Why does no one talk about knowledge in this school?
A conversation between Grace Jackson, Angela Oakley and Henry Welwyn, heads of science, English and history at the Riverside Academy, East London.
This is an extract from a longer conversation about knowledge, teaching and schools. The full text is available here.
Henry Welwyn: I have a question for you guys. Why does no one talk about knowledge in this school?
Grace Jackson: What do you mean? We talk about knowledge all the time. We’re currently having lots of conversations as a department around where to place disciplinary knowledge in our curriculum. We have our knowledge organisers; we talk about how to chunk new knowledge to avoid too much cognitive load; our CPD sessions are based on developing pedagogical content knowledge. How can you say we don’t talk about knowledge?
HW: OK, so I grant that we use the word ‘knowledge’ in conversation, but what are we actually talking about when we use that word?
GJ: It’s what helps us understand the world. It’s the stuff we must pass on to our students so they are not ignorant when they leave us.
Angela Oakley: Can you give an example?
GJ: Well, in science, we want students to know lots of things. Biology tells them what they need to know about their bodies to stay healthy. Chemistry explains how substances react and change; they can’t understand loads of everyday things without knowing that. Physics explains how everything moves and interacts, how anything electrical works, how energy moves around, and so on. They couldn’t understand most of the world around them without physics.
AO: Couldn’t they? I never really understood anything in science, but I seem to cope just fine in the world.
GJ: But you would cope better if you did understand. Knowing how to wire a three pin plug means you can change a fuse if it blows in your kettle. Knowing what concentration means makes you more likely to put the right amount of screen wash in your car so the water doesn’t freeze on a cold day.
AO: But I don’t need to know these things! If my kettle broke, I’d just call an electrician. And I just follow the instructions on the back of the bottle of screen wash; I don’t need to know why I’m adding a certain amount.
GJ: So are you saying the knowledge we give to students is pointless?
AO: I’m not saying it’s pointless. I’m sure it’s useful for someone, somewhere. What I would argue is that we get way too excited about knowledge and miss what I think education is really all about.
GJ: What’s that?
AO: For me, it’s about self-discovery. It’s about emancipating yourself from the norms society places upon you and learning how to think and act freely. Too often, at school, we focus on filling students’ heads full of facts. We forget that they are living human beings, who have a right to learn how to think for themselves.
HW: How do you think we should support them to do this?
AO: Well, when I read a text with my students in English, I’m not really interested in telling them about what such and such an episode is a reference to or what technique the writer was applying on page 79. What I’m trying to do is give them a window into their own soul. For me, it’s by reading about and reflecting upon the experiences of others that we can truly come to understand ourselves.
GJ: But surely there’s knowledge involved in this? You need definitions of words, first and foremost. There’s no way you can understand what a text is talking about unless you know what the words mean.
AO: Of course, but my point is that you have to start with the meaning of the whole text and only afterwards focus on the individual words. Students have to be engaged before they start learning definitions. Otherwise you kill their motivation and they don’t want to read the text at all.
GJ: I’m not sure about this. I would argue that if students know what the words mean then they’re way more likely to enjoy the text. If they’re trying to read something they don’t understand then the cognitive load is surely going to be way too high. They’ll be putting all their energy into decoding and will have no capacity to make sense of the broader meaning.
AO: So what, you think we should make students memorise the dictionary first before we allow them to read any texts?
GJ: No, of course not. That would be crazy. All I’m saying is that you can’t understand Shakespeare unless you already have a broad vocabulary. We need to explicitly teach students the meanings of words before we introduce them to the most important texts.
AO: Well, that’s another thing: why do we have to teach students Shakespeare? Who says his plays are the most important texts?
GJ: Surely we can all agree that any study of English literature should involve the study of Shakespeare?
AO: Perhaps, at some point. But why do we have to start with Shakespeare? That’s the problem we have in this school, we just do what we’ve always done. In English we have to teach Shakespeare, in history we have to teach about the Tudors, in science we have to teach about the famous discoveries of all those dead, white men. None of this stuff speaks to students; it has no tangible impact on their lives.
HW: What do you think our role as educators is?
AO: To liberate our students, to enlighten them, to empower them. We have to let them know that the world is not fixed, that power structures are open to change, that history is still being written. Yet all we ever seem to do is the opposite. In science, you guys tell them, “here are a load of facts about the world, you just need to remember them.” In history, you go on and on about the past without ever telling them how this might relate to their lives in the present. And now you’re telling me that in English we should stop talking about their own lives and instead tell them a load of stuff about Shakespeare. It’s too much!
HW: You don’t think Shakespeare has relevance to their lives? I always thought he was addressing some pretty universal themes.
AO: Well, that’s arguable, whether you can take the perspective of a white, European, educated male from the early 17th Century as universal, but I’ll grant it to you for the sake of the argument. All I’m saying is that we have to consider our students’ starting points. They are growing up in a world that is very different to the one Shakespeare lived in. If you go to his texts too early, you switch them off entirely. They need to be motivated to find out more about themselves before being introduced to those traditional texts.
GJ: I’m sorry, Angela, but I think you’re just plain wrong here. Firstly, this whole thing about students being motivated before they can learn anything is nonsense. It’s by learning things that they become motivated. My students enjoy learning science because I teach them how to do things and then give them an opportunity to practise. Once they get the hang of it and feel that success, they feel good. It’s that feeling that motivates them to learn more. I just don’t buy all this lighting fires bullshit, I’m sorry.
AO: But what does success even mean? You’re dictating -
GJ: Hang on, hang on — let me finish. Secondly, I really don’t think you can claim that the themes Shakespeare is talking about are not universal. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what era or society you were born into: you are going to experience feelings of ambition, of love, of jealousy, of pride, of despair. Shakespeare addressed those themes better than anyone before or since, and there’s no way we can help students understand themselves in the way you’re talking about unless they know a whole lot of stuff about his plays.
Finally, even if those themes weren’t universal, if what you say about Shakespeare’s perspective being limited to a certain time or place is correct — well, those plays still happen to be the plays that people in power have read and can talk about, so we 100% owe it to our students to give them a decent working knowledge of those plays in order that they can take part in those conversations. Because if we’re saying, “oh, those kids in that private school might learn about Shakespeare but our kids in this school are going to learn about something more ‘relevant’,” we’re denying them access to the very power structures you’re saying you wish to overcome.
AO: But isn’t that just the classic liberal position! First, you set the rules of the game so that they entirely suit your preferences. The students who accept those rules ‘feel that success’, as you described it; they are the ones who are indeed motivated to work harder. The students who don’t accept those rules, however — students who, I might add, tend to be from working class or minority backgrounds — are branded as ‘low ability’ and end up being spat out of the system as failures. And that’s after they’ve endured years of punitive behaviour systems forcing them to play a game that bears zero relation to the lives they actually lead. The system is rigged and you know it.
GJ: But how is anyone ever going to change the system unless they’re part of it? That’s what I’m saying! The only way we can change the system is if the kinds of students you’re talking about have the opportunity to become part of it. What you’re suggesting ultimately just preserves the status quo.
AO: I know that’s what you’re saying: you’re saying that we have to take the power structure for granted and hope that by forcing working class and minority kids to be compliant then they won’t get screwed over quite so badly. What I’m saying is that we need to question the whole structure. We need to liberate our minds from the way we’ve always done things and think about how we could redesign the system altogether.
This is an extract from a longer conversation about knowledge, teaching and schools. The full text is available here.
