Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Berry Billingsley for the “Stories of Impact” series

Watch the video version of the interview.

RS =  Richard Sergay (interviewer)
BB =  Berry Billingsley (interviewee)

BB: I’m Berry Billingsley, and I’m a Professor Science Education, here at the University of Canterbury Christ Church.

RS: So, the project, learning about science and religion, tell me the genesis of the project, and why it came about?

BB: So, then as a more experienced teacher, I was asked if I would mentor a religious education teacher. I followed my year-nines, those are 14-year-olds, out of my lesson and into their religious education lesson. They were like completely different people. Suddenly, they could ask all those questions I wanted them to ask in my lesson. But now the religious education teacher was saying, oh those are actually a bit hard, there’s rather a lot of science in those. And it just made me think, if you could just put the religious education lesson, with the science lesson.  If you could put the two teachers, with all of their expertise together, what an incredible setting that would be for schoolchildren. So, this project has been an incredible journey, a very long, hard work journey, to see how we can make that happen.

RS: Why weren’t some of these big questions, because science is obviously an enormous arena, why was it that religious education, and what the kids were getting there, were triggering the larger questions that they weren’t asking in science?

BB: In our science education, and I’ve studied the science curriculum, nationally and internationally, quite a lot now, we have a kind of an agreement now, a little bit like science has an agreement about what it’s in science. In science education, we have a bit of a pattern now, about what’s going to be in science education. And the big questions are just not there. So, the sorts of things that children are finding out, are very established, well-rehearsed, bits of content knowledge. In fact, our curriculum here in England, at the moment, is very focused on content knowledge. It even says that when children are doing their investigations, they should only be focused on discovering the content knowledge that we already know. Big questions, as we know, are not easy to answer, so they don’t fit that box. They’re not the sort of question where you can do an experiment in the classroom, and in 20 minutes you can see something, write it up, and think that you’ve now got an answer. 

RS: So, the mission of the project, fill in the blank, what is the mission of the project?

BB: Once, we started to investigate how children are really thinking about these questions, and not just of themselves, as in of the questions themselves, but because of the way that school is set up, what we found is that the children are seeing science and religion as two completely separate boxes. They don’t bridge between the two. They can’t see how to travel from one to the other. So, what they do is they sort of have two little worlds going on in their minds. They have what they say in their science classrooms, what they say in their religious education classrooms. And as far as the children are concerned, those two worlds just can’t mix. So, they will say to us in the interviews, things like, we don’t bond science and religion together. We have separate lessons because that’s their experience. When we did the research, we found how many things are missing in their thinking, gaps in their thinking. Because they’ve never really needed to study what kinds of questions are being explored in each classroom. So, they’ll say to us things like well, in science we do experiments, we get proof, they’re very convinced by science. In fact, they’d really like to apply science to everything, and they haven’t really thought about why the questions in the two classrooms are actually very different, where you might not be able to very simply apply your science to the sorts of questions you’re looking at in your religious education classes. 

RS: So, some of them said to me, that science is very good at the how, whereas religious education or faith-based education is better answering some of the big why questions. Would you agree with that?

BB: I think that’s quite a useful statement, but actually, because we are working sort of ground up from where the children are at, I try to explain it in the terms that I already know are going to be familiar to them. And one of the challenges, when you find detail into that particular statement, is that most children think science does help us with why questions. Why do things fall to the ground? Why does orange juice taste disgusting after you’ve done your teeth? You know, all those sorts of questions are why questions, and science does seem to be able to help us to get answers. So, I think it’s quite useful to look at the methods that are used in science and to kind of start by trying out what would it be like if we really did apply those methods, those stringent tests, to these big questions. So, in the curriculum, it tells the children that science is about observations. We start them on that idea very young. So, science is about observing things. And not only that, but in science, we collectively observe. So, we look at natural phenomena, we look at something we can all see, and we collectively observe it, and we try and explain what we can see on the basis of more observations. And then, if we write it up, other people ought to be able to see the same thing, they should see that natural phenomenon, and they should see what we observed. They should be able to make sense of it the same way. When you think about the sorts of questions that you’re asking in religion, they’re really not often, those sorts of questions. In fact, they might be a little bit more, sometimes, like history questions, where we’re relying on testimony, what people said they experienced. [06:45:53.08] And what they saw as a one-off. Lots of events that we talk about in Biblical text, for example, are one-offs, they’re not repeatable. So, they’re not the sorts of questions that you can easily bring science to. So, we have a bit of a phrase, which is, science and religion are mostly concerned with different types of questions. And that’s very similar to what you said. It’s just adapted a little bit, so that we can fit it with their experience that science does address why questions, and that actually, it’s about the methods of science that mean it can’t easily address those questions. 

RS: Would it be wrong to say that the old rubric has been science versus religion?

BB: Even my own rubric, when I began the project, was I started with science versus religion, thinking that it was then my job to dismantle science versus religion. And one of the many wonderful advisors in our project, is very fortunate. It has fantastic advisors working with us, who pointed out to me that by putting science versus religion as the heading on one of the web pages, even though I was then going on to dismantle it, was not a great start. So, I’m very careful now. I always say science and religion. So, I think even just getting the language out there helps children. Again, we do some of our research with very little children and it’s really quite alarming, how early on in their lives, they can already tell you that it’s science versus religion. Long before they really know very much about what science or religion are necessarily saying. 

RS: So, let’s unpack a little. I mean, there are those who would argue that, and you’ve sort of referenced this, science is fact-based. Faith is not. And there’s no place for faith in a science classroom, that it becomes confusing. It becomes cloudy. How would you answer that?

BB: Such a very, very good question, and we hear that from the children all the time. So, they tell us that it’s pretty much the first thing they say about science. Science is facts. Religion, they’ll say, is opinions. And for them, the difference between the two classrooms, is that science is there to tell you facts, even if the teacher tolerates the opinions for a little while, eventually, in the children’s words, the teacher will overrule and tell you what the fact is, what you’re meant to put in the exam. Whereas in the religion education classroom, you can believe what you want. The children will even start to characterize the two teachers. So, they say of their science teachers, science teachers know a lot, they’ve probably got a Masters, you know, very well educated. Not really interested in listening to you very much, they really just want to bat on and tell you equations. The religious education teacher, far more interested in your ideas, maybe doesn’t know very much. And that, of course, is because in their experience, the religious education teacher isn't giving them an answer. So, the way that we address that, and that’s absolutely what we’re doing in the workshops, is to show them what happens if we kind of move the question gradually, from one that’s very narrow, and very amenable to science, and that’s a phrase we use a lot. Ah, that’s very amenable to science. As we gradually make that question bigger and bigger, and it gets closer and closer, to what you might meet in the religious education classroom, so that they can see that actually, it wasn’t something special about those two things. There was something special about the question. If in religious education, you asked a question that’s very amenable to science, you’d hopefully come out with the same answer. I did have quite a perturbing experience with some teacher trainees. So, I was talking to the teacher trainees about an experiment that we can do in a science classroom. And we talked about it, and you might see this experiment later on. So, you have children all lined up, and they’ve all got a scrunched-up ball of paper, and a flat sheet of paper. And the idea is to think about, so as to predict which one will hit the ground first. So, will the scrunched-up ball hit the ground first or will the flat sheet hit the ground first? So, you’re making a prediction based on your scientific understanding of the world, your mental model of the world. So, we talked about how I might do this experiment. I said, which classroom do you expect to see that experiment in? Science classroom, that was easy. I said, alright, 30 children, we took them out of the science classroom, we went down the corridor, into the RE classroom, into the religious education classroom. The children do the same thing, what do we think will happen? They all looked at each other. I, I think they still thought they knew what was going to happen, but I just think they felt that religious education, or even religion, was somehow going to be challenged, by taking what was essentially a scientific investigation and putting it into that space, because their model of what happens in a religion, or in a religious education lesson, is that everybody can have their opinion. Nobody’s opinion is better than everybody else, anybody else's, and they could all be right. So, suddenly if different people had different opinions, that was going to be very problematic. 

RS: What did that teach you?

BB: Once again, just the level of entrenched compartmentalization. So, it’s there in the children’s thinking, but it’s also there in the trainee teachers. And it’s there in the teachers. So, I’ve now experienced it, at each point, in education. And I’ve also, for my own research, my PhD research, I was looking at what university students think. So, if you want, those are people who have kind of come through school and they’re starting to think about where they go next, they’re making sense of it. Their experience was that these were the questions that you learned not to ask. And again, we hear that from the children as well. So, it looks sort of like an impossible thing to get on top of, and then after a while, you learn not to ask the question. I think that’s a huge shame, because if we look at scholarship, historically, and even now, those big questions have motivated all sorts of wonderful scholars. Newton, as we know, was inspired and motivated by his faith, and far from the only scientist to be inspired by faith. So, if we cut out experience with those big questions, we’re stopping children who would be motivated by them, from looking into science from that perspective. And I think that’s a shame. 

RS: So, give me a sense of some of the big questions, that may or may not have answers, but are not being asked by these children, because of the bifurcation of science and religious education? What are the big questions?

BB: The, great thing about today is you’ll see those questions. And you’ll see us having a go at answering them. And you’ll see the children’s responses, as they go through the workshops. So, the current project that we’re working on for LASAR, which is learning about science and religion, is called being human. And we’ve taken a whole collection of questions around what does it mean to be human? So, there is creation and devolution. There’s that sort of idea, of how did we get here? But the ones the children are more interested in, are not really that one. In fact, as one young man said to me, well, we’re here now. So, you know, what they really want to know is what is their own experience of being human, and how they should understand that. And that question has become wonderfully tangible at the moment, because we have these robots, and the robots look almost human-like. And in fact, we can get the robots to do things that seem almost human-like. And there’s two different ways that you could see the advance of humanlike robots. One is to say, well we’re really, really, really, special. And if the robots ever get to the point where we’re at, that will be remarkable, because we have choices about what we do. We create our own futures, we have an inner life and mind, where we experience our lives. We have relationships where we really care about other people, and want other people to care about us. If you believe in God, we have a one-to-one relationship with God. God knows us individually. All of those things make a person really, really, really, really special. And if a robot can get to that, that’s incredible. What many of the children say to us, when they think about almost humanlike robots, they say well now I don’t feel so special. And that’s because they can sort of see the robot. Instead of thinking about how the robot might climb up to the point where they feel they’re at, they start to sort of bring their understanding of themselves down to what they understand about the robot. So, they’re sort of putting into words, this age-old question, which is are we really kind of putting in anything of ourselves into our own lives? Is there actually something in there that’s, a soul if you want, that’s kind of steering us through? Or are we really just the sum total of all the parts that we’re made of, and the interaction that we have with our environment? The genes that have, kind of, made us the way that we are? The circumstances we’re in? Are we anything more than that? Or if you really analyzed us, are we just, sort of, a sum of patterns that you could understand and predict scientifically? So, that question, as you know, is a very old question. But it’s very real to people at the moment, because we are asking those questions about robots. 

RS: So, is your thinking that if religious education and science weren’t put together, those sorts of more moral and ethical questions would not be asked in the science classroom?

BB: I think those questions, and more even than moral and ethical – they are moral and ethical but they’re really deeply philosophical. They’re questions about, you know, how we should understand ourselves and what we can make sense of in the world, to tell us what kind of people we are. Are we agents with free choice? Or are we slaves to our circumstances and our genes? So, children will go to a science lesson, they’ll learn about genes, and as usual, they’re very convinced by what they hear about in science. And in the science lesson, because the big question isn’t entertained, the science teacher doesn’t know how the lesson they’ve taught has rubbed off on children’s thinking about themselves as people, because we don’t go there. We’ve got a, a curriculum, and we’ve got an exam spec, and they are very small contained questions that children learn to answer. And we call it the hidden curriculum. So, there’s what we meant to teach the children, but what did we also teach them, that we didn’t actually realize we were teaching them in that process? 

RS: So, let me ask why not, instead of or in addition to religious education, bring a philosophy teacher into the classroom?

BB: Some schools do have philosophy. Philosophy, at the moment, in schools has an awful lot on its plate, like all the other subjects. So, even philosophy education in a school isn’t the answer. You know, we really do need to kind of prioritize these big questions, and find a proper space for them, and work out where they fit. I also suggest that since big questions are of themselves, very multi-disciplinary, we need all of the classrooms working with us. The solution is also not just to give it to one classroom. Because, as I’ve already mentioned, children have a habit of sort of compartmentalizing what they learn in that classroom. So, in this classroom, I need to know to give this answer. But when I get back to my science lesson, that doesn’t seem relevant anymore. Because the science teacher wasn’t in the philosophy lesson, so the science teacher makes no reference to what was there. The science teacher seems to still be on the same journey they were on before, on the same journey they were on before. And that seems to be it. So, the children will suppose that the science teacher has a different stance, for example, to the religious education teacher, because they assume that about the science teacher, they assume that’s how the science teacher thinks. 

RS: What do you think, if you were at the 40,000-foot level, and think about this project and the lessons you’ve learned, what’s missing in today’s educational system?

BB: I think the fantastic contribution that our project has been able to make, is to highlight what is missing. Because if we only have exams that ask children to answer a very narrow set of questions, and we only have classrooms that are designed to teach a very narrow curriculum, as I say as a teacher, you can really miss what the children just haven’t picked up in the lesson. You can also miss the misconceptions and miss perceptions that children have picked up. And if you knew about them, then you might actually get there and try and do something about them. But because you don’t see them, you don’t get on and do something.

RS: Well, let me interrupt, because the kids go through a curriculum every year, every day. Science, literature, history, religious education, math, etcetera, etcetera. They’re getting it in their daily dose, but what aren’t they getting in that – what I’m inferring is that, all these disciplines seem siloed to you, is that correct? And they’re not getting a multi-disciplinary approach? I mean, I’m answering the question, but you see where I’m going. So, what – considering the breadth of curricula that they are getting every day in school, what’s the problem?

BB: So, the children in school at the moment, they’re getting education in the specialist subjects. And the specialist subjects are each focused around, in many cases, a specialist discipline. So, they’re getting what we call the immersion in the discipline, and immersion in the discipline, for example, in science education, as I’ve highlighted, is to really take them to the bits of science that we can do best. So, here’s what they’re missing. I’m pretty sure you’ve never gone to a science lesson, where the opening line by the teacher was, today, we’re going to look at all the questions that science really struggles to answer. You never had that lesson. You always had the lesson where the teacher, pulled open the drawer, gave the class a nice set of springs, that were all beautifully chosen to work nicely, told the children how to do the investigation, made sure they were all doing it that way, went over and helped that group who said, it’s going wrong miss. How did they know it was going wrong? Because they turned the page in the book, and they knew what they were meant to get, and they knew they weren’t getting that. So, they knew it was going wrong. And what does the teacher do then? They say, oh yes, okay, don’t worry. Move to that other group. Go and stand with that group. It’s working really well over there. So, in other words, it’s almost like a conspiracy. We’re in the business of showing children how the established scientific knowledge that we have, was produced. And as long as that is what the purpose of the lesson is about, helping the children to get very quickly, in 20 minutes, to where somebody fantastic like Hook got, a really great scholar, after a considerable amount of thought. [07:01:03.08] And as a science teacher, you’ve kind of got 20 minutes to get them there. So, clearly, you’re going to kind of get them there, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So, children’s experience in the science classroom, and we know this, isn’t the same as scientist’s experience working with frontier questions. 

RS: Would it be your working thesis then that science can’t answer every question?

BB: It’s a very good thesis. In fact, that's one of the things I ask the children to consider today. So, we talk about those big questions, and I say, what you will probably, I hope come away with at the end, is that science is consistent with many different answers to those big questions. So, your science will not get you all the way there. You know, science informs your thinking, science informs our thinking about every part of our lives. But your science is not going to get you all the way to an answer on those big questions. And if I give you just a little knotty kind of thing to think about. So, one of the investigations that we do is with pieces of spaghetti. This is kind of classical physics. All of our spaghetti, can I get some spaghetti out to show you?

RS: Yeah, yeah. 

RS: So, as an example, you have spaghetti.

BB: Yes. 

RS: Tell me about that. 

BB: Okay. So, we have a workshop, and the star of the show is spaghetti. So, this is all sorts of things you can discover by experimenting with spaghetti. So, actually, here’s one that’s quite fun. And some people got a physics paper out of this, so some really impressive physics. And this is, if you try to break a piece of spaghetti, can you ever actually break it into two pieces or do you always get a bit that flies off in the middle? So, I’ll leave that challenge for you to investigate for yourself. So, hopefully, you’ve got some spaghetti somewhere around at home, or at school, and if you try to break the spaghetti into two pieces, what happens? So, someone got a physics paper out of that. We became very interested then in spaghetti, because actually spaghetti is, whoops – spaghetti has some interesting properties. Spaghetti is sort of quite springy, and we can bend this as you can see. So, we could put a little gondola onto the spaghetti, and you’ll see in the experiment, that they then weighting the gondola. So, they put stones into the gondola. And they look at what happens when the gondola breaks. So, how bent was the spaghetti? Or how much weight was in the gondola when the spaghetti broke? As I say, this is fantastic physics, because why does it lend itself so well to physics? Well, I’ve got lots of children, and they’ve all got bits of spaghetti. And you can see that spaghetti, partly because it’s engineered that way, all the pieces are pretty much of a muchness. They’re all of a very similar weight, they’re all a very similar length. They’re all a very similar thickness. So, actually, they make good physics. Good classroom physics. I can have lots of children doing the same thing, and they could all look at what weight we put onto the gondola, in order to break the spaghetti. I might even come up with a relationship. A relationship is really exciting in science. I might even come up with a relationship that says, as I make the spaghetti longer or shorter, and we can do that, just by putting the spaghetti, like so. So, we could have longer or shorter lengths of spaghetti, and we could see whether that makes a difference to when the spaghetti breaks. We might get a fantastic graph in a relationship. I could then make a clock, because that’s engineering for you. I could have this hanging here and it might work as a clock, because I could drop water in here, and I could have this spaghetti bridge set to a certain amount, so I know when it’s going to break, and that’s my alarm, I know when to go to my next lesson. So, there’s the appliance of science. So, science is very convincing. Once they’ve had a really good go at investigating their spaghetti, and noticing how amenable their spaghetti is to those sorts of physics questions, the next thing we ask them to think about is the behavior of the people. So, we say, I’d like to make this a bit competitive for you. The person who puts in the stone that breaks the spaghetti, is the loser. And the last person to put in a stone that doesn’t break the spaghetti is the winner. And everybody else is just somewhere in the middle. And we put them into their groups, and off they go to investigate. It’s really interesting what these groups of children do. So, we’ve had so many examples. We’ve got children who completely break the rules. So, we had a group of girls, and it was girls, who said, well, we didn’t like your rules. We went for a sort of distributed responsibility. We chose one person, and they put all the stones in, so we had no winners and losers in our group. So, they stepped right outside the boundary. Now, I’ve never met a piece of spaghetti yet, that’s done that to me. The spaghetti, well it might ping onto the floor, but I still think it’s a pretty inert thing. It doesn’t have a mind of its own. Alright, where did we get the mind of our own? Do we really have a mind of our own? Or are we just trumped spaghetti, you know, very complicated spaghetti, with a lot going on? There we are again, at that big question. So, you kind of come around to the big question, but we can already start to see that what we could answer so well, using some observations, some repetition, all those things that make good physics, they really broke down when we actually started to understand how some people were interacting with each other. 

RS: So, the – so, tell me the point of the example, was to understand that interaction, and the pedagogy around that? Or you tell me, I mean, what’s the, tell me the point of the spaghetti example?

BB: Within the workshops that we have in a typical day, and the way that LASAR, learning about science and religion, works at the moment, we bring the students on campus. So, all those rules I mentioned about how classrooms work, so the idea that the science classroom is bound to a particular curriculum. The religious education classroom has its own curriculum. The two classrooms don’t talk to each other. All of those rules, we can bypass all of those, we’ve brought the children in. So, we can give them a series of workshops in the day, that get them, if you want, from sort of zero to where they are now, to where we want them to be. So, during the day, they’re meeting all sorts of different things that we think they need. Not only to address the big question itself, but the equipment that they need, the thinking skills that they need to bring to it. And it really is those thinking skills that are missing. Those thinking skills are not all ones that you have to do while looking at really kind of sensitive, worrying, because many science teachers are rather sensitive and worried, questions about religion. You don’t really want to be addressing the most controversial and sensitive questions when you start to get the thinking skills going. So, here is an example of comparing, experimenting with spaghetti, and experimenting with people, trying to understand people. In both cases, we’re looking at behavior. Behavior of spaghetti, behavior of people. That sort of comparison doesn’t happen at the moment in the science classroom. But it’s perfectly okay, there’s nothing controversial or sensitive there. So, what we’re looking at, as a project, is doing a day, at the moment, on campus, and then eventually, I hope, in a school. How can we use those different spaces, now that we understand that the bigger question is multi-disciplinary, and it needs particular thinking skills, where do we put those thinking skills? And where do we put those workshops? So, they really can work in a school.

RS: How do teachers react to this?

BB: That’s a very good question. Now, where teachers are bringing the children onto campus, they do know what’s going to happen. We’re very overt about what the day is about, and we have the benefit in England of having religious education on the curriculum. So, it’s perfectly okay to advertise a day as big questions that bridge science and religion. So, the teachers know what they’ve come to. So, they are already looking with interest to see how we manage these questions. With that said, our research has not only looked at those teachers, the teachers that bring the children to campus. We’re very careful to make sure that we sample lots of different teachers. Most teachers that I’ve talked to, absolutely where I was at, when I was at school, just show me how to do it, give me permission to do it, give me a platform to stand on, so it’s not me speaking on my own. And I’m absolutely up for it. I’ll give you another example which as a school teacher, I always thought was kind of quite interesting. We had to do, my colleague and I, we had to do the year eight, so that’s a 13-year-old, sex education lesson. My cheeks and ears got very red, and I noticed her neck went very red, and we could both see that we were kind of on the spot. We did the whole cool, chilled, you know, write your questions down everybody, and pass them forward. That’s a good trick as a teacher, get them to write the questions down and pass them forward. Don’t take them live, you know, because you never know what’s going to come. The questions were coming in, we were managing very well, we were giving them good answers. But we both felt that we knew what we were meant to say, because there is support for teachers in that area. Teachers have a platform to stand on, they’re not on their own. As a science teacher in a classroom, even though I was a teacher who had looked very much at those big questions, I was on my own. I didn’t really have a line or a way of managing those questions that I’d looked at in my teacher training, for example. The teacher training covered all sorts of other things, but not that. So, what it’s made me realize is that if we really are going to address this problem, and it is a problem, and one I think is hugely important and worth addressing, it’s not a simple solution. It’s not just going straight to the children. We need to change what’s happening at every chain, every point in the chain. We need to change how teacher education is working, so that the teachers are getting support. The teacher educators need help. They haven’t tried to manage these big questions before. The children coming through school need help. We have to work on all the parts of the system at the same time, to try to get out of the entrenched compartmentalization that we’re in at the moment. 

RS: Let me ask you this tough question, which is, what you’re looking at in some ways is unique to the UK because religious education is a mandatory subject. In places like the United States and elsewhere, religious education is not generally, if you’re in a public school, parochial school. Is this sort of project, you’ve had this project elsewhere, where religious education is not part of the curriculum?

BB: Absolutely. So, we’ve been lucky because we started in England, and as you say, in England, we do have religious education in schools. So, we do have an opportunity to be quite overt with the question in schools. Having said that, we experience many of the same pressures that are in those countries where they don’t have religious education. Because if religious education is happening in a school, but only in a small compartment, so that the children get it in that small box, but it’s not permeated into the other classrooms, then they still isolate it. So, it’s not very different to the way that children isolate school and home. So, you think one thing at school, different thing at home. One thing in the science classroom, different thing in the RE classroom. A lot of what we’ve been looking at, and a lot of what I hope you will see in the day, is how we teach children the thinking skills. And the thinking skills can apply in sorts of questions, not just the ones that you meet in the religious education classroom. So, for example, there really isn’t any bridging in England, or indeed many counties, between science and history. You don’t have to get as far over as religious education, to see that the bridging isn’t happening. One of the things I talk about with trainee teachers, because I’m in the business now of training teachers, I put onto the blackboard, or I put onto the whiteboard, sorry. I’ll start that again. One of the things I do with trainee teachers, because I’m now teaching teachers how to teach, is I show them a PowerPoint slide that has on it what the history curriculum says at the beginning, about history. But I don’t tell them its history, I say what subject is this? When you look at what it says, it talks about children needing to sift evidence, for example, and justify their answers. All sorts of things that they associate with science, and they know my area is science. So, they’ll often say it’s science. It’s not science, it’s history. Many subjects are interested in evidence, religion is also interested in evidence. It’s just that, as we’ve discussed. You can’t always get that sort of observable, repeatable, measurable evidence that science prefers. You can’t always get that sort of evidence for those bigger questions. In history, the way that we address that, is we broaden out what we’re willing to look at. So, we also look at testimony. If I came into my science lesson, and I said of the testing spaghetti experiment, I’ve got a letter written here by my mom, about how much she likes spaghetti. Can I add that? We have a lot of spaghetti at home, and I wanted my mom to justify why we do. My dad’s a chef and we love spaghetti at home, is that eligible? No, testimony is eligible in the science classroom. But it would be eligible in the history classroom, and it would also be eligible RE classroom, or religious education classroom. 
    
RS: So, bottom line, the work that you’re doing is an effort at trying to inculcate a much more multi-disciplinary approach to education today, correct?

BB: Pretty close. It’s to, it’s actually, the first stage is to help teachers and educators, policy makers, to appreciate those gaps. So, to see what is missing, by not having a multi-disciplinary approach. Because our experience has been, that you once demonstrate what is missing, and then you show what the children can gain by putting it back in, that those teachers, those policy makers, they want to come on board, and they want it to happen too. So, it is, if you want, it’s a bit of a Pandora’s Box. It’s sort of saying, look, you’ve only asked those very narrow questions, and the children told you what you expected to hear. And so, you think that they’ve understood. But they’ve really only understood something very little. And when you look at what they thought about the multi-disciplinary question, you’re often quite alarmed. Gosh, I didn’t know that they thought science says there’s no god. I’ve never told them that. Where have they even got that from? Well, you were in a classroom with children, who in their previous lesson or at home, had been talking about God creating the universe. You batted on and talked about the universe coming into existence, through the big bang. You never referenced god. You hoped that they would be able to situate what you were talking about, in their wider world view, whatever that was. But you never helped them to do that. So, they made assumptions about how you understood the world, through what you were saying. God wasn’t in the picture. As I’ve mentioned, if the children had a really good grasp of the methods of science, and they knew that the reason that god wasn’t in the picture is because we’d narrowed down the question to the sort of questions that we can resolve using observations, they’d be able to say, okay. Well, God wasn’t in the picture because we weren’t asking that sort of question. We weren’t asking the sort of question where you would see God coming into the picture. If we broaden the question back out again, then we’ve got a space where we can start to see God coming into the picture. If we’ve only really asked questions about what happens when atoms interact with each other, well we’re not really going to see god at that level. But that thought process isn’t happening in the science classroom. And then the science classroom isn’t being referenced in the religious education classroom, or the home, wherever religion is talked about. So, it’s creating those bridges. And as I say, the most important thing of all, is helping children to see that science and religion are mostly concerned with different sorts of questions. And that we use different sorts of methods to try and work out those different sorts of questions.

RS: Why does it matter?

BB: Well, that’s a wonderful question, because how long have you got? It matters. So, I can give you very many reasons why it matters. One reason it matters is that scholars, historically and today, are completely passionate about these big questions. They motivate many scholars. Some scholars will say that they’re motivated by those questions. Some scholars are sort of wanting to disprove something, but that’s still motivating them. So, those big questions have motivated scholars throughout history. And we have a real problem in science at the moment, where we’re recruiting into science, and into engineering, a very narrow group of children. Children who come from homes where science and engineering are already a focus. I suggest those children can see science and engineering in a wider picture. They can see their parents experiencing science and engineering, but also having a life. You don’t see that at school. You don’t see life around the science, you just see the science. So, one reason it matters, and one reason it matters to policy makers, is we’re losing a lot of good scientists, and good engineers, because we’re not showing them how, what they’re meeting in science and could be meeting in engineering, fits into those bigger questions, and those wider ways of thinking. So, the children are making assumptions about what sort of person a scientist is, what sort of a person an engineer is. And those assumptions are not right, but at the moment, those assumptions are supported by society, because the only ones that have got through, tend to be of that kind. That’s one reason why it matters. It matters because in order to address those big questions, you need science to help you. And science is important and countries want more science. So, that’s one reason. Another reason it matters is because of what children think about themselves. So, it’s really not great if you’ve got children going around thinking that they could be reduced to spaghetti, without really engaging very deeply with the question. We’d really like them to engage with it. We hear a lot on the television now, and on the radio, about how your genes might have dictated what you did. We’ve got genetic engineering, and gene editing, and all sorts of skills available to us now, to kind of go in and change as it were, what we see as the hard bits of you. The bits that are inside. We need young people to be able to embrace the bigger question of what it means to be a person. So, that they can really come to a good conclusion about where they want to go with that. For those of us who are a little old, or heading in that direction, we care because what those young people think is going to affect us. So, for example, are you going to be or am I going to be farmed off with a robot and told, that’s great, you know, you should be lucky you’ve got it, interact with the robot. The robot’s the same as a person, etcetera, etcetera. Or do we want to be able to have a say about how those interactions should be managed? So, those sorts of questions are becoming increasingly present, and pressing for us, because they are really entering our lives now. They used to be wonderful, big, philosophical puzzles. Now they really are the reality on our doorsteps. 

RS: What do you think, through the work that you’ve done here, has been the impact on children’s thinking? What have you seen, when they come away from, after they begin these sorts of workshops? Is there an aha moment that happens? What, what goes on?

BB: We, we do. We have plenty of aha moments during the day. At the moment, my frustration is, that we give them a glimpse of it, because they come here for one day, and we say to them at the beginning of the day, that they are now scholars on a university campus. They’re not school students now with compartments to work between. They’re scholars where they can ask big questions, and explore ideas that they might not feel comfortable about raising in school. And then when they get back into school, it’s kind of back to where they were before, back to the exams, back to the curriculum, back to the classrooms. So, I think we can give them a glimpse of it, and I hope that sustains them. Our research suggests that it does sustain them. I think what would sustain all the children, and a lot better, is if we could now make it work in schools. That’s definitely got to be the next thing. So, we’ve shown that there are significant thinking skills missing in children’s thinking. They don’t only apply to questions bridging science and religion. They apply to questions bridging science and the humanities. In fact, they apply to questions bridging science and everything. So, we’ve shown that those thinking skills are missing, that they need to be taught in schools. We’ve shown the reasons for wanting to put them in schools, to incentivize a new group of scientists and engineers to come through. We’ve shown lots of reasons for investing, as it were in this area of education, that are not only focused on enabling young people to see religious answers. I think that’s important because education has a stance, as we all know, on, on where it is with that. So, by bringing that to policy makers and schools, the next step has to be to get schools, policy makers, curriculum documents, to start teacher training indeed, all starting to kind of take these questions on board. Take the multi-disciplinary approaches on board, and build it into schools.

RS: Needless to say, some of these are very thorny questions. Creation, genesis, evolution, that a parent might say, you have no place as a teacher. This, you know, my, my child will understand through my parenting, where we stand on this. It’s the role of an education system to give them the best possible answers, strictly, you know, within that discipline. What would you say to that parent?

BB: I would say that’s completely fine, I agree. I don’t have a problem at all with that. The problem I have at the moment is that children think they are getting the answers at school. And when we listen to the answers they come up with, all the scholars are horrified. Even the most, as it were, scientistic, the ones that are most committed to the idea of science eventually solving our problems, even those scholars are horrified when they hear what the children say. So, the children will already say, for example, that they’re programmed by their genes. Well, there are not many scholars, even the most extreme scientific scholars, who want to say you are programmed by your genes. So, the children do think they’re getting answers. What I want to create is the environment that you’ve talked about. I want to give the children the thinking skills that enable them to move between the science and the other questions. And we’re really not just doing that. We’re showing them science working with a very small set of questions that science can answer already, and can answer very well. But they’re tiny little questions. They’re a class set of seven carefully chosen springs, nicely weighted down. They get a beautiful straight line graph. Not only that, when they look in the book, they can see what the line graph is meant to look like, and that’s a lot of what they’re getting in school. So, then really not getting to grips with science. And they’re really not getting to grips with what it means to take a question, and then think about how you want to go about answering that question. How far can we go with science? How far can science take us? So, I don’t want them to get a stance on how to answer the question necessarily, I just want them to see that we didn’t get there through science, and we know that’s what they think at the moment. They think they are getting there through science. 

RS: You have a pretty, fairly straightforward approach to this, but this is a pretty hard problem to solve. Do you agree?

BB: I think it’s a huge problem to solve. I think incidentally, that’s one of the reasons why, you know, I couldn’t be luckier and happier that I work with the TWCF, because I just don’t think there are many funders that are willing to take on the enormity of that question, for all the reasons that we’ve started to talk about. So, in education, any connection with religion is difficult. You know, there are all sorts of reasons why another funding organization might not be interested in supporting multi-disciplinary big questions. And because that absolutely is the name of the game, as it were, it means that we can do things, and we can show teachers, and show children, and show parents, that there really isn’t anything controversial, or even sensitive, about helping children understand that experimenting with some spaghetti is really different to trying to understand the behavior of some people. 

BB: Had a go with bending it. We could even put a little gondola onto the spaghetti, and we could then put stones or weights into the gondola, in order to see how far we can bend the spaghetti before it breaks. So, actually, I think I could make this even more scientific, by threading the spaghetti through here. So, I’ve just got a couple of straws on, on bottles. Actually, I’ll put the gondola on there as well, there we are. And thread that through there, and I can now try to see, not only, when the gondola pulls the spaghetti, to the point where the spaghetti breaks. I could also have a look at what happens if I change the length of the spaghetti. You might even be able to make a prediction about whether you think I could put more stones into the gondola if I have the bottles further apart, or if I have the bottles closer together. 

RS: So, so help me understand the point of this experiment? It is to show what?

BB: So, I’m showing you here a set up that’s very amenable to science. I’m showing you here a setup that’s very amenable to science, because I’ve got some spaghetti, while I guess our experience with spaghetti is that, that spaghetti doesn’t change its mind. It doesn’t think, well one time, I’ll break, but maybe the next time I’ll play hard to get and I won’t break. So, I’ve got something here already, that’s going to be relatively straightforward to experiment with. Not only that, I can repeat the investigation, I can do it many times. I can have many pieces of spaghetti, and fortunately, because this spaghetti has been engineered and manufactured, all the bits of spaghetti are pretty much the same length, they’re all pretty much the same width and weight. And so, they do lend themselves to those methods of science. I can do something relatively repeatable and I have lots of very similar bits of spaghetti. Something we know about people, well, you could say they’re very broadly similar. But when it comes to their behavior, they’re very individual. And if you put them in a group, they become very, very individual. So, that idea of repetition becomes a lot more difficult once you’re working with a group of people. If it’s with three people, instead of three strands of spaghetti, and I wanted to understand their behavior as a group, I would already have a question that’s a lot less amenable to science than the question in front of us here.

RS: So, so let me ask you a different way. What are you testing in the kids through this experiment? What are you looking for?

BB: When we do this investigation with the children, what we’re looking for them to come up with, is to tell us that this investigation was amenable to science. They could all in a classroom, come out with a very similar answer. They might all discover a relationship, or a rule, or a pattern that applies with the spaghetti. When we go around the class, and we look at how they’ve tried to explain the people’s behavior, they can already see that the groups were very different. And the people in the groups were very different. So, they can explain back to us that that question about how people behave, is really not as amenable to science as the sorts of questions as that they’re used to seeing in their science classroom. 

RS: So, one part of this is pure science, just understanding what’s going on here. But the other part of this, is trying to understand group dynamics? Is that correct?

BB: I’d say it’s not really either of those. It’s neither particularly focused on just understanding the science, nor the group dynamics. It’s really about seeing the transition of the question from the one to the other, so that you realize that although science was quite good at answering the science question, which was the question about how the spaghetti behaved. When you try to apply the scientific methods, those ideas of observation, repeatability, experimenting preferably with just a natural phenomenon, rather than a social phenomenon, or a psychological phenomenon. When you move over into those other sorts of questions, your scientific methods are not that helpful. If you wanted to understand how those groups of children were interacting with each other, you could observe. But you find out an awful lot by asking them. I don’t find out very much in my science, by talking to my spaghetti. So, the science with the spaghetti works very well, because my science is focused on what I can observe, and what you can observe. We can get to a good explanation of what the spaghetti is doing, just by collectively observing and talking about our observations. But if you really want to understand how that group of children are interacting, we would like to be able to call on some other methods too. We’d like to ask them, and talking to the spaghetti, you know, that’s, that’s not, not appropriate.