Epistemology 101

A little side note on yesterday's class: I knew some students in the upper
grades had studied electricity before, but I decided to start at a
pretty basic level with static electricity, to make sure everyone
really understood what they thought they understood.  At some point a
student volunteered an answer to one of my questions, and I asked,
"How do you know that?" with the intention of highlighting how the
student's conclusion followed from the things we had just observed.
But the student said she knew it because a teacher (in a previous
year) had told her, so I asked how the teacher knew that.  The
response: that teacher had a teacher at some point.  So where did THAT
teacher learn it?  The whole class was eagerly getting in on the act
and shouting out different answers by this point, but one answer was
"From scientists."  So how did scientists learn it? Eventually we came
back to the idea of doing experiments and learning from them.

I think this was really useful because too many people are stuck at
the first stage of epistemology: knowledge comes from an authority,
and that's that.  Of course, it's normal at this age (grades 4-6), but
I'd like to do whatever I can do to move the kids on through the next
stages.  It goes to the very nature of science: is it just a set of
results, or is it the process?  It's both, of course, but the process
too often gets short shrift in education.  It's difficult to
teach---it can't be a unit by itself, rather it has to be built in to
every science unit, which makes the logistics very difficult---and
it's difficult to write a test question about it. But it has to be
done.

If you're interested in what thoughtful people have discovered about
the stages of epistemology, you might start with this quick summary of William G. Perry's research.

The second group, grades 1-3, would have missed out on this except
that at some point I said, "Here's what I think is going on," and one
student said. "You're the teacher, you should KNOW what's going on" or
something like that.  So that was a good chance to have a similar
discussion with that group.