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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergay, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.
If you've been a long-time listener to the Stories of Impact podcast, you'll expect by now to be surprised by the kinds of studies Templeton World Charity Foundation invests in. TWCF-funded projects are not only groundbreaking, they're often rule-breaking, asking challenging questions often left untouched by other funders. Today's story is about one of those cutting-edge scientific studies—
One that explores the possibility of a paradigm shift in how educators not only educate students, but each other.
The study we hear about in this episode is the kind of research project that Sir John Templeton himself would have enthusiastically embraced, one that sits at the intersection of science and religion and is designed to tap into curiosity and passion for interdisciplinary and lifelong learning. Meet Dr. Sibel Erdogan.
a professor of science education at the University of Oxford and the leader of a research project guided by the TWCF mission to explore big questions in the classroom. Her research brings together science educators and religious educators to learn with and from each other.
It's a project that aims to break down divides between the space of scientific and religious study in order to discover what happens when the silos disappear. Dr. Erderon's study explores how argumentation can help students bridge disciplinary divides to achieve deep understanding.
What is argumentation? And why is this researcher interested in looking at the practice of argumentation in science education and religious education? Here's Dr. Erdogan. Argumentation is a process of arguing. And arguing, I don't mean in a conflict sense.
We mean by argument the justification of claims with reasons and evidence. So argumentation is the process of justifying claims with some evidence and reasons.
And argumentation is a big part of science. Scientists make claims about, for example, the spinning of the Earth. I mean, we don't experience the word spinning, but we know from empirical evidence that the Earth does spin.
And similarly, in religious education, there are claims that are made that are justified with reasons and in some respects, for example, in reference to empirical evidence in this form of historical data from key texts, for example.
So there are similarities in terms of ways of reasoning in making claims and justifying claims, but there might be also differences. And in the context of this project, we thought that it might be useful to see how science and religious education context can form a bridge in terms of argumentation in schools, secondary schools, and how we could get
further understanding about how to bridge some traditional gaps across school subjects such as science and religious education. Dr. Erdogan's study was based in the UK, where in public state schools, both science and religious education, which Dr. Erdogan refers to throughout this conversation as RE, are part of the national curriculum.
Students may study the same subject from the angle of both science and religion. For example, a student might go to an RE class and learn about the Book of Genesis, and then move on to a science class where they learn about the Big Bang Theory.
But though their subject matter may overlap and religious educators and science educators work alongside each other in public schools, Dr. Erdogan says... For the most part, the subject teachers of science and religious education don't tend to interact in schools. I mean, the subjects are in silos and science teachers teach their subject and the subjects can be...
up to a certain age group, general science, and then it splits into physics, chemistry, biology. And then next to this, in the same school, you would have a religious education teacher who was teaching religious education syllabus. So why was Dr. Erdogan interested in bringing these two areas of education, science and religion, together?
We're interested in surpassing some of the traditional classic boundaries between subjects, particularly given there are issues that concern different subjects. So this way of reasoning about, in terms of argumentation, for example, is something that is present in science topics as well as in RE topics anyway in the syllabi.
So we thought about how do we coordinate some links between science and religious education teaching. But more importantly, there are questions that lend themselves to multiplicity of perspectives. So you can take a big question, examine it from different perspectives.
Dr. Erdogan believes that it's increasingly important to explore problems and questions through an interdisciplinary lens. A lot of our everyday problems these days require complex problem solving. And we're not really doing justice to students if we just teach the subjects in silos and they don't know how to connect these subjects in a real-world situation.
We need to be more mindful of presenting more complex problem solving to students in lessons and that does require more cross-subject collaboration and interaction. I'll give you a contemporary example about COVID-19.
And so COVID-19, for example, is a big problem, has been a big problem that has concerned not just scientists, but also economists, educators, sociologists, historians. And in terms of solving the COVID-19 crisis, it wouldn't be sufficient only to rely on
the perspectives and knowledge of the science. I mean, we need the science, but in order to mitigate the problem of the pandemic, we needed to resort to understanding of different stakeholders to solve this complex problem. So in that sense, part of the mission of our project is to ensure that the students eventually get an understanding that
There's scope in interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary understanding because we live in complex societies and we need to understand issues in a way that can be teased apart and examined from different perspectives.
It wasn't easy for Dr. Erdogan to recruit educators who were willing to work across silos. But once she secured the participants she needed, she was able to solicit the guidance of those educators in shaping the study itself. Getting science and RE teachers into the same room to discuss a common purpose is not easy.
very commonplace, at least not in England. So we recruited 30 teachers, 15 RE and 15 science teachers, and we conducted workshops with them. So it was a mix of some of our ideas based on our research understanding, but also relying on the expertise and experiences of the teachers and
In Dr. Erdogan's study, educators would come together for workshops every six to eight weeks, and in between they would work together in their schools, facilitated by a study researcher. It was up to the educators to determine how they would collaborate and what they would collaborate on.
Some of the teachers would pair up and plan lessons together, splitting the content in a way that would make sense in a science context versus an RE context. Sometimes they taught the lessons separately, sometimes together. What were the necessary elements for the research project's success? There is a sort of a basic requirement that you would keep an open mind and try to understand the
an issue that you might always have faced from your disciplinary background, from a different background. So that willingness to be open and to listen to another point of view, I think is a prerequisite for interdisciplinarity. Because in an interdisciplinary conversation, you're really trying to cross boundaries and try to understand problems in a different way than what you might have always thought about.
So that willingness to participate in different ways of thinking and communication with others who might have different points of view than you, I think is an important aspect of doing this kind of work. What did Dr. Erdogan discover by exploring the difference in argumentation between science educators and religion educators?
For a very long time, the differences have been stressed and emphasized. Science teachers tend to emphasize factual information a lot. They care a lot about facts and accuracy of information and so on. Whereas the RE teachers in our project,
They emphasized a lot kind of the relative nature of the evidence. So they didn't care too much about accuracy. Not that they're not interested in accuracy, but the sorts of things that they're more interested in and they're more concerned about is how an argument may be more true or less true.
which is less of a sort of constrained way of looking at information. Historically, we've accentuated the differences rather than the similarities. So part of our agenda in this project was to recalibrate and rebalance this dynamic between science and religion in general, and then in the context of education in particular.
Did anything surprise her? I come from a science background. I'm a science educator. I've been introduced to religion and religious education, but I didn't know the extent to which religious education teachers were so concerned about science. I was really surprised about that. I mean, it seems like there's a lot more narrative about science in religious circles than in the other way around. And that surprised me.
And I think it's a good model to have that multiplicity of narrative for science as well, because that reference point to another subject that might have a relation to what you are immersed in can only help because you're extending and enriching your viewpoint and understanding. What else?
I was really struck from the first meeting by how open the Ari teachers were to the entire scope of the project. A lot of the teachers had backgrounds themselves in religious studies, history of religion, sociology of religions. They were very well versed in arguments and argument theory. I was really impressed by this from the first meeting. In contrast, the
Science teachers, their background in argumentation was fairly limited. And we saw this very clearly in the workshop when we put the teachers into subject groups. So science teachers with science teachers and RE teachers with other RE teachers and asked them to produce a poster on what they understand by argumentation.
and the science teachers came up with bullet points of few words, whereas the RE teachers produced extensive texts. And when the groups both presented their ideas, you could see that there was that initial realization of differences between the two groups. But I think one of the things that was really interesting was that the RE teachers ended up mentioning a lot of science content.
in their discussion of arguments, whereas the science teachers didn't really make that much reference to the RE content. I mean, this is no fault of science teachers' background, they just haven't had this kind of introduction, whereas the RE teachers, as I've now learned, they have a lot of argument-based lessons in their syllabi. So they started at a different place to begin with.
So it was very interesting to see that I think the science teachers were pleasantly surprised to see the amount of learning that was due to take place in the rest of the project. What was the highlight of the study for Dr. Erdogan? We've learned that it's possible to bring science and RE teachers together to have meaningful conversations.
And this may seem like a straightforward statement, but sometimes some of the discussions and debates about science and religion interface may be quite complex for some people or they may be resistant to have that conversation.
Some science teachers or scientists might be resistant to having religious education and religion voiced in the context of science. And so I think it was a major outcome of our project that we managed to have a constructive dialogue between science and religious education teachers. It may seem like a straightforward approach,
outcome or a given, but it isn't a given. So our project context enabled the teachers to have those meaningful conversations so they could see the point in talking to each other.
So this was one big message. So we've learned a lot about their views, their teaching, their views on argumentation, its teaching, as well as the collaboration with the other subject and their views of the other subject. So all of these aspects were not known to us previously or in the literature. So our project produced research-based publications that specify these details in terms of the teacher's teaching and views.
Similarly, we've collected data on the students and we've looked at how they engage in argumentation in science and RE and in a mixed sort of context. These are the highlights, you know, the fact that we've learned a lot about teachers' views and students' reasoning in both subjects.
Dr. Erdogan has always been a curious and enthusiastic questioner. I was always interested in science and I come from a family of teachers, so I was always interested in education and surrounded by teachers. And I sort of combined my interest in science and education by following a route in educational research, trying to improve science education through research.
Along the way, I have always been interested in sort of questions that go beyond just the scientific questions. So I myself as a student was not always satisfied with what I was experiencing in my science lessons in terms of addressing big questions. I always had more questions to ask.
about science and how we know and why we know and some of the questions that science lessons would answer in this respect were not always satisfactory from my point of view. I was always left as a child sort of not being, you know, something was missing in terms of sort of addressing issues that were beyond technical aspects of these big questions. So
That's where I came from. I was motivated by my own sort of background and, you know, trying to understand big questions and trying to get teachers and students to be sort of addressing these big questions in science lessons. While Dr. Erdogan may have opinions about education, she is interested in testing her theories with scientific rigor and learning from subject matter experts.
People tend to have a lot of big ideologies and ideas about what education should be. And they're practically just ideologies. I mean, opinion based ideologies.
claims about how teaching should be done, what learning should be about, or what students should learn, or how they should learn. And I think it's important to listen to educational researchers who actually research education, and they gather evidence about educational contexts, including how teachers teach, how students learn,
And what are some of the tools that need to be used in order to facilitate the teaching, in order to facilitate the teacher's learning? Because the teachers themselves have gone through an educational system that needs challenging. So their teachers themselves need to learn new techniques and new ways of teaching.
Educational research has a big part to play in reforming education so that it goes beyond opinion-based anticipation of how education should be to what education can reasonably be based on our knowledge of how learners learn or how teachers teach. How does Dr. Erdogan hope her research will impact education overall?
Ultimately, I mean, the big goal really is to enthuse students, enthuse future generations, and to get them to have a sense of awe and wonder in what they're experiencing in schools, so that schools are not irrelevant, especially nowadays in the age of the internet where you can get knowledge and information on the internet. I mean, the
Do we need schools to teach about photosynthesis or anything specific? The students can find a lot of information themselves.
So in order to keep schools relevant and education relevant from the students' point of view, we really need to be serious about how we enthuse students and get them immersed in discussions and conversations about big questions because they are interested anyway. The students themselves are interested in these questions.
It's just that our curricula haven't created the space for these discussions to happen. So I think there's a lot to do in terms of opening up some discussion spaces in schools and in education to give students a chance to raise these questions and explore them.
Dr. Erdogan believes that if students have enthusiasm and passion for learning, if they're excited to explore big questions, the whole world will benefit. If we can get students to understand how we know and why we know, it's a great step forward because it means that we're respecting the students in understanding how we construct knowledge.
So recognizing the students' needs to understand how knowledge works is important. And if they can understand how different forms of knowledge work, even better. Because then they understand the strengths and limitations of different ways of knowing.
and that not all knowledge is of the same kind and not all knowledge works in the same way and so some of these nuances that create conflict in society because people talk across purposes because they don't understand how knowledge works in different facets of life I think, I mean maybe this is a huge claim but I think it would help communication and conflict resolution in many areas of life to understand
where the nuances lie in different ways of knowing and understanding the differences between different ways of knowing. One of my favorite things about telling these stories of impact is that I get to keep learning myself. And over three years of storytelling, I've learned so much from the scientists we've featured. And I've started thinking more courageously.
I taught graduate students for several years, and I always felt most confident as a writer teaching writers. That silo gave me a sense of safety.
When I taught a media class with both graduate and undergraduates, including writers, actors, computer science, veterinary, and sports medicine majors, it was a lot scarier and a lot harder. Because suddenly there was new vocabulary, a mix of learning styles, divergent expectations and needs. And that's what education should be. Scary and hard in an exhilarating way.
I learned and grew the most working with my students in that interdisciplinary class, and it made me a more humble, more thoughtful, more skilled teacher, and better human. So I think Dr. Erron's study is really important and really exciting.
We should break boundaries, explore questions and problem-solve together, bring together a mix of ideas and practices and possibilities so that our education can help us become the expansive, highly creative beings we were born to be. And we should never stop learning.
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This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergay and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. Senior producer Katie Flood. Music by Alexander Filippiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.