Renewing the curriculum to promote epistemic cognition in the knowledge society: Some procedural principles

In our Knowledge Society, the division of cognitive labor, the specialization of knowledge, and the brisk growth of new information and communication technologies provide a complex challenge for those tasked with selecting what is worth teaching and how to do it. The ease of access to information due to advanced and user-friendly technologies often gives us the illusion to know more than we actually do. This “epistemic disease” is a danger to both democracy and public health. The educational system must therefore encourage good epistemic habits consistent with responsible citizenship. From a didactic perspective, this requires updating the curriculum in light of the educational challenge of the 21st century: making students aware of what knowledge is and what knowing means by fostering their epistemic cognition. Since epistemic cognition is concerned with the acquisition of a habitus, that is, a durable disposition to act in a certain way under certain circumstances (second-level curriculum objective), curriculum updating should not be reduced to a mere quantitative increase in the knowledge to be taught. On the contrary, this revision should address, on a qualitative level, how the selected disciplinary content is didactically transposed. In this contribution, we intend to propose some procedural principles – conceived as pragmatic patterns of behavior – that can help teachers design instructional activities consistent with the goal of promoting students’ epistemic cognition. These procedural principles will be formulated based on a conception of discipline as a correlated system of epistemic products and expert practices of knowledge construction, validation, evaluation, and justification.