I once overheard a colleague ask a 10-year-old pupil why he learns maths. “To pass tests,” was his reply.
If students believe learning only matters because it helps them to pass tests, it’s unlikely that they’ll find learning useful beyond school. Clearly, learning doesn’t stop at the school gates, and students will need to be motivated and excited by their learning throughout their lives. So how can we, as teachers, instil this sense of curiosity and desire for knowledge?
I believe the key is epistemic insight. What is it? Put simply, it’s knowledge about knowledge, and particularly, knowledge about disciplines and how they interact. So why is this so important?
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In secondary schools in England, we tend to break learning up into small fragments and teach those fragments in very rigid subject compartments. But really, what we need is a new way of thinking about timetabling learning. There are so many life skills - such as our capacities for self-care, compassion and critical thinking - that sit across school subjects rather than simply within them. Perhaps it’s time for a more holistic approach.
The challenge of this is, of course, that setting and marking tests becomes so much more complicated. Secondary disciplines each have their own areas of expert knowledge and methodologies for finding things out. But teaching them in silos does students a disservice.
How does epistemic insight work?
Here’s where epistemic insight has a part to play. At Canterbury Christ Church University, we run a curriculum research and innovation project called the Epistemic Insight Initiative, which seeks and develops activities to make learning about knowledge exciting for students of all ages.
It’s an initiative that relies on teachers and student-teachers being “epistemic agents”, who are themselves thinking critically about the nature of knowledge and its applications and communication - not just within their own subject or subjects, but also across them.
We can create a more joined-up approach to the curriculum and increase students’ curiosity and thirst for knowledge by encouraging them to consider how different disciplines approach the same question.
Let’s take “Why did the Titanic sink?” as an example. Which two disciplines would help you to answer? In this game, we take a question that bridges two different disciplines and then ask students how each discipline would respond. Science and history are the obvious answers to this: how would a scientist and a historian each investigate this question?
A “Big Questions” day can be another approach. On this day, the timetable is pushed aside and students explore a big question through the lenses of different disciplines. A good example is: “Can a robot become a person - and will robots one day outperform and outthink us?” Pretty much every secondary discipline has something to say here.
Epistemic insight shouldn’t only be taught through Big Question days, but throughout all lessons. For example, create a “‘knowledge puzzle” that juxtaposes a pair of words, such as “earth” and “world”, and ask students to compare and discuss the words. Do they mean the same thing or are they different? Which classrooms - or, in other words, disciplines - discuss one or both?
As well as paired words, there are also shared words that have many meanings and are seen differently through the lenses of different disciplines. Consider the word “evidence” - its meaning differs in both the science and history classroom.
Ultimately, whatever jobs our students go on to do, they will need combinations of two or more disciplines to solve problems.
There will be designers of smart wallpapers who combine art and technology. There will be fact-checkers on the internet who are combining computer science, science, journalism and literacy. There will be ground teams and flight assistants looking after your safety at and above spaceports. Physicists and botanists will continue to create plants that thrive in low gravity.
Epistemic insight will be at the centre of all of these - and should be in our curriculum, too.
Berry Billingsley is professor of science education and director of the LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion) research centre at Canterbury Christ Church University
