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.
Renewing the curriculum to promote epistemic cognition in the knowledge society: Some procedural principles
Monica Tombolato
2022
Abstract
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.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.