Building “Permeable Walls” in Secondary Classrooms
Permeable Walls is an innovative international pedagogy project, co-creating research with teachers and students in Key Stage 3 (Age 11-14).
Entrenched subject compartmentalisation of the secondary learning environment can provide challenges for students’ understanding of how different areas of the curriculum are related to each other and to real world contexts.
We are recuiting secondary schools now, who would like to be research partners. We are looking for schools to work with us between March and July 2021 or who would like to plan with us to create learning opportunities for their students from Sept 2021.
We have pre-designed resources for teachers and students or, dependent on numbers, we can create bespoke packages for your school. Bursaries to acknowledge additional teacher workload and time may be available. Get in touch via the contact form tinyurl.com/hello-ei
Read a blog from our pilot PW school.
Working with Teachers Across Departments
By supporting students to become epistemically insightful we enable them to become rational and compassionate thinkers, able to create their own trails through education drawing on the richness created though disciplinary interactions, rather than feeling that they have to be constrained by disciplinary boundaries.
Epistemic Insight goes hand in hand with teaching a broad and balanced curriculum: it brings to life the ‘purpose of study’ section in each national curriculum subject by helping students to recognise which is disctinctive about each discipline and its preferred method, questions and norms of thought.
Becoming a research partner provides access to CPD and resources to support you in delivering epistemically insightful opportunities for your students. The project works across at least two departments and can be scaled to fit the spaces available in your curriculum, whether this is embedding shared language for all year 7, or creating bespoke sessions/ schemes of work. Teachers are partners in the co-creation and delivery of opportunities.
Working with Students
By studying across boundaries, students can deepen their understanding of cross-disciplinary responses to many of their questions and encourage active enquiry into the power and limitations of of different responses and solutions. They are able to recognise the disctinctive contributions disicplines make, as well as articulate when, and why questions fall outside the scope of a particular discipline.
We know from our conversations with research schools, that for some students developing their understanding of a discipline’s preferred methods, questions and norms of thought has helped them to see the multidisciplinary opportunities available to them post-16; or perhaps to recognise that they can combine their love of scientific methods and the questions of history to explore a career in osteoarchaeology. By enabling students to recognise the shape and unique features of disciplines as they exist beyond the classroom curriculum they are empowered to explore relationships and opportunities that they may not have realised were even possible. Students’ responses and project work (if applicable) inform our continued development of the pedagogy and may gain a university certificate of participation.