, you don't, someone, you think that someone is a really experienced knitter. Based on the number of years, jumpers, scarves, hats that they have created.

Georgia (27:09): Yeah.

Adam (27:10): But I think you and I would value experience in knitting in a different way that comes from how many, how broad is your technique experience.

Georgia (27:21): Yeah.

Adam (27:21): You know, or, there's so much richness that comes into experience...

Georgia (27:24): Mm-hmm.

Adam (27:24): ...That is not just... because, you can have knitted a thousand jumpers that are all just stockinette...

Georgia (27:30): Yeah.

Adam (27:30): And that doesn't, that you are the, you are gonna be my go-to person when I want to do that. (Georgia: Thanks ) But is that, is that helpful in terms of like, when you talk about experience and learning, but also. Like, what is the value in learning in knitting? 'cause that's the other thing. Does it even matter? And does it...

Georgia (27:48): Mm-hmm.

Adam (27:48): Do you want to learn? Like why even bother? Like, for me, it is a passion that drives me because I'm hungry to just understand more of it.

Georgia (27:57): Yeah.

Adam (27:57): I love knitting because I can get into so many things in so much depth and breadth. I never like becoming an expert in anything, and I've always run away from that in my life. What I love is collecting a real breadth of knowledge and knitting has that for me in spades.. I'm really enjoying that process. But I understand that it's because I'm hungry for learning in that area.

Georgia (28:20): Mm-hmm.

Adam (28:20): There's nothing wrong with not wanting that.

Georgia (28:23): Mm-hmm.

Adam (28:23): And I, that's also another thing, like if you don't want to learn and develop, like why? Like you really don't have to. Knitting doesn't just have to satisfy a learning. It can be... it is just a way of communicating with other people or connecting with other people of giving yourself, something to do, the satisfaction of making things is good for mental health, all the other amazing things that craft gives you. And I think that's another problem that you get into with, with thinking about knowledge and teaching within craft, because some people would be allergic to even the concept that you could have a learning structure around it because

Georgia (28:57): Mm-hmm.

Adam (28:58): Well, it's not there for me to learn. It's there for me to do.

Georgia (29:00): Yeah.

Georgia (29:01): This is reminding me of, the conversation, the one I was talking about before. I was trying to describe how craft ideas could maybe influence or impact the way that people thought about music or teaching. And I brought up the idea of "Sloyd"......

Adam (29:15): I have no idea what Sloyd is.

Georgia (29:16): So it is a, it is an approach to learning handicraft, and like an educational approach (Whittaker, 2013). And I always mix up between if it's Swedish or Finnish... bad Georgia, bad craft researcher. Um, so Sloyd is an approach of learning how to do handicrafts. It still practised a lot in Nordic countries. The framework was used in the US as well.

Adam (29:35): Mm-hmm.

Georgia (29:35): For like quite a long time, like there were schools teaching it, well into the late 20th century. Sloyd kind of operates from these really lovely principles, where it's things like " A task should go from easy to hard, it should go from something known to not known. Um, it's really lovely. I'll share the link to the framework. It's not, it's not giving like "big iron fist structure". Right. It's giving, "wow, this makes a lot of sense". And it's approachable. One of the things is that a child, when they will make something, that thing belongs to the child when they finish. It's lovely things like that are really motivating. I tried to introduce this idea of like, "oh, well, for example, I might look at Sloyd" and this composer was like, "I would run a mile from that, Georgia", because there was the slightest whiff of having any kind of formalised approach to anything. Even though these, these rules that they have, or these guidelines are so open and nurturing. The assumption was this is bad. Like it's bad that we shouldn't have this, this structure around it. So this is why I've been ostracised by the musical community and why I have a knitting podcast.

Adam (30:44): Oh, that is exactly, but that's, you are exactly in the same position. Just to go back to Atul Gawande. It's exactly the same. He said, "look, there are processes that exist in other places, which, which are for the betterment of everyone and everything, and they improve these outcomes, let's have a look at them" and totally ostracised from the community as a result.

Georgia (31:03): And fortunately, there are lots of instances where that has not happened in medicine. I'm thinking now of, that thing that does the rounds occasionally about babies and uh, Great Ormond Street, Formula One Pit Stops (Catchpole et al., 2007). Do you know about this?

Adam (31:17): No, but you've mentioned some of my buzzwords there, so...

Georgia (31:21): So, there were two surgeons... I need to look this up to actually see how legit this is, but I'm pretty sure it's like a legit story. From my understanding. There were two surgeons and they didn't have a way of transporting babies very well from, from one place to another. So a poorly baby would arrive at Ormond Street and they needed a more fluent way of transferring the baby.

Adam (31:45): Mm-hmm.

Georgia (31:45): I'm mucking up the technical language here. But when they were doing the transfers, they weren't having very good outcomes. On their break, they were watching Formula One and they saw a pit start and they went "they know how to do this". And so then they contacted one of the "Formula One People", companies, things

Adam (32:03): Tell me you...

Georgia (32:04): "Formula One People"

Adam (32:04): Tell me you don't know about Formula One without telling me you don't know about Formula One.

Georgia (32:07): "Formula One People". Um, they contacted one of the "Formula One People" and said, "look, we're Great Ormond Street. We want to know how to do this". And then they got trained by the "Formula One People" and how they did pit stops. And then it then really was informing approaches. And then there were lots of other hospitals around the world that or did training and did visits to the "Formula One People". And that was an, a really beautiful example of this, like interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge where something driven by the efficiency to like win race ended up helping win a really, really important race, which was to help, to help children who are poorly.

Adam (32:41): I am so surprised as a, as a real Formula One fan. I'm so surprised, I don't know that example because it's such a great example of Formula One technology making a difference outside of Formula One and Formula One has such a questionable image in so many ways.

Georgia (32:57): Yeah.

Adam (32:57): That would be such a good thing for them to talk more about actually.

Georgia (32:59): " What about poorly babies?" Uh, yeah, it's a pretty good one, isn't it? I mean, that's why I love being in interdisciplinary research. I'm based in a computer science department. I love being in these juxtapositions between different areas where you can share knowledge. I've got this really wonderful research group where we're all kind of misfits from different places, and it's amazing moments of like human progress that you get when actually these different areas of humanity and life will come together and talk to each other.

Adam (33:28): I mean, I have a talk that I do on creativity, which is.... we are way, way, way over time here and so I can't go into it more but, it is so true what you say about like, great... really great ideas come from that where you take two things from two completely different areas and you are able to mash 'em together in some way.

Georgia (33:47): Yeah.

Adam (33:47): A lot of the time you end up with rubbish, but sometimes, I dunno, I want to go back to a cooking example. You end up with something delicious.

Georgia (33:54): We didn't make it to our top tips that I had from this magazine I've held over, about teaching to knit, which I suppose will have to be an episode in the future about actually teaching somebody to knit and I want to know more explicitly about your experience of actually how you've been approaching teaching your kids to knit. I'm not a normal subscriber to Knit Now, but I bought it for the Clangers Tea Pot Cosy pattern, which is still on it, but...

Adam (34:15): But it has a checklist in it. And we were, we were planning to, we run out of time, but we were going to, you were gonna ask me all the questions in the, on the checklist...

Georgia (34:21): The article was called "Pass It On" and I thought it was quite a nice way to link up this learning thing. But alas, we've had a wonderful conversation about Medicine and Formula One and knitting and skills.

Adam (34:31): Yeah, well, I'm really interested to hear everyone's feedback on this as well.

Georgia (34:34): Exterminator 1 2 3, I hope you're happy.

Adam (34:36): Yeah, we didn't talk about television at all. So, but please do... we do love hearing your feedback, and if you send it to one of us on Instagram or something like that, we do end up sharing it between the two of us too. So...

Georgia (34:47): And we finally figured out what's happening with the emails now, I thought that Adam was still was getting these emails. He was not. You've got the emails now. We've both got the emails.

Adam (34:55): I have seen the emails now.

Georgia (34:56): So, yay. Thank you so much for your really lovely, wonderful emails. As we are entering into this new season, I dunno, it doesn't just feel like a literal season of episodes, it also feels like a new... a new breadth of approach and difference, new software, more formal... just, it's, it's good. I feel good.

Adam (35:14): I feel good. I'm glad you feel good as well, Georgia. I, that's, that's,

Georgia (35:18): I'm glad you feel good. I'm glad you feel good.

Adam (35:20): And we hope those of you listening feel good too, but let us know. Drop us an email. We need to also find a way to shut up. Any ideas...

Georgia (35:28): Alright

Adam (35:29): ... let us know at whatever our email address is.

Georgia (35:31): Please don't. Please don't give us more hate. Please not. Please no.

Adam (35:34): Well, no. If you, if you, if you love what we have to say, then give us a five star rating and if you don't love what we say, then just send us an email instead.

Georgia (35:40): Yeah. And five star ratings would be really lovely because we got a nasty troll thing as discussed on the last episode, and I would...

Adam (35:48): Everyone's, I dunno everyone's entitled to their opinions.

Georgia (35:51): It didn't look that bad in the comment itself, I wouldn't normally say it was a troll, but their name had exterminator in it. Okay.

Adam (35:58): Alright. I'm not going any further with that.

Georgia (36:01): Okay.

Adam (36:01): Thank you very much for listening.