Thinking about the development of a body of knowledge

My first conversation with Dr. Hanan Yaniv, about a year ago, and his drawing on a white board during our discussion, gave me a way of thinking about how the body of knowledge in disaster management is developed; how practitioner and researcher's body of knowledge differ and intersect; what distinguishes first hand disaster experience as a form on knowledge; and whether disaster experience can be recreated, created, simulated to provide first hand opportunities for learning, without having to experience a real disaster. And to start to answer these questions I turned to the disaster management literature on these topics. I also sought to learn about how new technologies, and educational technologies specifically, were discussed in the literature, and how these discussions were linked to the development of a body of knowledge. My reading, thinking, and reflection on these questions results in pages and pages of notes and drawings, and eventually to the conceptual framework of my proposed research topic. Along the way, and as a result of my reading, I recognized that indigenous knowledge was part of the body of knowledge, and an important element that needed to be added a framework, and that was generally missing from the discussion in North American literature, but which was part of the literature on disaster management in an international context.

Today's presentation was a chance for me to hear Dr. Yaniv speak about his philosophical and theoretical orientations, and how that has influenced his work.... to be continued.