Epistemic Insight Digest: Issue 2 [Summer 2021]

PREFACE: 

Championing research engaged teaching and co-creation at CCCU
The Epistemic Insight Initiative is designed to draw attention to a gap in education today - and to
innovate solutions that help to address that gap. 

Of all the work we do across the Initiative - it is arguably the work by our students including our student teachers that gives us the most to celebrate and talk about. From the start, the EI Initiative was set up to enable tutors and students to work together - to co-create research studies and resources that can help to test, clarify and address a gap that research says - persists in classrooms today.

We are the only university - to the best of my knowledge - that offers its students such a high profile, rich and embedded experience of being ‘research engaged’. By coming here our students have an opportunity to explore together a problem that unites and affects us all - and one which is at the frontiers of research.

What does engaging with the research look like?
It’s an experience that begins with our tutors introducing every student to EI and giving everyone an invitation to engage more deeply with the research. This is followed by a period of negotiation at each point in the journey - so that every student and every tutor is part of a shared conversation between us all while having the space to take the research towards the questions it generates for them and their own areas of interest.

Why have a shared research agenda - exploring one gap which supposedly exists?
We can ask our research question of every classroom, of every year group, in every school and of every curriculum subject. We can also ask it of our own experience of Big Questions and of questions that bridge disciplines, like, “How do we keep each other safe during a pandemic?” and “Is it true that you are what you eat?”, “What does it mean to be anxious?” and “Can a robot own its own thoughts?”

As you look through the studies that follow - I hope you agree that here we can see the value and impact of a Faculty working together on one shared question to help to make education better. 

But - what is that question - and what gap?
You’ll see it explained by each of the authors in the way that most fits the research they are doing. Or - and here’s the spoiler alert - if you’d like to have more of an idea before you start, here’s my version to help:

The gap in education, identified through research, that motivates the Epistemic Insight Initiative:
When we teach children about knowledge through the lens of each discipline in isolation - and test their ability to recall that knowledge - we leave out conversations which draw their attention to the different types of questions we are asking and exploring in each of our knowledge domains - and to the ways that disciplines can work together on Big Questions. We can address it by proposing and evaluating changes in school or by revisiting our own understanding of what it means to ‘know’ and how we know what we know.

But that’s the problem the way I see it - so now please read the wonderful papers in this year’s Digest to explore what this gap looks like and how we can respond to it - across the range of specialisms, professions and activities we do.