How can we think of a practice of study?

Our answer begins with another question: how does study relate to knowing? For what is practiced is known affectively, "deep grooves," reinforced paths in our nervous system. Our knowledge may come in many forms and guises, but if it comes as a result of intention, then it is study.

The relation between study and knowing is little examined in an doxic model of teaching and learning, but which is central to us. What we know is at our fingertips, it is not a burden to our memory nor taxing in our efforts to give it voice. Though our knowledge is provisional, capable of being recast by new experience, it is not ephemeral or impermanent.

Knowledge is the byproduct of study insofar as our considerations of the object give rise to experience, while evoking and recalling other experiences, putting them in meaningful relationship with one another. In our collectivities of study, our common experience, and the shared surface of our distinct experiences, ensnared most often in language, knowledge emerges out of memory and affect.

What is known differs from what is thought, especially as thinking requires effort and exertion, requires placing two experiences in relationship or comparison with one another, and holding them in that position until affect's glue firms and hardens into durable meaning. Knowledge is the remembered aspect of this experience, shallower in a way than the moment-to-moment original, but more durable, more capacious, less confined.