Students are returning to school. Trump and Trumpism are still with us. What’s a teacher to do?
Uncertain? Join the club. If there is one thing that is certain, it is uncertainty.
Too many of us do not learn how to respond to uncertainty. The result is unproductive fear and susceptibility to the appeal of authoritarianism.
Students who entered kindergarten in 2018 will become adults and voting citizens in 2030. Many may not enter the formal workforce until 2035. Preparation for dealing with the uncertainty they will surely encounter should be an essential feature of every child's education, and it needs to start early. That does not only mean anticipating new technologies. Preparation for responding to and understanding uncertainty itself should be a goal. Science education beginning in elementary school is rich with opportunity.
Uncertainty is ubiquitous, inevitable, and often unsettling. It can threaten security and deeply held beliefs.
The promise to eliminate uncertainty is the calling card of political and religious authoritarians. It is their excuse for choking off freedom. Fear of uncertainty can stifle research and innovation. Understanding and responding to uncertainty with curiosity, reason, and integrity is essential to advance science and for democracy.
In our time, assertion of uncertainty serves as an excuse to debunk ideologically inconvenient but well-supported theories such as evolution and climate change that are universally accepted in the scientific community as fact. Supporters of unabated use of fossil fuels claim we should not act to control global warming because of uncertainty in the evidence. The current President of the United States asserts that we must shut down immigration of Muslims, Haitians, Africans and Salvadorans because of uncertainty about what They might do. None of these claims have any evidentiary basis but have appeal due people’s fears about uncertainty, unchallenged ignorance and prejudices, and a misunderstanding of how science establishes knowledge..
Science educators can to more to help prepare students to understand and be more comfortable with uncertainty when they learn about how scientists establish new knowledge.
In the public arena, there is an insufficient differentiation between scientific knowledge (in both the natural and social realms) and belief. The former is established by evidence, and the latter is a matter of unassailable faith. Scientific or other evidence-based knowledge claims are subject to challenge and revision, whereas belief is not. Recognition of uncertainty strengthens knowledge, whereas it threatens belief. Note President Trump’s frequent use of the phrase, “Believe me,” (especially when followed by an outright lie or distortion) and his extreme intolerance for disagreement.
Teachers can help students understand the importance of uncertainty when they gather, record, and interpret data as they engage in first-hand investigations when they are challenged to support claims with evidence, and when they are required to either defend or revise explanations in response to evidentiary challenges.
Two common sources of uncertainty are imprecision due either to human error and limitations of observation tools. For example, students often compare the masses of substances before and after a chemical reaction. In a closed system, they should be identical. However, carelessness or inexact measurement tools might show the samples to be different. Teachers have choices about instruction. One is to ignore the uncertainties in the data students collect and tell them that that conservation of mass is a scientific law. (Not a legal values-drive creation of humans, but rather a natural phenomenon established by repeated observation). In a sense, students could be taught to obey the law. An alternate approach is to engage students in a discussion about the source of error, techniques to characterize it, and whether the results support the scientific claim that mass is conserved in chemical reactions. The latter takes time but pays off in understanding about when uncertainty is significant and when it is not. Telling students favors authority as the source of knowledge and deprives them of independence. Engaging them in scientific argumentation– confirming, revising, or abandoning their claims in light of evidentiary challenge– builds their talents and confidence to think independently and weigh evidence.
On a simpler level, elementary students can learn about filling in and projecting missing data. For example, students learn that magnetism can act through space. They can graph data about the relationship between distance and the strength of a magnetic field. By interpreting their data, they can begin to develop a preliminary model of that relationship. Once again, small deviations in the manufacture of magnets, and subsequently their strength, or limitations of measuring devices may produce data with variation around an overall trend line. Anomalies are an opportunity to engage students in debate about whether or not there is a trend in the data that is sufficient to support a sound claim.
Students can practice dealing with uncertainty. They can discuss when uncertainty makes it hard or difficult to reach a conclusion and when it does not. They can even be left to ponder ambiguity.
As students grow older, they can wrestle with the intersection of uncertainty and values. For example, when they learn about measuring concentrations of dissolved materials they can learn about how environmental regulators set threshold levels of known dangerous chemicals in water, food, and air. They can debate tradeoffs between economic claims and uncertainty about health impacts.
Most important, students can learn to examine whether their preconceptions– which may be divergent from what is known about how the natural world works– taint their ability to consider new or contradictory evidence. Students can learn to change what they think they know. They can learn to argue civilly based on evidence. They can learn to approach inevitable uncertainty as problems to be solved rather than feared. Perhaps dispositions about uncertainty learned in science lessons will carry over into how students approach political and social issues as adults.
The response to uncertainty that is most worrisome is abdication– blurring the lines between fact and fiction, turning away from personal and social agency, turning away from trying to make sense, and turning away from trying to investigate how unexamined bias undermines weighing of the evidence.
The most dangerous responses are denial of objective fact and tacit or enthusiastic acceptance of authoritarianism.
School preparation for uncertainty as antidote is not a theory or even a prediction. The evidence is insufficient. Think about it as a hopeful experiment that is well worth trying. The cost is minimal, and the benefit could be huge.
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Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He works part time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.