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The power of knowledge

The quality of Dutch education is under pressure. The level of maths and reading skills is declining rapidly in international rankings, and there is an insurmountable shortage of teachers in some parts of the country. In an attempt to fill the gaps created by this — long-predicted — shortage of teachers, the focus seems to be more on the quantity than the quality of teachers. Coaches, teaching assistants and generalists are filling the gap left by the subject teachers who are leaving more and more schools. This seems logical: it’s better to have someone in front of the class than no lessons at all. But let’s re-emphasise the power of knowledge. For me, the right to education means more than just sitting in a classroom. I would like every student to have a committed and passionate teacher with a sound subject knowledge.

Why aren’t teachers allowed to just teach anymore?

For me, the right to education means more than just sitting in a classroom

What you don’t know, you won’t be able to see

As a geography lecturer, I want students to make sense of the world around them, both near and far. Nothing makes me  happier than when a student in Year 2 of HAVO (senior general secondary education) proudly sends me a picture of a U-shaped valley he saw from a train when he was on holiday. His first U-shaped valley, which had been ‘invisible’ to him before, became visible as a trail of former glaciers. What you don’t know, you won’t be able to see. Students need substantive building blocks and a capstone of knowledge. Not just for concrete concepts but also to be able to understand more abstract geographical issues like the position of China and Taiwan, migration flows and the ability to assess fake news.

The value of knowledge in environmental education and general education should not be underestimated. If you know something, you can appreciate, protect, improve and cherish it. Something that you know absolutely nothing about will often have no value. Information is widely available to students, but knowledge is not. The more you know, the more you also know what you don’t know. Your circle of knowledge grows, but so does the circumference of the same circle with the boundary to unexplored knowledge. Knowing what you don’t know makes you curious. Knowledge and skills go hand in hand. In my view, knowledge-rich business subjects like geography, biology and history are indispensable to the enhancement of students’ literacy and numeracy skills. I can’t imagine how I as a teacher would be able to teach students skills without a focus on knowledge. Knowledge also plays a role in addressing educational inequality. With fewer subject teachers, students rely more on the knowledge they are given at home. So, knowledge transfer becomes even more important when students have less backing from home.

The bar that we as teachers set for our own knowledge could be raised quite a bit

The power of subject knowledge

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that a teacher’s pedagogical and didactic knowledge doesn’t matter, but let’s not downplay the importance of sound subject knowledge. A strong subject-knowledge base makes you more adaptable as a teacher: you can put the textbook aside and let students get to grips with current and authentic social issues.

In an attempt to address the teacher shortage, some schools have recruited playground supervisors, some teachers are effectively only allowed to teach 10 minutes a week, and more broadly deployable generalists are filling the gaps left by subject matter experts, many of whom are retiring. Teachers no longer being allowed to ‘just teach well’ is one of the reasons we are struggling to retain inspired teachers in the education system.

Teachers in the classroom

In an attempt to solve the teacher shortage, new routes into the teaching profession have been created: from career-switcher entry routes to teacher minors. As a teacher-trainer, I’m involved in one of the 384(!) routes into the teaching profession. A two-year Master’s degree programme at a university of applied sciences. Besides knowledge subjects and didactic subjects, the degree also covers learning processes, pedagogy and educational research skills. I wonder how some of the shorter routes into the teaching profession manage to produce proficient teachers with the initial teaching competence required. In this way, solutions to the quantitative shortage of teachers are leading to qualitative friction in the classroom, especially if specialist knowledge and teaching skills are not followed up in the schools themselves. It’s important for teachers to know more about the subject matter covered in the textbooks. To turn concepts from the textbook into powerful knowledge, teachers need to be aware of the concepts but also of how the knowledge has evolved.

Textbooks today are containing more and more pictures and figures and less and less text. If the knowledge doesn’t come from a textbook, it’s vital for the teacher to have a strong knowledge base. Besides subject knowledge, school subject knowledge has an important role to play. For example, the coherence between concepts but also common misconceptions among students. A geography term like ‘natural gas bubble’ evokes the misconception that it is a subterranean gas-filled balloon. However, in reality, this gas is located between the cavities in a sandstone. Outdated scientific concepts are very persistent. Some geography teachers (and textbooks!) are still identifying convection currents as the drivers of plate tectonics, despite the fact that geologists today see these mantle currents more as a result than a driving force.

There’s a role here for the university too: how do we ensure that new insights filter through to our education? Many refresher courses in schools focus — again with the most well meant underlying vision, like broadly shared school plans and unity in school policies — on the general pedagogical-didactic field. As teachers, we should also be open to subject-matter and subject-didactic-related training or actually insist on it. The bar we set as teachers for our own knowledge, as well as the subject-specific bar we set for new teachers, could be higher.

If the knowledge doesn’t come from a textbook, it’s vital for the teacher to have a strong knowledge base

Powerful knowledge exchange

By naming a secondary school teacher Alum of the Year, Utrecht University is underlining not just the importance of education but also the role university graduates play in it. It’s also an outstretched hand to anyone not directly involved in education to consider how the knowledge you gained during your study could be a knowledge impulse for education. From guest lecture to substantive feedback on textbooks and from contributing to a knowledge festival to a career switch perhaps, or to becoming an inspired subject-matter-expert extraordinaire in the education sector.

Together with employees from TNO, I have developed lessons on the new geological map of the Netherlands. Also, former lecturers at Utrecht University regularly allow me to spar with them on substantive questions I encounter in class or at my university of applied sciences. This is a knowledge exchange I’d like every teacher to have access to. This exchange is often still informal and voluntary, which is also where its strength lies to some extent. It would be interesting to consider how the university could facilitate this valuable ‘knowledge transfer’ more.

Teacher Roelof Schuiling (1854–1936) ends his foreword in Nederland: handboek der aardrijkskunde with a quote from his favourite poet — ‘Who improves me and will not offend me’ — as an invitation to pass on comments and remarks to make geography education better together. As teachers, let’s remain open to new knowledge and work together to make Dutch education better and more rich in knowledge. In times of cutbacks and shortages, let’s not lose sight of the power of knowledge.

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