Epistemic Insight: Engaging with Life’s Big Questions | Berry Billingsley | TEDxFolkestone

We live on a small blue dot of a planet in a vast cosmos. You know, they say it's impossible to imagine how small we are compared to the vastness of space. So as a child, I did try to imagine. I'm Beri Billingsley and I'm now a professor in science education. And what fascinates me these days is the way we all try to juggle what we think we know from science with what else we believe about ourselves and the world. Especially when it comes to big questions like why does the universe exist? And who are we as human persons? And throughout my 15 years of research, I've been working on a problem and it has to do with knowledge. And something we don't say to children about knowledge when they're at school, I don't get it. Why don't we tell them? Because it seems to me it's the one thing that would make everything else make more sense. So to explain, I'm going to start with agency, which is a big goal in education and includes encouraging children to question and think for themselves. Here's how it works in primary school. We have a pretty good idea of what's going to interest our younger students and a good teacher has a portfolio of puzzles that they can use to keep children curious and motivated about the topics that, actually anyway, we want to teach. Here's one of my favourites and I call this an ooh moment because if you show it to a group of eight-year-olds, they say ooh and then after they've tried it for themselves, they say why? How does it work? And so not long after the ooh moment, we can have an aha moment when they have a scientific explanation for what they've just seen. When children get to secondary school, it all changes. Instead of directing their natural curiosity towards the topics we want to teach, we rely more and more on the textbook, timetable, subject classroom and exam. I discovered the full force of these educational devices on the questions children ask in their lessons. When I was teaching in a secondary school and I was asked to mentor a new teacher who turned out to be a teacher of RE, religious education. So one day at the end of a science lesson, I followed my year nines, those are 13-year-olds, out of my classroom, down the corridor and into the RE classroom. Oh, they looked shocked. That's not what teachers do. Teachers stay in their own classrooms. So once they'd settled down, the lesson got started. And now I was shocked. In my lesson, we've been talking about the water cycle and evaporation. Lovely, safe science topics. And just a few moments later in this classroom, we were talking about whether there's a God who can answer prayers and what it means to live a good life. I thought, thank goodness they don't ask me these questions. I don't think I'd know how to answer. And then I thought, I wonder why they don't ask me these questions. They're obviously enjoying the discussion. How do children know which questions it's appropriate to ask in each of their subjects? And what happens to all of their questions that don't fit into the neat little boxes? Of the timetable. And right there, you have the problem with secondary school. You see, we've become so good at putting boxes and walls around the disciplines that science, mathematics, geography, history, that we seem to forget to say to children that most of the questions you meet in life are not like the questions you meet in those individual disciplines. And many questions in life are big questions that stretch across subjects and need more than one discipline if we're to get to an answer. So if that's the problem, does it matter? Or then again, maybe it's just a bit obvious that some questions are big questions and need more than one discipline to get to an answer. Okay, so I'm going to try you on a scenario and then see what you think. So let's take two disciplines that we study in school, science and history. And the question, why did the Titanic sink? So I could investigate this question scientifically with a wave tank. That's a tank of water and a model Titanic. And I could try to find out why did the Titanic fill up with water and go down so fast? Or I could investigate in history. And then I could look at letters and newspaper reports and diaries to try to find out about the people who were there at the time. Okay, so here's the thing. At the end of my science investigation, I might decide that the people to blame for the Titanic going down are the shipbuilders. Because after all, they put in those faulty rivets and compartments that were meant to keep the water out and actually let it in. But in history, I might say that the captain had a lot to do with it. After all, he was the one who took them up close to the North Pole and into the path of icebergs. So who's to blame? What do you think? Captain or shipbuilders? Well, them all, right? Probably a few more people as well. Yeah, but here is the thing. Would I know that if I'd carried out my investigation in science? Would I realise that if I want to ask this bigger question, who's to blame? I need to open the door, go down the corridor and into the history classroom to see what they're saying in there. Think back to when you were at school. Were there many lessons where you were encouraged to say to your science teacher, hmm, that's very interesting. Do you think we should check in with the historians now to see what they've got to say? Or as I think I did, did you just go out of science thinking you'd been told everything you needed to know? And of course, in a way, you had. You'd been told how to do an investigation in science. The problem is you hadn't been told how to compare science with history or how to relate science to big questions. And just consider this. If that gap is duplicated in schools across the land, in schools across the world, that is a huge population of people who are leaving school without the insight they need to say, what makes a question a good one for science or for history or for both? So that's the problem and why I think it matters. What are we going to do? What I'd like to do is to teach epistemic insight in schools. And epistemic insight means knowledge about knowledge or knowledge about disciplines and how they interact. So these are the lessons where you can ask big questions that bridge science, religion and the wider humanities. Questions like, can a robot own its own ideas? Can it be a good friend? How should we take care of each other during a pandemic? And why does the universe exist? And you remember I said at the beginning, I'm really interested in how we all juggle what we think we know from science with what else we believe about ourselves and the world. I hope you agree epistemic insight is a real game changer in schools in that regard. Because now we are encouraging children to make connections and look for bigger explanations by drawing together the disciplines that they study. And I'm going to finish by giving you an example of how it might work. Because here is a tool that we are using now in schools. And we call this a discipline wheel. We can put a question in the middle. And then we can explore that question through the disciplines that you can see. We can increase student agency. We can encourage students to choose three or four disciplines that they want to use to explore that big question. So let's take the question, why does the Earth exist? Well, rather wonderfully, we can see that although we are still a small blue dot of a planet, there are so many reasons to say we are significant, complicated, valuable, surprising, despite our unimaginably small physical size.