TiE THEMES
Engaging with uncertainty is an educational imperative
Many uncertainties face us in the 21st century and they are also integral to many every day decisions; engaging students with such uncertainty is recognised internationally as key to ensuring creative, critical and resilient civil societies.
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There are multiple uncertainties that we face including climate change, mass migration, rapid digitalisation and automisation, and threats to democracy, where solutions are unclear and will unfold over time. Covid-19 also reminds us that the unexpected can and does happen. Uncertainty is also integral to everyday decisions in business, finance, politics and personal lives, given their particularity and imprecision. Such matters require careful consideration and deliberation, before deciding how to act.
Problems which humans face, whether sparkling at dinner party conversations or conducting international trade negotiations, are not well-defined problems amenable to rapid calculation . . . We talk about uncertainty only if incomplete knowledge leads to a state of doubt – we are only too familiar (some politicians come to mind) with people who are ignorant but not in doubt, and therefore experience no uncertainty. (Mervyn King and John Kay, 2020, Radical uncertainty: decision-making for an unknowable future) |
Global schooling is currently preoccupied with establishing certainty
While the world is full of uncertainty, schooling emphasises certainty: this cannot wholly prepare students for the real world and every day challenges.
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School subjects are mapped and measured, as defined by national curricular. On the surface, this approach seems to work. The teacher is certain what they must teach. The students are certain what they must learn. There are right and wrong answers. Those giving correct answers receive good grades and go off, full of expectation, into the world. This ignores how the world is filled with uncertainty.
Our education system will never succeed in shielding everyone from uncertainty. Nor should it try: this simply leaves young people to worry before, perhaps, telling an adult. Working through uncertainty with support is what builds resilience.
Our education system will never succeed in shielding everyone from uncertainty. Nor should it try: this simply leaves young people to worry before, perhaps, telling an adult. Working through uncertainty with support is what builds resilience.
Acknowledging existing uncertainties, rather than ‘trying to find a way to kill uncertainty’, suggests Riel Miller from UNESCO (see BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week), is a way to appreciate novelty, diversity and difference. It offers the possibility to cultivate the confidence and imagination to explore ways to express these values in ‘radically different ways’. (See our blog Covid-19 and the future of education and Financial Times OpEd Is uncertainty the enemy of wellbeing)
How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature? To survive and flourish in the world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult that teaching them an equation in physics or the cause of the First World War. (Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p.265)
Learning means opening yourself up to the event and to the hope that something might come to help you stage the becoming of another you and another us . . . Good teachers are teachers who suspend knowledge, who open up the abyss. (Eamonn Dunn in The Pedagogies of Unlearning, p.18-20)
Children and young people are grappling with uncertainty, often alone
Working with uncertainty is important to prepare students to find their place in a complex and uncertain world, but they need the support of a teacher/educator.
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Many students are already dealing with uncertainty in their lives, sometimes with the support of family and friends, but at other times alone. Our own research, for example, is looking at how children and young people are working out how to live with Covid and to mitigate the threat of climate change. They are busy engaging with inherently difficult ethical and existential questions, and trying to relate these to government directives, school strictures and their complex family lives.
Students are working out how to respond to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements; how to make sense of competing sources of information and to escape echo chambers (in a world of ‘post-truths’); and many are navigating the consequences of living with economic precarity. Children and young people are managing multiple feelings, such as fear, anger and confusion, plus the joys of reimagining possibilities for the unknown. Having opportunities to rehearse being uncertain in a safe space, with teachers who pay attention to them as they figure things out, is important educationally and for student wellbeing. |
Curricular knowledge is important, but all topics include a degree of uncertainty
Core to teaching is sharing what you know and love about the world, but uncertainty exists in all taught topics (and more so in some than others).
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Sharing what is already known helps to ensure that students have relevant knowledge/skills and are socialised into how the world applies such knowledge. Drawing attention to aspects of poetry, mathematics, ecology, philosophy or football, for example, offers students the possibility to foster a passion for the topic and to want to continue and preserve that which already exists in the world. Importantly, this includes truths thought to be worth aspiring to for the benefit of humanity. This is inherently hopeful.
While teachers share what they know, there exists a degree of uncertainty in all taught topics. An analysis of a poem, for example, varies across people, place and time; and science always works at the boundary between what is, and what is not, yet known or imagined. With global digitalisation, the breadth of knowledge available expands and shifts exponentially.
There is greater uncertainty in some topics, such as climate science.
While teachers share what they know, there exists a degree of uncertainty in all taught topics. An analysis of a poem, for example, varies across people, place and time; and science always works at the boundary between what is, and what is not, yet known or imagined. With global digitalisation, the breadth of knowledge available expands and shifts exponentially.
There is greater uncertainty in some topics, such as climate science.
I tend to go in with, the text is the thing, it’s the anchor. I do believe I very rarely fall foul of this. I do believe good things will happen if you open a conversation around a good text, and if you know the text, you being the teacher. It doesn’t matter if things come up that you don’t know the answer to, I hope I’m dealing with how to deal with uncertainty all the time, not fixed solutions: allowing for ambiguity, dispute. It’s all meat and drink, it’s all part of the fun. I couldn’t imagine it being otherwise, in terms of English teaching. (Tom, a secondary and sixth form English teacher; cited in our research paper).
[Female students] would say, ‘Well what did you want me to say?’ and I’d have to say ‘I want you to want to say something. That’s what I want. I don’t care if it’s right or wrong, I want it to be your response to the text we’re talking about. There is no right or wrong from that point of view’. Germain Greer (see our blog Troubling ‘good’ girl’ conformity in the classroom)
There is no certainty in science . . . uncertainty is the engine of science. (Prof Tom Jefferson, epidemiologist).
Curricular subjects are experienced in multiple and uncertain ways
Curricular topics that include any degree of uncertainty are not simplylearned: they areexperienced in multiple and uncertain ways.
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We register our experience of a topic in multiple ways:
- Different knowledge: exploring different knowledge about the topic, including disciplinary (science, arts, humanities), indigenous, children’s local knowledge, and their imaginations.
I chose [to study] botany because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrods looked so beautiful together . . . it is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both. (Robin Wall Kimmerer, an Anishinabekwe native American and scientist, Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teaching of plants, p. 46)
- Feelings felt in bodies: exploring diverse (and sometimes competing) feelings about a topic and how these are ‘felt’ in our bodies.
One of Klein’s most inspiring stories is of the fire chief who abruptly pulled his crew out of a burning building minutes before the floor collapsed, having sensed that there was something wrong with what he and his colleagues regarded as the best explanation while remaining uncertain what it was that was wrong. Administered by someone with a proven record of success in decision-making, the question ‘Does this feel right?’ is valuable. To admire this expertise is not the same as applauding people who make decisions ‘from the gut’, relying only on their bombast or seniority to attest to the quality of their judgement. (Mervyn King and John Kay, 2020, Radical uncertainty: decision-making for an unknowable future)
Despair cannot be banished by injections of optimism or sermons on 'positive thinking' . . . [We] can come to terms with apocalyptic [climate change] anxieties in ways that are integrative and liberating, opening awareness not only to planetary distress, but also to the hope inherent in our capacity to change. (Macy, 1991; cited in Mayes and Holdsworth)
- Things we do and encounter: exploring different practices that people do in relation to a topic (e.g. scientific techniques; cultural differences; personal action), which might involve encountering different things (e.g. texts, equipment, buildings, the natural environment) that enhance or limit an experience of the topic.
- Existential and ethics : exploring values and concerns for making meaning of life, including the spiritual, existential and inherently difficult ethical questions that arise. This might include, for example, whether what we desire is desirable for the planet; what might we give up for the sake of others; the role of humility and gratitude in our relations with the natural world? One way to address such ‘big’ questions uses a Philosophy with Children format.
During a trip to the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, we discovered an educational and cultural emphasis on voiceandsilence as offering opportunities for contemplation. (See our blog Silence in the deep mid-winter)
During the first lockdown, with many having to accept that their contribution to the collective effort meant doing little more than remaining at home,ProfessorMona Siddiquidrew on the Koran to make clear that purpose is not found in individual work or routine, but is to do with ‘something bigger which takes us outside of ourselves and our own desires’ and ‘accepting uncertainty, and finding the courage to live in new ways which cultivate inner fortitude and patience.’ (BBC Radio 4, Thought for Today, 2020)
Uncertainties are not experienced in the same way by different people. Knowledges about the present and perspectives on the future are all constructed in particular contexts. Depending on one's situation, uncertainties may be embraced as opportunity or encountered as a source of dread, fear and anxiety . . . Emotions and feelings matter, as they affect understanding and action. Religous and spitirual beliefs about - and enactment of - relationships between humans and the world may also impinge . . . And, in turn, uncertainties are influenced by histories, cultures and identities. (Ian Scoones & Andy Stirling, Politics of Uncertainty, p. 4-5)
Specific registers may have a particular resonance for an individual student, bringing it alive for them. Some will lap up information and relish the ‘facts’, whereas others may be captured by a topic’s imaginative possibilities, or by exploring their own feelings, or wider ethical and spiritual dimensions.
Creative, playful and deliberative activities can support students to register how they experience topics. See examples here
Creative, playful and deliberative activities can support students to register how they experience topics. See examples here
Teachers and students together make meaning of uncertain topics
Working with uncertainty aims to avoid the tyranny of only ever using instruction, by arousing in students the desire to make meaning of the world around them and to recognise their own intelligence to do so.
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When opening up a space to be uncertain, everyone is invited to share what they know, and no-one person has the ultimate authority to claim what is ‘true’. What makes sense is decided by everybody, through a rigorous process of focusing on the topic and making reference to what can be known about it, as experienced through the different registers. The teacher may include an emphasis on curricular disciplinary knowledge, but there are also opportunities for students to bring in their local knowledge and cultural histories, feelings, opinions, concerns, questions, etc. This offers the possibility to expand what it is possible to know about a topic.
Meaning is the work of the will. This is the secret of universal teaching. (Jacques Rancière, 1991, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 56).
Integrating the diversity of ways in which students experience topics (including their local knowledge, feelings, questions, concerns, etc.), particularly in those topics where there is greater uncertainty about what can be known, is core to decolonising education practices.
National and school curricular define what is (and therefore what is not) considered valuable to know. To ensure the curriculum does not silence difference, including other possibilities of knowing and being in the world, schools must also open-up opportunities for all students (regardless of ethnicity or race, gender, social class, sexuality, etc.) to speak of their own diverse experiences. This avoids the knowledge hierarchies of colonisation.
National and school curricular define what is (and therefore what is not) considered valuable to know. To ensure the curriculum does not silence difference, including other possibilities of knowing and being in the world, schools must also open-up opportunities for all students (regardless of ethnicity or race, gender, social class, sexuality, etc.) to speak of their own diverse experiences. This avoids the knowledge hierarchies of colonisation.
The first uncertainty [confronting our time] concerns the inexhaustible and ungraspable diversity of social experiences in the world. (Santos de Sousa, 2009, p. 112) |
Engaging with uncertainty is demanding work and core to democracy
Engaging with uncertainty is not about students simply sharing their own thoughts and opinions, or doing what they like: it requires them to acknowledge and respond to multiple and competing internal feelings, external pressures and information sources.
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Not all student ideas are helpful or desirable: teachers must require students to verify collectively what can be known and whether what is proposed is desirable for themselves, others and the nonhuman world.
Understanding the complex world is a matter of constructing the best explanation – a narrative account – from a myriad of little details and the knowledge of context derived from personal experience and the experience of others . . . Successful decision-making under uncertainty is a collaborative process. Having arrived at the best explanation, it is important to open that explanation to challenge and be ready to change the guiding narrative when new information emerges. (Mervyn King and John Kay, Radical uncertainty: decision-making for an unknowable future)
Working with uncertainty involves students engaging with diversity and difficulty, rather than shying away from complexity. It also emphasises the importance of working together to determine a course of action, where there is no clear path, but still a need to act. This is core to ensuring students’ early inauguration as citizens in an open democracy.
Working with uncertainty can open up new possibilities
Knowledge is important, but as important (or more so), is how students might use this knowledge for the common good of the human and non-human world.
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Where teachers share what they know, students must be able to answer questions in factually correct ways. We need them to know how letters can be used to communicate ideas and that two plus two equals four, for example. Our research explores the benefits of also working with uncertainty, where teachers alone cannot know the answers.
Read more here on the possible benefits that include deep learning, self-awareness and being changed; embracing difference and complexity; school and wider structural change.
Read more here on the possible benefits that include deep learning, self-awareness and being changed; embracing difference and complexity; school and wider structural change.
Schooling only for conformity is never sufficient within a system with democratic ideals. . . . [Rosa] Parks knew that it was considered unacceptable for people of colour to choose where to sit on a public bus, but still she rejected the bus driver’s order when told where to sit. (see our blog A test of citizenship: Rosa Parks and how to educate for a world of uncertainties) |
Engaging with uncertainty does not require a full-scale educational revolution
Engaging with uncertainty is not utopian; it does not ask that students or teachers overhaul entire schools or education systems. It is about momentary shifts in the everyday of the classroom/school.
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Teachers are key for sharing what they know, whilst students respond with how they experience a topic: together, teacher and students verify what can be known, remaining open to the potential of forging something new and transformative
Our inclining ‘i’ in TRANSFORM-iN EDUCATION highlights these moments that offer possibilities for transformation amidst the dominant assumptions of conforming rectitude of current schooling and statutory curricula. (see our blog Attending to the micro)
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Working with uncertainty sits alongside existing models of education
Working with uncertainty sits alongside, rather than competes, with existing models of education that are commonly used in schools (and elsehwere). We think of engaging with uncertainty as 'seafaring', whereas more dominant instructional models are like taking a plane or train, which offer fast and efficient routes to known desinations. There is a place for all these different models in schools.
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A currently dominant 'mastery' model of education is like taking an aeroplane to a fixed destination that we want to reach (i.e. curricular learning objectives). On the plane journey, passengers move from A to B; the sit up and 'belt up', in rows, looking ahead, following instructions; with a view to enjoying themselves on arrival. The destination is defined, with everyone travelling along the fastest, most direct route, with an emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness. Everyone starts at the same place on the clearly mapped out flight path, supported along each step of the route. We often use this model in education, for example, in a TED Talk or when preparing for a test or examination.
There are multiple ways of reaching the same destination. Another, the 'discovery model' of education, is like taking a train. This allows for different and more scenic routes to be followed, with passengers moving around and sitting in groups. This model is often used in Design and Technology lessons, during science experiments or solving a class maths problem, for example.
There is a third complementary 'not knowing' or 'uncertain' educational model, which can sit alongside those above, at particular moments or for extended periods of the school day. This is like being a seafarer on a boat, who has the stars or a sketch map to hand, but takes a winding route with no fixed destination in sight. The seafarer responds to what is already known (represented by the map), but is not restricted by it. This allows for 'getting lost' which opens up the possibility for extraordinary things to happen. This is where teachers and students are enabled to be 'not-knowing' and less certain as a way of forging something new: being able to remain curious in the here-and-now, and keeping the future open.
There are multiple ways of reaching the same destination. Another, the 'discovery model' of education, is like taking a train. This allows for different and more scenic routes to be followed, with passengers moving around and sitting in groups. This model is often used in Design and Technology lessons, during science experiments or solving a class maths problem, for example.
There is a third complementary 'not knowing' or 'uncertain' educational model, which can sit alongside those above, at particular moments or for extended periods of the school day. This is like being a seafarer on a boat, who has the stars or a sketch map to hand, but takes a winding route with no fixed destination in sight. The seafarer responds to what is already known (represented by the map), but is not restricted by it. This allows for 'getting lost' which opens up the possibility for extraordinary things to happen. This is where teachers and students are enabled to be 'not-knowing' and less certain as a way of forging something new: being able to remain curious in the here-and-now, and keeping the future open.