Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation That Can Transform Schooling - Hardcover

Egan, Kieran

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226190439 ISBN 13: 9780226190433

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

For generations, schools have aimed to introduce students to a broad range of topics through curriculum that ensure that they will at least have some acquaintance with most areas of human knowledge by the time they graduate. Yet such broad knowledge can’t help but be somewhat superficial—and, as Kieran Egan argues, it omits a crucial aspect of true education: deep knowledge.

Real education, Egan explains, consists of both general knowledge and detailed understanding, and in Learning in Depth he outlines an ambitious yet practical plan to incorporate deep knowledge into basic education. Under Egan’s program, students will follow the usual curriculum, but with one crucial addition: beginning with their first days of school and continuing until graduation, they will eachalso study one topic—such as apples, birds, sacred buildings, mollusks,circuses, or stars—in depth. Over the years, with the help and guidance of their supervising teacher, students will expand their understanding of their one topic and build portfolios of knowledge that grow and change along with them. By the time they graduate each student will know as much about his or her topic as almost anyone on earth—and in the process will have learned important, even life-changing lessons about the meaning of expertise, the value of dedication, and the delight of knowing something in depth.

Though Egan’s program may be radical in its effects, it is strikingly simple to implement—as a number of schools have already discovered—and with Learning in Depth as a blueprint, parents, educators, and administrators can instantly begin taking the first steps toward transforming our schools and fundamentally deepening their students’ minds.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kieran Egan is the author of many books, including The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding and The Future of Education: Reimagining our Schools from the Ground Up.

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Learning in Depth

A Simple Innovation That Can Transform Schooling

By Kieran Egan

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2010 Kieran Egan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-19043-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. The Problem, 
2. The Proposal, 
3. Objections and Responses, 
4. The Nature of the Topics, 
5. Some Operating Principles and Examples, 
6. Building the Portfolio, 
7. What Do We Do Next?, 
Conclusion, 
Appendix A: Foundations for Learning in Depth, 
Appendix B: A Brief Outline of the Learning in Depth Program, 
References, 

CHAPTER 1

The Problem

Whether or not our current cohort of students is setting new records in the ignorance stakes, we do have a problem concerning an inadequate return in terms of the knowledge they learn for the high-cost teaching effort expended in schools. What is the point of teaching a curriculum crammed with the wonders of human discoveries and inventions when we see most students come out of our schooling system recalling little of this knowledge and with virtually no sense of its wonder? That is to say, we surely have a problem. And here's a solution that I hope to persuade you is worth trying. As it comes at the problem from a new direction, let me elaborate the problem a little to explain why this unconventional proposal stands a fair chance of resolving it.

Breadth and Depth of Knowledge

Nearly everyone who has tried to describe an image of the educated person, from Plato to the present, includes at least two criteria: first, that educated people must be widely knowledgeable and, second, that they must know something in depth. The first criterion is fairly straightforward—pretty well everyone associates being well educated with knowing a fair amount about the world, about its history and geography, about politics in their own and other countries, about what is generally going on in the sciences, about the arts and literature, and so on. That is, a person who really has learned, retained, and somehow made meaningful the curriculum that has been taught in school satisfies the breadth criterion. In addition, we expect that breadth of knowledge not to be some loose assemblage of facts, but also to involve some conceptual schemes that give it order and give the person some general understanding, and we also expect the educated person to have developed habits of critical reflection on what is known, along with a commitment to continuous learning. Such a person is equipped with the knowledge and skills that a modern society requires.

The depth criterion is there because most commentators on education recognize that having a relatively superficial knowledge of many things is somehow not adequate to give an understanding of, to put it a bit vaguely—as it usually is put—the way knowledge works, or the nature of knowledge, or the insecurity of knowledge. By learning something in depth we come to grasp it from the inside, as it were, rather than the way in which we remain always somehow on the outside of that accumulated breadth of knowledge. With regard to the knowledge we learn in breadth, we rely always on the expertise of others; when learning in depth, we develop our own expertise. It is assumed that learning something in depth carries over to a better understanding of all our other, "breadth," knowledge.

In everyday classrooms, teachers commonly try to achieve both breadth and depth by covering a topic in a general way and exploring some particular themes in more detail, or by allowing students to choose projects they can pursue in more depth within an overall unit of study. The main curriculum provision schools make for achieving the depth criterion is to enable students in high schools to specialize in something or to develop specialized skills as part of vocational preparation. But in terms of satisfying the depth criterion, these faint moves don't begin to have an impact on the problem. They merely encourage students to learn something a little less superficially.

This proposal is not concerned with the obvious utility value that a lot of specialist knowledge serves for someone working in a technically demanding area or someone in a profession that requires considerable detailed knowledge. Accumulation of relevant "vocational" knowledge cannot achieve what we want educationally, and, anyway, it generally comes far too late in a person's education to achieve what learning in depth can do for the school-aged student.

Breadth Important for All; Depth a Luxury for Some

It is usually assumed, as far as the school system is concerned, that the depth criterion is a bit of a luxury and available mainly to the more academic students or to those in wealthy private schools; the breadth criterion is what we mostly struggle with for the mass of students most of the time—ensuring exposure to and coverage of the general information we consider essential for an effective citizen in today's world.

Our currently dominant educational ideas require that we justify curriculum content in terms of its relevance to the kinds of lives students are likely to lead. That criterion leads us to cover a great deal of important knowledge that will have utility in their daily lives. It does not lead to prescribing consistent and deep learning of something that might have no particular relevance to their social lives—indeed it suggests any such prescription would be considered eccentric. That is, we assume that our main task is exposure to a wide breadth of relevant knowledge, and we hope that in among this there will be some topics or subjects in which students' own interests will carry them to greater specialization.

I think there are a number of things wrong with these educational ideas, but here I want to address only the implications for attaining breadth and depth of knowledge. I think we have got it the wrong way round; I think that achieving the depth criterion is a key to also achieving the breadth criterion better. So I will show how we might manage successful learning in depth, and suggest how this might go some significant way toward solving the more obvious problem of graduates of our school system seeming to know little of the curriculum they have been taught for more than a decade.

Why Depth?

Encouraging students to learn something in depth is not generally seen as essential in our schools, especially when so many students seem to have difficulty mastering even the most basic levels of literacy and numeracy. So, what educational purpose does knowing something in depth serve? Since Plato's days to our own, this question has been posed in terms of what deep knowledge does for the mind. What reasons are usually given? Here are a few:

1. Expertise and Learning How Knowledge Works

The most common claim is a kind of tautology: lacking deep knowledge of something is to lack an adequate understanding of what knowledge is, and how it functions. If one's knowledge of everything remains at a general and superficial level, one never really comes to appreciate the nature of knowledge. One of the things a person learns in the process of learning in depth is how claims to knowing can be built and attacked and defended—it's all part of the slow process of discovering the insecurity of our claims to know. As noted above, knowing something in depth is like knowing it from the inside, where the student gains expertise, and comes to recognize from one area studied in depth something about how knowledge...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226190439
• ISBN 13: 9780226190433
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 220
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar