6. Navigating the Landscape of the Domains
So far, we have examined three approaches to teaching. The first ignored the knowledge-skills debate altogether, and saw education as simply a means to a socio-economic end. The second concentrated on pedagogy, aiming to make the conditions right for students to immerse themselves into the disciplines. The third concentrated on curriculum, making sure knowledge was carefully sequenced in order for students to store it in their long term memory more effectively.
What united all three of these approaches was that they saw knowledge as something we have, separate to the something we do of skills. In this article, I will argue that the two cannot be separated. Knowledge is something we are.
Exploring the landscape
When I was young, I loved mountain biking. I started at the age of 11, gently rolling around waymarked trails in my local forest with a friend from school and his dad. We would go up there every Saturday, following routes of varying difficulty and building our confidence and skills each time.
Soon, we began to go up there on our own, and instead of following the same old paths each time, we would dive off down smaller, fainter trails and see where they took us. At one point, we found a spade hidden in some bushes. We had visions of building our own trails, but our teenage work ethic meant we usually ended up leaning on it and chatting rather than doing any actual digging.
Around the same time, I would be dragged up hills on walks with my parents. I was often reluctant at the time, but in hindsight I was lucky to have been introduced to the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, the wilderness of Galloway in Southern Scotland. As with knowledge, these things often only become apparent later on.
Navigating the landscape
My stepdad, Chris, had a huge collection of maps. They were battered and frayed, and of differing ages depending on how long he had been walking in that area. The night before a walk, he would sit and stare at them for what seemed like hours, glasses perched on top of his head and map held up close, squinting. Eventually a route would be chosen, and the next day we’d set off to tackle it.
Chris always carried the map. Often it would be kept inside a plastic wallet, to save it from getting wet if it rained. As we walked across the landscape, he’d fold and refold it, to keep our location within the see-through plastic square.
Sometimes he’d show me where we were, pointing with his middle finger at some spot he’d managed to triangulate from visible landmarks. We’d then look up and examine those landmarks — a peak, a tarn, a section of dry stone wall — and how they fitted into the landscape itself.
As I grew older, I too began to take part in this strange ritual of map examining. I would spend hours hunting out footpaths and bridleways, wondering what they’d be like in real life, before setting out to explore them for myself.
As time went on, I lost interest in waymarked trails. What appealed were the fainter paths, the routes that led me into unknown territory. I was becoming a proper mountain biker; someone who rode their bike in the mountains as opposed to someone who happened to ride a bike designed to go off road.
In reality, I often ended up carrying my bike, because the terrain was too steep or rough to cycle on. These new adventures required a level of fitness beyond what carried me around the woods. The trails also became rockier and more exposed, placing more demands on my handling skills and nerve than I’d ever needed close to home.
The greater challenges were rewarded with a greater depth of experience. Zipping down a path at top speed was made all the sweeter for having battled to get there, and by the thought that no one else was likely to have made the same journey that day, or even that year.
There were days when I would struggle for hours along what looked on the map like a perfect stretch of snaking trail, but in fact was a boggy, heathery trudge. Some days I would carry my bike all the way to the top of the hill, only to find the route down too steep and rocky to cycle. As frustrating as such experiences were, they only added to the satisfaction that arose when those tiny dashed lines on the map translated into perfect terrain beneath my wheels.
Learning the limits
After a few years of adventuring in this way, (adventuring very much with a small ‘a’, admittedly), I began to learn what would make a good trail and what would be too much for me to handle. I became wary of trails that made their way deep into remote valleys then stopped. On the ground these would invariably peter out into nothing.
Likewise, footpaths that slashed through densely contoured mountain-sides tended to be too technical to make for an enjoyable ride. They offered lovely walks, but I was well aware of the limits of my mountain biking abilities.
It was only when I became aware of such limits that I could truly enjoy the landscape. I had learned where and when was ripe for cycling, and where and when a walk or a run would be the better choice.
It took a certain amount of experience to appreciate that there are many different ways in which people interact with the world around them, and to learn the art of choosing which way was appropriate at a particular time or place.
So it is with knowledge. As humans, we are all adventurers, exploring the vast and intricate landscape of our collected experience.
To be knowledgeable is to feel at home in some part of this landscape. It is to have pored over the maps; to have investigated every footpath, stream and trig point; to have learned which adventures are achievable and which are bound to end in failure.
Knowledge as something we are
Knowledge, then, is the ability to navigate, not the remote hills of Scotland and northern England, but the domains that have been built up over millennia by humans also engaged in such adventures.
A knowledgeable person is familiar with every feature of the landscape; they are utterly in command of the area they inhabit. Knowledge is the ability to triangulate, to locate the position of each new landmark relative to all the others.
If an expert in a domain gets lost, they will soon reason their way back to a place they recognise. It is through these experiences that they are able to assimilate these new surroundings to their overall map.
This implies that there is more to knowledge than mere familiarity with the landmarks. A person may identify every mountain, waterfall or pile of stones without hesitation, but unless she knows where they lie in relation to each other she cannot be said to know the landscape.
If such a person were to get lost, she would wander around for days, stumbling across recognisable features but never knowing what will crop up next.
Likewise, there is more to knowledge than the ability to conquer the landscape. We can imagine the supreme intellectual athlete, able to scale every peak and hurdle every river. This person might find themselves in an unknown valley, dismissing the need for maps and simply charging off upwards to tackle the nearest mountain.
For all they might find, it will take a long time for them to become truly knowledgeable: to know which paths lead to impassable cliffs and which ones skirt round safely; to know which woods offer short cuts and which are impenetrable; to know the extent to which their athletic prowess will serve them and the limits they will inevitably reach.
Knowledge is reducible therefore neither to lading-lists of landmarks nor agglomerations of attributes. To know is not to have a large bank of locations stored in one’s memory; it is not to have a large stride length, muscle mass or VO2 max score. To know is to be at home in the landscape.
When we describe a person as knowledgeable, we are making a judgment on that person as a whole. This judgment rarely hinges on particular facts or procedures they are or are not able to recall or enact; instead, we are describing a certain attitude, a readiness; a command of their domain.
A person’s knowledge frames every decision they make; every action they take; every word they speak. It is by their decisions, actions and words that we identify them. Their knowledge determines who they are.
The role of the teacher
This brings us to the task of education. How can we cultivate this adventurous spirit, this ability to triangulate, this fitness to meet the demands of the landscape? What did Chris do to make me feel at home in the hills?
He could have taught me that a map was simply a means of navigating from one place to another, and that the best routes were the most direct. Or that maps were only useful for their contours and chevrons, because they pointed to the steepest hills which would optimise my training regime.
These methods might have helped me reach my destination faster, but I would never have had any adventures along the way.
He could have dismissed the very notion of maps altogether, telling me that I could ride my bike wherever the hell I liked. Better to immerse myself in the landscape than be taken there against my will.
Without him forcing me to climb mountains and wander around on misty moors, however, it’s unlikely I would have strayed further than my back garden. I’d never have caught the sunrise glimpse of snowy white peaks hitherto obscured by clouds.
Alternatively, he could have shut me indoors, poring over maps and memorising photographs of the features they represented. It’s hard to imagine such a process filling me with enthusiasm for exploration.
Had I eventually ventured out, I would have been forced to stick to the paths. Without any sense of how the landmarks lay in relation to one another on the ground, even the tiniest deviation from the trail would have been terrifyingly unfamiliar.
What he did instead was model the virtues that over time became second nature to me too. He would tell us explicitly that we were embarking on a fifteen mile walk through Galloway tussock, a walk so self-evidently pointless that therein lay the thrill of it. He would lead us to the broadest slopes and take the steepest route up, purely because he took delight in the struggle.
At every summit, we would take a moment to reflect on the sheer beauty of the horizon that stretched around us (at least on the days where visibility was greater than a few metres). He would point out every exquisitely carved peak in the distance, telling us how he used to argue with his own father about their names.
We observed and imbibed the time he spent poring over his collection of maps, well-thumbed and lovingly arranged as they were. He took pleasure in showing us his plans, pointing out the landmarks and telling us with enthusiasm what all the symbols represented on the ground.
These examples highlight the deeper role of a teacher in imparting knowledge. Each of the examples of education I discussed earlier is based on an abstraction, focusing on one part of the process but neglecting others.
In teaching me to navigate, Chris transcended these abstractions to convey something deeper, something that went to the core of his identity and ultimately shaped my own.
Bringing it all together
All of the approaches to education I have discussed so far in this series contain a degree of truth. Of course a student should be aware that the tools they acquire in school may be useful in other contexts, and that any qualifications they receive are likely to have some use in the university and job markets later on.
There is little point denying this; it forms the basis of much of our societal structure. To make this the primary focus, however, would be to stick to the valleys and passes and avoid the most spectacular peaks of learning.
It’s obvious that students need certain habits and qualities in order to study objects, ideas and texts in greater depth. Where an athlete builds her fitness, a student must develop the intellectual virtues: patience, attentiveness, exactness.
One cannot explore a landscape without these qualities, but they must be inculcated for the purpose of allowing students to find enjoyment in adventure, not for the sake of the workplace or survival in the 21st century.
There is a lot to be said for the thrill of discovery. Students love to find things out for themselves, just as the adventurous spirit really thrives when it steps away from the footpath.
Yet there are some areas of human experience that lie so far away from the major conurbations of everyday life that students must be taken there — often dragged against their immediate wishes — by those who have made the journey already.
Finally, there is no doubt that any student who shows a reasonable command of her domain is in possession of a number of facts and procedures. She recognises the major landmarks, knows all the symbols on the map, and is familiar with many of the better-trodden routes.
If a student is to ever go beyond the waymarked trails, however, she must be given opportunities to get lost. Just as I learned when to ditch the bike and lace up my walking boots instead, she must be allowed to suffer the frustrations that establish the limits of her knowledge and teach her how to choose.
The teacher must give a student all these things. She must equip students with the facts; give her a taste of discovery; develop her intellectual virtues; and prepare her to meet the goals of wider society.
She must apply the principles of cognitive psychology to build retention of information; she must provide opportunities for adventure, experimentation and failure; she must use all the behavioural tools available to build discipline and rigour in her students; and she must maintain one eye on exams, accountability, and the job market at all times.
She must do all these things, and yet transcend them. If the student is to truly feel at home in the landscape, and eager to explore it further, the teacher must weave all these variegated practices together.
What must pervade every aspect of the teacher’s work is that spirit, that adventurous spirit, that wish to go through these gruelling experiences to attain the satisfaction of being there; becoming a part of the landscape: a participant in human experience.
Only when we recognise this will we escape the sterile dichotomies within which schools and teachers have sought to identify themselves. This is what we hope to achieve at Bobby Moore Academy. Are we traditional or progressive? Neither. Do we focus on knowledge or skills? Both. Do we seek to be experts in curriculum or pedagogy? We seek to be experts in everything.
It is on this basis that we are building our science curriculum. In the next article, I will begin to outline what this looks like in practice.
This is part of a series on Developing a Science Curriculum at Bobby Moore Academy.
Previous articles:
1. What’s going wrong with our Year 11s?
2. Isn’t there already a curriculum?
3. Does anyone learn because they love learning?
