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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 ourstudent teachers that gives us the most to celebrate and talk about. From the start, the EI Initiative wasset up to enable tutors and students to work together - to co-create research studies and resourcesthat 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 anopportunity to explore together a problem that unites and affects us all - and one which is at thefrontiers 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 aninvitation to engage more deeply with the research. This is followed by a period of negotiation at eachpoint in the journey - so that every student and every tutor is part of a shared conversation betweenus all while having the space to take the research towards the questions it generates for them and theirown 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 everycurriculum subject. We can also ask it of our own experience of Big Questions and of questions thatbridge disciplines, like, “How do we keep each other safe during a pandemic?” and “Is it true that youare 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 andimpact 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 versionto help: The gap in education, identified through research, that motivates the Epistemic InsightInitiative: When we teach children about knowledge through the lens of each discipline in isolation - and testtheir ability to recall that knowledge - we leave out conversations which draw their attention to thedifferent types of questions we are asking and exploring in each of our knowledge domains - and tothe ways that disciplines can work together on Big Questions. We can address it by proposing andevaluating changes in school or by revisiting our own understanding of what it means to ‘know’ andhow 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 Digestto explore what this gap looks like and how we can respond to it - across the range of specialisms,professions and activities we do. |
