Learning from Misunderstanding: Theory of Knowledge, Trump & Technology.

We live in an age of hyper-connectedness - and yet academia has never felt further removed from real life and the next generation of undergraduates. Some thoughts on the place of Theory of Knowledge as a connecting glue between progressive interdisciplinary learning at school, college, and throughout this crazy world of ours.

In his latest novel and self-professed ‘muted and distorted autobiography' Sweet Tooth, University of Sussex graduate Ian McEwan speaks through young writer Thomas Haley as he rails against his opposite number’s ‘intellectually stultifying’ experience at Cambridge and advises ‘Sussex would never have allowed you to stagnate the way you did, would never have permitted you to do nothing but mathematics… compulsory historiography for all newcomers, and then for me, by choice, cosmology, fine art, international relations...'

 My own experiences as a Sussex student were certainly of an educational model that found a rare sweet-spot between the North American broad liberal arts education, and a more traditionally British subject specialist degree in literature. But it was the interrogation of the study of literature itself, critical theory - comparable to ‘historiography’ in Haley’s 1970’s academic lexicon - that really distinguished my experiences of learning at Sussex. We didn’t just study literature, but rather right from the first year as an undergraduate our reading and seminar work concerned questions of what, why and how to read literature. Politics and epistemology were at least as central as the literary texts themselves to our study.

I have since enjoyed a career educating within a similar model: the IB Diploma. Epistemology follows a distinctive framework in the IB’s Theory of Knowledge course but, as in the place of critical theory and historiography at Sussex, its place is at the centre of curriculum.

All student in the IB Diploma study Theory of Knowledge. Students learn about the similarities and differences between types of knowledge within and beyond their broad curricular studies. They create dynamic, inter- and trans-disciplinary understandings that are connected to the real world. To paraphrase McEwan’s pithier prose, we might say of Theory of Knowledge that it will not allow intellectual stagnation. In theory. 

The theoretical model centrally unfolds around extracting knowledge questions from real life situations. These real life situations can - and should - be drawn from anywhere in the student’s lives and learning: social media, academic subject areas, local and global politics… literally anywhere that poses questions about what, why and how we know.

In practice, Theory of Knowledge far too often unfolds in a static classroom, with a very linear approach to teaching the Knowledge Framework. Examiners regularly complain of the same cliched real life situations being rehashed again-and-again in a model of precisely the kind of transmissive learning that the Theory of Knowledge course, at the core of the IB Diploma, aims not to be.

Our schools are, of course, full of original and inspiring real life situations every day, and progressive IB Diploma programmes are reimagining Theory of Knowledge courses that move beyond the static classroom, into the wider learning community. Why is this important? Not least because, whether at Sussex or any number of other intellectually progressive universities around the world, the theory of knowledge dimension is the area of the IB Diploma - at least in the liberal arts - that most directly scaffolds our students into undergraduate level thinking and beyond. The visit of Sussex’s Richard Follett, Professor of History, to our school recently was one such occasion where we really developed this scaffolding. 

In a distinctively Sussex feat of interdisciplinary brilliance, Follett fulfills the role of Director of International Recruitment and Development alongside his Professorship. What better way for a distinctive university to reach out to prospective new students, than with an authentic experience of learning with an academic whose teaching style is distinctively of that university? The experience was entirely different from the off-the-peg recruiters who usually visit: better both Sussex and our students.

Follett's guest lecture last year, on (then newly elected) president Donald Trump, as ‘Tweeter in Chief’ prompted some highly original Theory of Knowledge conversations, particularly pertaining to communication technology innovations, and personal and shared knowledge. 

So this year, we decided to frame a broader, interactive learning and panel-based series of knowledge investigations around Trump and Technology. Excerpts can be seen in the video below.

A pervasive fear throughout the conversation that took place was certainly that of stagnation - though here not so much from traditional 'intellectually stultifying' academia, but rather the very different, though comparably insular echo chamber of social media through which so much of our knowledge is mediated today. As we all face the epistemological challenges of the fake news era, and as universities and schools alike face competition from web-based and other, more affordable and dynamic learning modalities, we must continue to make such connections, even if we don’t fully understand each other at first. McEwan has written elsewhere that ‘You spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other’. This may also be true of the way we connect schools with universities - and it must be true of how teaching and learning stays connected with our politically uncertain world.