Curiosity and Learning

Have you ever visited a Pre-K classroom and watched the young learner’s eyes? I’ve always told young educators that eyes don’t lie, meaning if you want to see a young learner’s engagement with what they are learning, look at their eyes.

Young learners are naturally curious about almost everything. But then something happens, usually while they are moving through our K-12 system, that takes that natural curiosity away.

Earlier this month, The 74 online interviewed identical twins Perry Zurn, an associated professor of philosophy at American University, and Dani S. Bassett, a professor of bioengineering, physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, about curiosity and learning.

The article begins:

“One of the greatest paradoxes of American education is that children everywhere are sparkling with curiosity, but schools are constantly scrambling to rethink their strategies for student engagement. It’s like the most famous lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the protagonist floats in the ocean, ironically cursed: ‘Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.’”

“How can this persistently be so? How is it that children are so thoroughly, exhaustingly curious…but so many schools feel that they need to cajole, coax, even trick their students into learning?”

“Perhaps the problem stems from a misunderstanding of how human curiosity works. In their new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, [Zurn and Bassett] offer a reframing that could help educators dissolve their frustrating paradox. The book is an outline of curiosity as relational, as a connecting function instead of the more traditional view, what Zurn and Bassett call an ‘acquisition’ function.”

“Clearly that has implications for school, other learning settings, and curricula – for, as they put it, ‘the architecture of what is learned and the arrangement of learners in the process.’”

The 74: “I’m wondering just as best you can, can you describe relational curiosity for a layperson? What does it mean to compare curiosity to edgework?”

DB: “So for a long time, curiosity has been studied as information-seeking in the sciences. Neuroscientists are particularly interested in understanding what is happening in the brain when people are curious. One of the current challenges is that we have trouble figuring out which piece of the brain is related to curiosity specifically versus motivation, attention, or, say, excitement about particular kinds of information. There are so many sub-processes in the mind and in the brain that are used in the process of curiosity that it is very difficult to figure out what it is we are actually studying.”

PZ: “Meanwhile, there’s a debate in educational theory about motivation versus interest, for example, and which one is actually the thing that’s more aligned with curiosity, and therefore with learning – hopefully. So there’s just a lot of stuff that we assume is related, but how it’s related isn’t clear.”

“I’m trained in philosophy. One thing I notice when I read over philosophical theories is considered (much like in the sciences) on an acquisitional model: If I want to know something, I want to gain knowledge of that thing. I want to acquire knowledge, facility or skill with that thing. This characterization appears over and over again, and there’s some usefulness to it. I want my kids to learn their letters, their numbers. You acquire, you gain a facility with these very specific tools or symbols.”

“So the characterization is useful, but it’s really limited. What we argue in the book is that what’s more fundamental to understanding how curiosity works is not its capacity to acquire any one piece of information, but rather to connect information that we currently have with information that’s new, or to make connections between pieces of information we already have.”

The 74: “There must be a social aspect of relational curiosity, right? That is, curiosity isn’t just about investigating our relationship to the past, but also about exploring how ‘here’s how it all works’ is also embedded in networks of power right here and now.

DB: “When we are curious we are often curious with another person or about another person or someone else is supporting our curiosity or policing our curiosity. The connection between two people is very relevant for understanding our personal experiences of curiosity. The same is true for students in the classroom.”

“But that’s just the start. It’s not just about interactions between two people. It’s about broader social networks – inside the classroom, in our lives, at home – that impinge upon, or support, or contribute to, or change the kind of curiosity that we engage in. Think of it like mentoring: we see a kind of curiosity in somebody else. We watch their mind move from idea to idea. We watch how they ask questions, and we think, ‘Oh, I want to think that way.’”

“The more kinds of curiosity that a person can observe through their social network, the more they can pull the bits that they like, and that they want to emulate. That can create, I think, a richer experience for students and adults alike.”

So, if we want to build curious learners, here are three things we should do based on the research of Zurn and Bassett:

Begin the learning process with the following question: “What would you like to learn today?”

(And then follow that question up with inquiry-based questions, building a web of questions outward.)

Identify an adult learning leader that is trained in asking these types of questions and supporting young learners as they become more and more curious about finding the answers.

Finally, find a learning cohort, filled with other young learners who are building their web of questions, to support the individual learner’s curiosity.

If it sounds simple, it is.

But the traditional system isn’t built to connect curiosity with learning. That’s why we have to build a new system.

Til tomorrow. SVB