How one view of knowledge came to dominate learning (TES 2023 06 28)

Interview with Eaglestone: How one view of knowledge came to dominate learning

Eaglestone argues that there is a "gulf" now between the was that English is taught in schools and universities: "What seems to have changed is the idea of what kind of knowledge the subject teaches". He insists that "ideas about powerful knowledge and cultural literacy stand at one end of things, while the study of what literature really is stands at the other". His solution is to "reframe national conversations about education away from the language of powerful knowledge and cultural literacy and towards the significance of disciplines".

He emphasises the need for "signature pedagogies" for each subject and, in English, for assessment to be holistic (rather than "atomised").

Types of Knowledge

He suggests there are different types of knowledge (Science teaches one kind, Humanities another):

The way I think of it is that in a successful physics lesson, all the students would end up coming up with the same answer to the physics problem. But in a successful English lesson, the idea is that all students will come up with different interpretations, because it’s about human distinctiveness and difference and understanding those things; it’s all based in your own experience.

Eaglestone uses Aristotle's term phronesis: "it means learning and reflecting on experience, and drawing ideas from that".

What the humanities teach is how to reflect on other people and on yourself and on experience. Of course, science is very keen to get away from that because that often leads to what scientists call “folk ideas” about what the answers are. So scientists, quite rightly, are anxious about that. That’s what someone like Michael Young (who developed the concept of “powerful knowledge”) is anxious about. But in English, it’s exactly that kind of thinking about people and experiences that we’re really keen on.

Goes on:

the idea that you want to separate out experience and personal understanding from what you do in the classroom is already misunderstanding what happens in English.

The shift is a result of the influence of E.D. Hirsch and Michael Young on DfE and OFSTED.

these ideas about knowledge are also deforming what the subject of English is; they have taken the central idea of what English teaches and they’ve twisted it into a kind of science.

In the current classroom Eaglestone draws attention to "feature spotting", the "vocabulary gap" ("the idea that you can’t teach the first page of A Christmas Carol unless you’ve explained what all the peculiar words are when, of course, the words aren’t the crucial thing; you understand the meaning from the wider context."), the idea that there's always a right or wrong answer and - the worst - the importance of historical context.

There’s so much teaching of historical context of literary texts that their literariness disappears and they get treated as historical documents. Historical context is, again, easy to teach, it’s easy to assess, it can be right or wrong. But, at the same time, it disempowers the reader in all sorts of ways.

He gives example of Jane Eyre where historical presentation causes "understanding of the text is immediately bracketed into this overarching and slightly stereotyped historical understanding".

Cognitive Sciences

Eaglestone is a little skeptical about the effectiveness of cognitive science approaches:

But education, and English in particular, doesn’t necessarily work like that because we’re interested in a much wider sense of meaning. It’s not as clear-cut as the kind of learning that cognitive science approaches are based on.

A way of teaching has grown up that treats people as if they were computers, as if they were artificial intelligence. It’s based around the idea that we can load information up into the short-term memory, and then some of that will go into long-term memory - like taking pictures on your phone. But that’s not how human beings work, and it’s not what the humanities do.

He reminds that - from the work of John Hattie - what makes really successful teachers is not subject knowledge but their deeper understanding.

Eaglestone wants subjects to assert their own "signature pedagogies":

It’s time for disciplines to stress their own signature pedagogies (a term coined by Lee Shulman) a bit more, and for us to recognise that different disciplines represent different ways of thinking and different ways of approaching things in the world.

English "signature pedagogy"

• The English signature pedagogy is "fundamentally dialogic".
• It's circular ("hermeneutics circularity"): "You get a big picture and the small detail helps you understand the big picture better. And then the big picture helps you understand the detail and significance. And those two things go round and round and expand; the large-scale understanding and the small-scale detail are constantly reinforcing and supporting each other."
• It has a focus on writing and redrafting. "Learning to write is not just reporting information; it’s a kind of thinking in its own right."

Assessment in English

• assessment/assessment objectives "they have led to a kind of atomisation of the subject".
• "assessment has to be holistic because the signature pedagogies involve working towards goals in a more holistic, reflective way"