What insights do we expect young people to call on when they address the big questions of life and the universe? How can schools prepare young people for a world that is awash with false facts and exaggerated headlines – and equip them with the best ideas and strategies we can offer to help them make decisions rationally and compassionately? What strategies can schools use to give future great minds of science and other disciplines the inspiration and stimulus they need?
Currently school teaching focuses on teaching nuggets of knowledge – but what is the point of a lot of disjointed facts and ideas if you don’t know how and whether any or all of them fit together?
We spend years teaching children in disciplines and about disciplines (as we should in my view) but give them very little if any insight into how disciplines do or do not work well together when brought to bear on a bigger question.
It clearly isn’t the case that all questions fit into boxes – nor that questions arrive with labels to say they are a ‘maths’ question or a question best suited to a mathematician. So one of the epistemic insights that schools are currently missing is how to work out which discipline or disciplines can best help you to address any given question.
Some people say that ‘we need more open questions in school’ – but that’s only a partial response, and of itself it doesn’t explain some transferable knowledge that is going to be taught and assessed. So let’s teach and assess epistemic knowledge – or to give it our phrase, epistemic insight.
This means planning sessions that ask small, medium and big questions and teaching students about the strengths and limitations of different disciplines and the ways they interact. Take a question like, ‘Why did the Titanic sink?’ – it’s not an everyday question nor a random question but it’s a good choice for helping a Year 5 (9 year old) student to appreciate that science and history can work together – in complementary ways – on a shared question.
Today – the language of pedagogy has become the language that teachers and children understand best when they talk about the nature of knowledge – and that can’t be right. The timetable puts some disciplines into subjects and then arranges them in boxes to tell children where they need to be and when. That’s fine except that this has now become the embedded language that children use to talk about knowledge. “It’s Art after lunch, maths in the morning and sport on Wednesday.” “What’s going to be in the science exam – are forces in or out?” “Which subjects are you dropping for GCSE?” We all know what a chemistry lab looks like and feels like and even smells like … each of us spent hours in labs soaking up the atmosphere and staring at the stains on the lab coats hanging on hooks near the door. But after all that time, are we really clear about why some questions find their way into a chemistry lab and some others are kept outside? Did you ever have a lesson in secondary school where a science and history teacher came into a classroom together to explain the distinctive strengths and limitations of their disciplines and some of the ways they can interact?
Teaching epistemic insight needs to begin in primary. I asked a 10 year old, “What makes a question a science question?”, “It’s in a science book” he told me with a look that said, surely that’s obvious. What’s missing for this student and countless others is the epistemic insight to appreciate that the questions in a typical school science book are questions that are filtered and shaped to be particularly amenable to science.
Why now? We’ve been as we are for several decades, why make changes now? One reason is that we’ve got to the point now where many of the teachers are also missing an appreciation of why the boundaries around different disciplines exist. Teachers say phrases like – “We need a broad and balanced curriculum” – which is the language of pedagogy being used to fill a gap in their own epistemic insight. “Broad and balanced?” We are not teaching the curriculum – we’re equipping children with ways to work with knowledge – we’re working within disciplines and across them to draw on scholarly practices and help students learn how to construct knowledge in scholarly ways, how to test it – and how to ask and explore different types of questions and discuss the limitations of any given approach. Only the problem is that right now, many of us are instead working with the pedagogy and not with the intent that produced it. We’re looking at the dot points in the curriculum document and at best noticing ‘links’ to something in another subject – and often not even doing that. Within our own subjects we mash the fragments together to give children ‘variety’ and to ‘keep them engaged’ – rather than notice with them that each discipline – and each of the fields within a discipline – has its preferred questions, methods and norms of thought.
Secondly – why now – is because the internet is removing the firm boundaries of classroom walls and putting our students into a knowledge free-for-all. The internet repeats the misperceptions that are pervasive in society. If society doesn’t have a clear understanding of how disciplines interact – then, broadly speaking, neither does the net. But the internet is also far more ‘giving’ than a teacher – it turns consumers into recipients and turns scarcity into abundance. A teacher filters which questions you get to see and work with, but the internet will give you an answer (or several thousand answers) to any question you ask. Epistemic insight should be guiding students’ searches. “Will you be using a historical lens or a scientific lens to help you choose key words to direct the search – and what do gain or omit because of the lens or lenses you use?”
And the third reason in answer to ‘why now?’ is because knowledge is changing and our expectations and understanding of ourselves are also changing. We know we are broadly speaking genetically similar (a flu bug can put thousands of us into bed at any given time) and yet we are also each unique. We can see the impact we have collectively on our planet from space and imagine ourselves as one very big, powerful population of connected, techno-crazy individuals. We are being asked to think collectively about big questions while at the same time appreciating the importance and value of our diversity. As teachers working in the education system, we are a collective force shaping young minds while at the same time individually responsible for interpreting the curriculum to meet the needs of our students.
What does “interpreting the curriculum” mean to you?
Big Questions are questions about the nature of reality and human personhood and some examples of puzzles today include, can a robot be a good companion, can and should genetic engineering be used to make better people, why does life and the universe exist and to what extent is it true to say, ‘you are what you eat’?
At school today, these big questions are squeezed out – or channelled over to religious education and philosophy – because they are controversial (so not an easy collection of ‘facts’) and because they bridge single-discipline subject boxes. But these are the questions that many people care about, and where we are experiencing and in some cases – producing rapid change with advances in technology and new implications for what we believe about ourselves.
Our research so far has revealed the unwanted and unintended impacts of the current system on students’ experiences of Big Questions. One of our first studies revealed a 13 year old explaining that, “We know not to ask those kinds of questions” and that a teacher wouldn’t want to hear it.
That’s why we are asking teachers to plan teaching that teaches epistemic insight – which means preparing different types of questions – including Big Questions – to build students’ understanding of how disciplines and other types of knowledge work. This new approach has the added advantage that hands-on science activities get to appear in more lessons than those saved for science alone.
So how does the school day work if we see teaching as a way to work towards exploring those big questions – and construct the steps from age 5-16 to get us there. Please join us to find out!
The Epistemic Insight initiative launches with Big Questions Day on Thursday May 16th. With the help of primary and secondary schools and our own student teachers we will showcase what it looks like when students are testing their wits with a range of big, medium and little questions with experts and our own student teachers.