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Knowledge and teaching in the age of information

The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone via computers, and in the last decade or so, via their handheld mobile device. The young people currently in university or in school grew up in a world where information is not privileged and immediate access to all of it is taken for granted. In this age of immediate and readily accessible information on any subject, we must ask: What is the role of academic institutions in teaching? If anyone can find out anything at any time, why learn anything? Is there any value to knowledge in its own right?

The answer is that of course teaching and learning are still important, but they must change to reflect the way information is accessed. The fact is that information on its own is useless without a contextual framework. It may be possible to easily find a detailed account of all of the units and commanders that participated in the Battle of Regensburg in 1809, but if the reader has no understanding of military history, and no background on the politics leading to the Napoleonic wars, this information is no different from a shopping list. Similarly, it may be possible to find detailed information on the excretory system of annelid worms, but without an understanding of what excretory systems are and what their role is in the organism, and without a knowledge of the biology and evolution of annelid worms, this information is no more than a list of incoherent technical terms.

These two very different examples serve to highlight the difference between information and knowledge. Possessing knowledge about a subject means being able to place information into a broad framework and context. People who are knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars do not necessarily know the names of every commander of every unit in the Battle of Regensburg, but if they need this information, they can access it and use it better than someone with no knowledge. A comparative zoologist may not know all the details about annelid excretory systems, but when needed, they will know what to look for.

With this distinction in mind, I suggest that teaching and textbooks need to shift their focus from transferring information to transferring knowledge. No textbook can compete with the wealth of information available at the students’ fingertips. No course can ever impart all that there is to know about a subject. However, a good teacher and a well-written textbook can provide a much better framework for knowledge and understanding than a search engine will ever be able to. Indeed, a course or module that overburdens the students with numerous bits of information is not only a misuse of resources, it is ultimately counter-productive, as the student will always be able to challenge the teacher with a new bit of information not included in the course.

Teaching in the age of information should focus on providing a working vocabulary of a subject and on building a robust framework of knowledge. Detailed examples can be used to demonstrate principles, but this should be done sparingly. The curious students can then fill in the details on their own, taking advantage of the information at their fingertips.

I have been following these principles in my teaching of evolution and organismic biology for as long as I have been a university professor. My frustration at the details-heavy zoology textbooks led me to write a new textbook, focusing on principles and on providing a conceptual framework to organismic biology, rather than on details. For example, I have written a chapter on excretory systems that outlines what the roles and functions of this system are, and gives a few demonstrative examples of how these functions are manifested in a small number of organisms. I have included similar chapters on other systems interspersed with chapters on individual animal phyla, which give an overview of the phylum and its diversity, and present the specific variations within each of the organ systems, and how these are adapted to the life history of members of the phylum.

As we and our students continue to have easier and more readily available access to information, this new approach will provide a more successful framework for students to continue to grow and learn as they step out into the world. Hopefully this approach will be picked up by authors of additional textbooks to provide a new generation of teaching resources, more suitable for the age of information.

^{Feature image credit: Ilya Lukichev via iStock.}

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Five tips to improve your research culture

With principal investigators facing work, life, mental health and career challenges, time is often a limiting factor. But creating a healthy environment helps all achieve and feel well. 

A typical principal investigator (PI) must overcome many challenges and has a great deal to learn. The experience was accurately portrayed in a recent Twitter post with the caption “Transitioning from a post-doc fellowship to PI of a lab…” In it, the “PI” sets off across a muddy terrain to reach a stable foothold with unexpected and humorous results. Reading the comments, the clip appears to resonate well with academics and researchers alike. 

The example reflects other transitions as well, including tenure, promotion, and taking on further organizational and research leadership responsibilities. On top of balancing various roles, along with one’s health and wellbeing, PIs must regularly figure out what research questions to pursue, how to win highly competitive funding, and manage their research career, as well as how to build and sustain a healthy team. There is a growing need to support and equip researchers with skills to shape their environments.

At the heart of this challenge is research culture and team leadership. Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes, and norms of a given community. Culture emerges from many factors: past history, explicit and implicit expectations, values and cultural norms as well as the relational dynamics and power systems. That said, each individual can and does impact their culture in subtle and overt ways. If we want to create a research ecosystem that is diverse, healthy, and more inclusive, we must recognize that every person in research can make a positive difference. 

Lately, funders and policy makers are paying increasing attention to this agenda. Principal investigators are well placed to help and have much to gain from it. If you are on your way to being a PI or already in the role, the five practical tips below will help you reflect on, explore, and begin to proactively manage a healthier research culture. 

Five practical tips for a healthier research culture

1. Get curious about the research culture you have now

Imagine an unexpected visitor staying in your group for a week. What would this person see? For example, what is the nature of interactions between different members of your group? What is and isn’t talked about? What tends to get rewarded and celebrated? Who succeeds here and who tends to struggle? How is help given? How are errors and learning shared? Are people tense or on edge? When a junior researcher speaks or presents their work, do senior researchers show up and listen? Your answers to these questions will help reveal more about the culture you have. From this place, you can more easily consider what would be the best scenario and how to bridge the current set up with this vision. 

2. Establish your key values 

What makes values so useful is that they guide behaviour and culture. For example, if a given team values results, some people may interpret this to mean “results at all cost.” But when we value teamwork and results, the way we get to the finish line matters. Decide on a small number of values that are key to your team’s collective and individual success and wellbeing. Consult your team. Here are some ideas for what could be valued: trust, honesty, excellence, teamwork, healthy debate, or even conflict that is effectively resolved. Talk about your values with the team and use them to guide how everyone works and behaves. 

3. Focus on fostering good communication

Results have inherent value but sometimes they can come at a cost. This could be health, well-being, work quality, motivation, and teamwork. Pay special attention to how you and others communicate. How are people supported and guided? What happens if someone does something wrong? Is everyone invited to speak and is their view fully considered? Is there enough compassion and healthy curiosity in the system? How is conflict handled and resolved? What sort of career support can one expect to receive at the start, mid-way through and towards one’s next career step? 

One of the most practical ways to improve communications is by asking people about what they need, how they feel, what they notice, and what would be better. Your job as a leader is to open and guide these conversations. Sharing your views is important but their greatest effect often comes when they are shared at the end of these conversations, along with a mutually agreed action plan. 

4. Major in curiosity over criticism

Avoid confusing rigour with criticism however much you intend to help. Uninvited negative evaluation risks damaging people’s confidence, motivation, and morale. This can quickly turn a healthy culture into one where fear inhibits everyone’s full potential. To counter this, adopt the following positive intention when speaking with others and holding meetings: “I am here to discover and learn.” Seek to first understand rather than jump to premature conclusions. Treat conversations as a worthwhile time investment as clear, mutual understanding is foundational to healthy results and relationships. 

5. Celebrate and be curious about difference

One of the best way to nurture and support diversity is to be curious and welcome difference. If you speak less and inquire about other people’s experience, needs, and desires, you will be better placed to ensure everyone’s success. Along the way you will develop genuine trust and respect and inspire others to follow your lead. The possibility to make this better exists in every interaction with much room to get things wrong and learn. Through conscious positive intention, regular reflection, and feedback, you will create the sort of culture that delivers top results and where everyone thrives. 

Is all this worth it? Absolutely! 

The ideas here can be worked into one-to-one meetings, regular group discussions, annual retreats, and appraisals, as well as countless informal interactions. Start small and you will feel and notice a big difference in little time. Your team and visitors will too.

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The color line: race and education in the United States [podcast]

Black History Month celebrates the achievements of a globally marginalized community still fighting for equal representation and opportunity in all areas of life. This includes education.

In 1954, the United States’ Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional for American public schools in “Brown v. Board of Education.” While this ruling has been celebrated as a pivotal victory for civil rights, it has not endured without challenge.

On today’s episode, we spoke with Zoë Burkholder, author of An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North and Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954, and Nina M. Yancy, author of the upcoming How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America, examining issues around education, integration, and segregation through their scholarship. In particular, we discussed segregation in northern schools and a recent case study from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Check out Episode 69 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

In this episode, we discussed Nina M. Yancy’s How the Color Line Bends and Zoë Burkholder’s books An African American Dilemma and Color in the Classroom.

Zoë Burkholder is also the co-author of Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education. Here you can find the introductions to An African American Dilemma and Integrations. Burkholder also wrote a blog post for the OUPblog entitled “Which is better: school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools?”

In 2019, Nina Yancy wrote an article in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics called “Racialized Preference in Context: The Geography of White Opposition to Welfare“, which reported some of her research for How the Color Line Bends.

You can also check out Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy, which offers a systematic study of state takeovers of local school districts.

Additionally, you can visit The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education for entries such as “Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Methodology in Education” and “Critical Whiteness Studies.”

_{Featured image: Photo by CDC on Unsplash.}

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Police-free schools: the new frontier in ending the school-to-prison pipeline

On 25 October 2015, a Black high school student named Niya Kenny filmed a white school police officer body slamming her classmate, a Black sixteen-year-old girl, to the floor at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Deputy Sherriff Ben Fields placed Shakara in a headlock, flipped her desk over, and then dragged and threw her across the classroom floor, all for allegedly refusing to hand over her cell phone. Yet it was Niya and her classmate who were arrested, charged with criminal “disturbing school,” and sent to juvenile detention.

Niya’s video went viral. Students across the country involved in the Alliance for Educational Justice and local groups working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline wrote and delivered love letters to Niya at a national youth power conference. The movement delivered a petition with 150,000 signatures to drop the charges against Niya and Shakara, and the incident served to accelerate the growing, but at the time little known, movement for police-free schools.

Community organizing and police-free schools

Riding the wave of mass protests against police violence and racism in 2020, Black and Brown parents and students won their first victories in defunding or removing police from schools. Since even before the Niya Kenny incidents, these local activists had been patiently organizing for police-free schools for many years. They had built a base of student and parent leaders knowledgeable about the issue, had developed and even submitted policy proposals, and had been lobbying school board members. When the protest wave opened up new opportunities, these organizing groups were ready. They won some quick and early victories and sparked a movement that spread across the country.

Long-established organizing campaigns won quick victories in 2020, cutting the school police budget by 35% or $25 million in Los Angeles in 2020 (and by another $25 million in 2021), ended the contracts between the Madison and Denver school districts and their police departments, and entirely eliminated the Oakland Schools Police Department, reinvesting its $6 million budget into a non-carceral safety plan. Since June 2020, over 138 school districts have announced that they will remove police from schools.

Police do not make students safe

Police-free school advocates spent years developing the argument that school police, also known as school resource officers (SROs), do not make schools safe. There is, in fact, no research-based evidence that demonstrates that police improve safety in schools.

As opposed to promoting safety, school police target students of color and those with disabilities, which starts them on the road to prison. During the 2017-18 school year, nearly 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement, with about a quarter leading to arrests, often for minor behavioral issues. In schools with police presence, students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged than students in schools without SROs. Overall, Black students are twice as likely to be arrested in school as white students. Many young people have their first encounter with police in schools. One study found that in North Carolina, school-based referrals make up about 40% of the referrals to the juvenile justice system and most of these referrals are for minor, nonvio­lent offenses.

The rise of armed security personnel in schools came with zero tolerance approaches to the so-called war on drugs in the 1980s and escalated in the 1990s as part of the move towards mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, which Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow.” In the late 1970s, there were fewer than one hundred police officers in schools in the US. By 2003, there were almost 15,000 and the proportion of schools with armed security continued to grow.

The fact of the matter is that public schools in low-income communities of color invest in systems of discipline, control, and punishment rather than student support. The result is that 1.7 million students attend schools with police but no counselors; 10 million students attend schools with police but no social workers.

Alternatives to zero tolerance and policing

Advocates working to end zero tolerance and create police-free schools are organizing for alternative approaches to criminalization like restorative justice. When students misbehave or fight, rather than being disciplined or arrested, school staff and student peers hold restorative circles—dialogic processes that get at the root causes of the issue and help resolve conflicts. The main problem, however, may not be student misbehavior. Rather, when teachers start to learn about restorative justice, it often leads them to realize that they must break with zero tolerance mentalities and practices that result in punishing and criminalizing students rather than supporting them. In this way, the movement for police-free schools seeks to create supportive school climates and to reimage public schooling as safe, humane, and empowering for low-income students, students of color, and all students.

The movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline

In the early 2000s, a new movement arose to challenge the school-to-prison pipeline. Its focus was primarily on ending zero tolerance school discipline policies that suspend and expel students of color and those with disabilities at high rates, pushing them out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Black students were and still are three times as likely to be suspended as white students; in Texas, over 75% of Black students are suspended at some point in their high school years.

When parents and students of color first named the school-to-prison pipeline and called for an end to zero tolerance, few were listening. After fifteen years of organizing, in 2014, the US Departments of Education and Justice issued joint guidance calling for an end to zero tolerance and warning school districts against racially discriminatory discipline practices. Organizing groups won a rolling series of victories in states and districts across the country that ended zero tolerance discipline policies. As a result, suspension rates have begun to fall, in some places dramatically. In Los Angeles, a coalition of organizing groups won a series of victories in campaigns to reduce exclusionary discipline, culminating in the end to suspensions for “willful defiance” in 2011. Lost days of instruction due to suspensions fell from about 75,000 in 2007-18 to 8,300 by 2013-14 and fewer than 5,600 lost days in 2017-18.

Ten years ago, the Black Organizing Project in Oakland declared the goal of completely removing police from schools by 2020. Few were listening. Now, the demand for police-free schools is gaining momentum across the country. It is the new frontier of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and transform public education towards racial equity and educational justice.

_{Featured image by NeONBRAND via Unsplash.}

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Eradicating ableism with disability-positive K-12 education

More than half a century ago, powerful civil rights laws brought disabled children into American school systems, breaking down the physical barriers that held these young people at the margins of society. But attitudes towards disability as a devalued limitation persisted, holding social and cultural barriers between disabled and nondisabled people firmly in place. There is, however, an opportunity to use the power of education and learning to reimagine how we design the world.

In 1970, United States public schools educated only one in five students with disabilities, and most states had laws on the books denying children with both physical and developmental disabilities access to mainstream schooling. In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) to support states and localities in the public education of students with disabilities. When it was reauthorized in 1990, EHA was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As a millennial born in 1984, IDEA afforded me, a blind kindergartener, the right to attend my local public school. I was born with a degenerative eye condition that meant I would have night blindness my whole life, and gradually lose my daytime vision as well.

By 2016, 95% of children 6-21 who were eligible for services under IDEA were spending at least some part of each school day in a mainstream classroom. This was a huge leap forward but was happening in the absence of a major culture shift—even though more and more disabled children were joining classrooms, disability was absent from the curriculum. For instance, no one—not my parents, my teachers, my classmates, or myself—referred to me as “blind.” We often referred to my “eye problem,” or said that, “I couldn’t see in the dark.” There was no vocabulary to describe my sense of difference, though it was deeply felt.

In school, I did wear glasses, but none of the trappings of blindness—the white cane, the Braille business cards—those would come later. Still, I was the source of relentless bullying. I recall dreading mundane things like accidentally dropping my pencil on the ground, as I’d have to kneel down, in a cold sweat of shame, as the boys in the class taunted me, calling me “blindy” as I traced my fingers across the floor to locate my fallen writing implement. This was all because none of us knew better—because, for centuries, disabled children were bundled away and corralled inside institutions, while nondisabled children were taught to fear and underestimate them. These deeply-engrained fears of disability still exist in the present day and are acted upon in ways that harm disabled children.

Though there are only 10 US studies linking disability to bullying in school, according to one study from 2009, disabled children were two to three times more likely to experience bullying than their nondisabled peers. A more recent 2019 analysis from the National Center for Educational Statistics    found that, alongside physical appearance, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, disability was among the most common reason for bullying reported by students. Negative outcomes of bullying include lower performance in school, greater absenteeism, and lower graduation rates, among others.

This data comes as no surprise to me, as it reflects my own childhood. And this is how schools perpetuated a culture of ableism—and it took powerful civil rights laws to achieve the simple step of giving disabled children access to the same educational opportunities as their nondisabled peers.

Thankfully, for a new generation of disabled students, this reality is changing, and we can begin to see a world remade by people who will grow up immersed in disability-positive education.

Organizations like Disability Equality and Education in Pennsylvania are developing disability-positive curricula that teach children about various forms of disability, as well as how to honor and respect the differences that make us all whole and human. Disabled authors are publishing children’s books like We Move Together and Rolling Warrior that further reinforce these ideas. Films like Crip Camp are being used in schools to tell stories of the disability civil rights movement. These are the narratives that I had to seek out in my adult life, that will no longer be invisible for the next generation of disabled youth.

And this is just the beginning. States, localities, and school boards must demand that disability become part of the K-12 curriculum. Students who, because of IDEA, have the opportunity and the right to learn alongside their nondisabled peers should see themselves in the education they receive. And they shouldn’t be alone in these discoveries—nondisabled children should be right there with them, building disability consciousness and finding creative ways to work together to ensure everyone is included in every aspect of life. If this becomes the foundation, a child who grows into an architect is less likely to forget to build that ramp and make it beautiful; a high school student who becomes a doctor is more likely to show compassion and provide accommodation to a disabled patient; and a nondisabled government leader is more likely to consider disability issues when designing public policies. Even after the harms of bullying and the loneliness of exclusion, I believe this new world is possible because knowledge is a powerful tool to repair our entrenched fear of otherness.

Featured image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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