I read this Substack post a couple days ago and noted with interest the way its point dovetailed with my own recent readings about the nature of curiosity.
Looked at through evolution’s lens, from the moment each of us emerges into this life, our brain gathers as much information (sensory and otherwise) as necessary to understand the world around us, so that we can survive and thrive as a member of our species. The firmer our understanding of our world (or belief in our understanding of the world) becomes, the harder it can be to activate our curiosity – if our brain doesn’t feel certain information is “necessary” because our world view is complete enough, there’s a good chance our brain will ignore that information.
So the job of education, then, is to gently, firmly, and consistently shake the worldview of the young. Calling their worldview into question activates curiosity, which is the bread and butter of deep learning.
Then today I read a post on LinkedIn in which the writer talked about “…curiosity, the very thing we in independent schools work so hard to cultivate in our students. Turns out we need it too.” This gave me pause, for two reasons.
First off, this highlights a central difference between virtue education and other forms of education: adults modeling the subject matter. There’s no real question of teachers obeying gravity outside the classroom, or calculating area in a radical way, or altering the plot of Hamlet. These subjects are fixed, regardless of adult action. However, if any school’s virtue education is just words unaccompanied by exemplar behavior, students will see it as at best unreliable and at worst hypocrisy. The research supporting this has been around since at least the 1960s, though Confucius himself told us in his Analects (5th-cent BC) that “a gentleman puts his words into action before putting his actions into words.”
If any of these guys are science teachers, it may confuse their students. (‘Oh there goes gravity’ by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Secondly, hmmmm….working so hard to cultivate curiosity in our students…I guess I can appreciate this turn of phrase. After all, if you teach in a school with content-heavy curriculum, or with high-stakes testing (state tests, SATs, APs, Zhongkao, Gaokao, GCSEs/IGCSEs, A-levels, etc.), these require a high degree of predictability and focus in the classroom. Therefore, if you hope to cultivate a notoriously spontaneous and digressive trait like curiosity while satisfying the requirements of such curricula and testing, you will indeed have to work EXTREMELY hard, and I’m not sure how well that will ultimately go for you and your students.
There is a tension between curiosity creation and the typical approach in a classroom. Concerned teachers who have not been trained to address this curious tension tend, in my experience, to attempt the next best thing – they try to impress upon students what it is that makes THEM curious about the subjects they teach. After all, the goal as stated above is NOT to cultivate the STUDENTS’ curiosity, merely to cultivate SOMEONE’S curiosity in our students.
And so an English teacher with a love of Tennyson has her class read “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Finding students unengaged, she might explain that she too, at their age, wondered what the big deal was. Was this poem even about a real thing? After all, if it was real and 600 people really died, that would be worth remembering.
This might get a few students interested as she guides them into inquiries about the Crimean War, especially as it connects geographically and historically to the current war in Ukraine. Happy with their investment, she launches into a description of the situation at the Battle of Balaclava, where the poem takes place. She gently corrects some students who wonder if that’s where the name of the dessert comes from, explaining they’re thinking of baklava.
Photo of a Crimean War Grenadier, circa 1856. Note he is not wearing a balaclava.
As a small cluster of students begins discussing a recent TikTok where a chef made baklava, the teacher struggles to move forward, except now a student wants to know if this is where the clothing balaclava comes from. The teacher says she’s not entirely sure and anyway, that’s not really related to the poem. Other students want to know what a balaclava is, so the teacher has the inquiring student explain. While that happens, the teacher quickly searches and confirms that yes, the clothing is named for the town where the battle happened, which is just outside Sevastopol.
Trying to get back on track, she asks the students to look for Sevastopol on a map and is surprised when a girl points it out almost immediately. The girl explains it is an important city on the Black Sea, pretty much due north of Ankara. Impressed with her geographical knowledge, the teacher asks her to explain what makes the city important. The girl, now embarrassed, explains that, in the European version of the game Ticket to Ride, it’s a major junction of four railways leading to different parts of eastern Europe, so it can be strategic to build routes to there when you play.
Turns out the Beatles were right – she’s got a….
As derisive and supportive murmurations begin to surface, the teacher returns to the battle, talking instead about the people involved, starting with the commander of the 600, Lord Cardigan. “Wait – CARDIGAN?” It’s the student who asked about the balaclava, now incredulous that another article of clothing has come up. Students start to wonder if this is a coincidence, or if there is more of a connection between this war and clothing in the 1800s. The teacher admits she has no idea – she doesn’t even know if Lord Cardigan has anything to do with cardigan sweaters. That’s not really relevant to the poem, though.
Another student mentions that actually, there’s a long history of the military having an influence over fashion. He starts describing a podcast about clothes that did an episode a few weeks back about military styles. The teacher cuts him off to return to the Light Brigade.
The teacher’s approach has clearly ignited the students’ curiosity on a number of occasions in a number of ways. But because their interest pulls focus from the material that she will likely use down the road for their assessment, she must worry about indulging their questions or connections. In any case, if she were to allow students to follow their own interests in the course of the discussion, she (the teacher) would likely not know the answers to their questions – how could she teach them, then?
The situation reminds me of the 1992 Baz Luhrmann film Strictly Ballroom – in it, talented dancer Scott Hastings finds himself at odds with the dance establishment in his corner of Australia, the judges at ballroom competitions who oversee the network of dance schools and control the curriculum they teach with a fierce, conspiratorial grip. Scott, having mastered the material in his dance school, frequently finds himself artistically shackled, and allows his natural grace and musicality to interpret new steps, typically to the utter delight of assembled crowds.
While Scott is motivated to find ways his art can delight and inspire others, his fellow dancers are motivated by achieving high scores and winning competitions. The dance authorities, meanwhile, realize that his approach to dance would completely upset their livelihood – how can you teach steps that are invented as a response to music in the moment? They insist that Scott stop attempting “crowd-pleasing steps” (their sneering, dismissive term for his dances) and stick to established, traditional choreography.
Frustrated by the limitations of his dance-school world, Scott pursues his own research. His goal is not to abandon all categorization and structure in dance (remember, he has mastered all the steps taught in his school already). Instead, he finds teachers who reflect the culture and traditions from which the music and dances originate. Ultimately, when Scott performs his own improvised steps in competition, while they still do not conform to “Federation standards,” they more importantly reflect both the long history of the dance itself and Scott’s deep feelings about his art.
Allowing students in our classes to go off-roading into topics brought up by the day’s activities would engage students, not least because they’d feel as though they were getting something THEY want, over and above what the curriculum demands. More importantly, it would demonstrate to them that we adults value their expressions of curiosity as much as our own. But how can we teach things we may not know?
The key may lie in the Substack post I mentioned at the start: it describes the importance of asking the right questions to draw students into our lessons. I agree – and I would add that the right questions are those that connect student interests to the lesson material:
- Granted, the baklava question was a misstep, but if there are students interested in food, what if we asked, “If we did an autopsy on one of the soldiers after the Battle of Balaclava, what might we find was their last meal?”
- If there are gamers in the room, challenge them – “The deployment of French, British, and Ottoman troops at the battle ultimately overcommitted the British and led to the death of the 600 at the hands of the Russians. What if we set up all the armies as pieces on a game board…was there a way to defeat the Russians without the loss of so many?”
- Fashion, for better or worse, can be one way to prove the lasting impact of a historic moment. “This was one small battle in a little-discussed war over 170 years ago. But we still talk about it – we have poems and movies about it, and names from it are in our everyday vocabulary. But which of these is the MOST important cultural leftover? Let’s fight about it!”
All of these questions could then be followed by guided periods of research and discussion where we help students find the things they want to know about the things we want them to know.
Admittedly, this is not a complete plan for building students’ curiosity – it is merely one step. But, I feel confident that it would be a crowd-pleasing step.
“curiosity (challenge)” by ankakay is licensed under CC BY 2.0