ABSTRACT
The most daunting of doctoral programme challenges is the expectation that graduate students conduct original research that generates new knowledge. This is a formidable ideal for anyone, but especially for people just beginning their acquaintance with the old knowledge. Few graduate students appreciate, however, that their beginner’s ideas about new
knowledge are much more grandiose than the ideals their faculty mentors will hold them to. Faculty members won’t necessarily tell them that because, in other respects, the asymmetries point the other way. Student ideas about what it means to critically evaluate a line of research, for example, frequently fall short of faculty expectations. But when it comes to the new knowledge ideal, students tend to aim for the stars and fear they’ll never get there, whereas faculty members place one foot in front of the other and just move along. My own experience as a graduate student and mentor suggests that students can benefit
greatly from the one foot in front of the other point of view, but only if they have both feet on the ground. That’s more likely to happen if students understand the pragmatic contexts in which knowledge can be defined as new – not just by doctoral students, but also by faculty members and other researchers. These contexts usually have something to do with being well informed, industrious, creative, clear thinking and truthful, but they have at least as much or more to do with ignorance. By ignorance, I mean the role and structure of collective deficits in academic under-
standing. My argument is that most doctoral students will have an easier go of their dissertation research if they begin by looking for that kind of ignorance than if they begin by looking for new knowledge.
