Sciensation Diaries: Inquiry Based History Education

Chapter Name: 18th Century Political Formations
Topic: Awadh
Class7, Tejasvi Vidyaranya, Habsiguda

PART ONE: Who was the weakest? The Mughal king or the farmers?

Einstein asks: Who do you think was the weakest person in Awadh during the rule of Burhan ul-Mulk Saadat Khan? You'll have to answer this question based on the information in the passage.
Answer1: The Rajput zamindars and Afghans of Rohilkhand as their lands were taken away.
Answer2: The Mughal appointee jagirs as they were removed from their posts and Saadat Khan appointed his own people.
Answer3: The Mughal king as Saadat Khan was running the kingdom with his own people, although under Mughal kingdom, for name-sake.

We then do a role play to understand the dynamics, between Mughal King, Saadat Khan, jagirdars and the people of Awadh.
Einstein: Since the Mughal isn't aware of Saadat Khan's undercover moves, he isn't doing anything. How can you claim that he is the weakest?
Adith's rebuttal: But Mughal King was already fighting a war, thanks to Nadir Shah's invasion. Read the previous topic he says!
Einstein: But then the king needn't look after everything, his relatives can take care of the issue.
Adith: Some of his relatives were already killed by the jagirdars and that's why Mughal empire was weakening.

Einstein then presents his answer that he thinks that farmers were the weakest under Saadat Khan's rule as they were forced to pay the taxes. The students then debate between the four possible answers- 1) Mughal King 2) fired jagirdars 3) rajput/afghan landlords 4) farmers

Adith then asks - I read this phrase- "revenue farmers". If the farmers are generating revenue for the state how can they be called weak?
Einstein responds- The revenue farmers are jagirdars who only collect the taxes from the farmers. I am stating that the farmers are the weakest and not the revenue farmers.

One of the students tells that farmers couldn't protest against the taxes as they were dependent on the state for money as the money lenders and mahajans would lend money to the state and only the jagirdars could take loans from the money lenders.

PART-TWO COMMERCE

My question: Why did the revenue farmers pay a fixed amount?
Chandrahaasa: If the farmer earnt less than a fixed amount, he'd get a loss, if he earn't more he'd get a profit. The fixed amount might have been an average.
Vrithika: If he is getting a loss, why would he agree for a fixed amount?
My question: The jagirdars were confident of a profit, why do you think they were confident, you have a few hints in the passage!
Vrithika: The jagirdars had the freedom to collect taxes.
Aashana: The jagirdars could assess and then collect taxes.
Einstein: Awadh had fertile lands with rich alluvial soil.

My next question: If you are confident of earning a high amount why would you want to pay a fixed amount? Let us say you are confident of earning Rs5 everyday, would you prefer paying Rs1 as tax everyday or 20% of the money.
Students: Rs1 and we may have to pay Rs2 if we earn Rs10, in case we agree to pay 20%.
My question: Why would the king agree to this?
Students: He is getting Rs1 everyday.

My question: Why do the jagirdars assess the revenue? Students faced a difficulty in understanding, we then took example of districts of Telangana and looked at ficitious figures of earnings.
Students: The jagirdars could look at earnings of other farmers to compare if the revenue figures are accurate.
My question: The jagirdar would want to find out if the farmers made a profit, he'd probably want to tax them well but wouldn't kill them, why do you think so?
Students: He would earn only if they live and continue to earn.
My question: Why is it hard to find out if they made profits, how did Saadat Khan find out?
We then did a role play with Rs10,000 and Rs6000 being actual revenue/expenditure figures while Rs5000, Rs7000 were reported figures. Students observed that numbers could be cooked up.
Students: The accounts of the jagirdars were carefully checked to prevent cheating.

PART THREE: What can we learn

My question: If we have started a chain of chocolate shops and if we have appointed ten different people to manage them, why should we monitor their accounts?
Students: They could be cheating us.
My question: Why do you think Saadat Khan was monitoring them well?
Einstein: Saadat Khan himself cheated the Mughal Kingdom, so he was scared if people would cheat him.
My question: What can we learn from this lesson?
Students: Saadat Khan had a good administration system.
My question: Why do you study history?
Students: To learn from mistakes and positives of others, may be! To be able to travel to that time may be!
My question: How can we make history interesting?
Students: By asking cognitive questions or may be through role plays!

I concluded the discussion with a small remark about content appreciation. I had mentioned that the History textbook is prepared by some of the best intellectuals of the country, but we as a sytem have, for a variety of reasons, failed in explaining why each sentence is being explained. I had explained flip learning and the approach of bringing sensemaking into the classroom, besides information transfer. The students recalled examples of phrases which we tried to comprehend with the help of questions- let it be assessment of revenue, fertile lands or accounts being checked. The idea is to ask- why is this sentence being explained to me.

I had asked- if this book has 200 pages, how many pages do you think the author wants you to remember? The students reply with 50, I differed, I said may be 1000. I asked how many pages did we discuss today? They replied- One page. How many pages can you write now, I ask. They replied five to ten pages! I asked so how do you think understand and interpret why each sentence is being explained? The student said that they would ask questions and have discussions. If they can't think of questions, they'd ask their friends to ask questions.

We leave the discussion with a homework. The students had varied professional interests, there were aspiring engineers, designers, sportstars, bureucrats and little Einstein wanted to pursue a career in Cosmology. Their homework was to apply the learnings from this lesson into managing 20 people who would work with them , as a team, to manage 20 different projects.

I am excited to read what they'd write. We finished the class with students starting a voting process for another 'boring topic' for the next discussion.

PS: It was a two hour long class, with more than 70% of the class having loads of questions to ask, I have just described the highlights here!

Moving Education from Content to Process

IntroductionThe models used to understand learning influence the material/pedagogy/assessments, often without the

curriculum designer realizing it.Traditionally, educationists have either visualized or designed teaching processes which would be appropriate while educating pupils who'd have to start from the scratch, who'd have to remember a lot of rules.

However, Noam Chomsky's Language Acquisition Theory and Jean Piaget's Developmental Psychology Theory suggests that children already know quite a few rules or they already know how to find patterns. So then the purpose of education is activate these inherent capabilities and unleash an exponential burst of information/insights.

The idea is co-create the understanding with the help of the students, by involving the students in the process of exploration.

Neuro-Psychological Context

* Every child is wired differently

* Every child constructs meaning based on sensory cues (Constructivist Learning Theory of John Dewey)

* Mirror neurons help in mimicking other's actions (the example of a monkey throwing a cap is quite profound)

Bloom's Taxonomy

1. Knowledge Questions: Who is the president of India?
2. Comprehension Questions: Why do we have a president of India?
3. Application Questions: If a country is not a republic, would it have a president?
4. Analysis Question: Why do we need a head of a state?
5. Evaluation Question: Which structure would you prefer - a republic or a democracy?
6. Synthesis Question: Can you define your government structure?

The first three layers are considered to be factual questions while the next three are considered to be cognitive or higher order questions. We shall now try and see how we could apply this question classification system to understand various educational processes.

Process

Now that we agree that we'd have to move from content to process, keeping in mind children's diverse inherent capabilities, it is important to understand how the word process shall be interpretted in this context.

A very simple and probably the most basic process is the imitation game, wherein the children are encouraged to spell out names, catch a ball, sing a tune or may be write down alphabets. This would be a Knowledge recall process.

Another very profound process would be net practice, which is done after the student learns basic techniques can comprehend their utility. In the nets, the student has to apply the techniques as per the situation. For instance a drawing teacher may teach how to draw curves and may be how to color using pastels, the child could be made to comprehend this by doing this again and again. The drawing teacher can then ask the child to apply these techniques, to draw may be a duck or say a tiger, which again is a kind of imitation, while applying some known principles.

Good teachers evolve the learning process to the next three levels, which are not exactly very hands-on, they are more cerebral or intellectual or may be minds-on. The students can be asked questions which analyse a particular component of the whole process. May be something like why should my elbow be straight and facing the bowler or why should the seam point towards thirdman? Analysis questions help a student in constructing his own meaning for the learnt techniques.

Basis the analysis, the students can then ask evaluation questions to judge efficacy of various techniques under varied conditions. Let it be an artist or an engineer or a scientist, judgement or evaluation is a very crucial everyday process. This can then be taken to the next level by giving problems to students and asking them to create their own ideas or solutions. 

Tangibility

* Note the subtle difference between application process and synthesis process. In application phase, a student applies a certain rule or technique, in synthesis phase, the student tries to combine multiple ideas. The former can be done mechanically if the various steps and the dextrity of combining multiple steps is acquired through practice. 

* Synthesis step can have both tangible and intangible components depending on the objective. However, the intangible creative component is inevitable as the child has to think about combination and re-combinations of the various ideas he has.

Summary of the Six Processes

* Knowledge process helps a child in acquiring the motorskills to use a certain technique.

* Comprehension process helps the child in understand various contexts in which the technique was applied.

* Application process invites the child to apply the process in select contexts.

* Analysis process lets the child investigate various aspects of the techniques and learn from them.

* Evaluation process helps the child in judging the utility of various techniques under varied conditions.

* Synthesis process is about combining the ideas (First three steps) and understanding of ideas (Step4,5) and creating new ideas/projects.

These six processes describe the "evolution of an idea in the child's mind".

Note that we can not color processes in black and white, the statements and the classification system could have a variety of counter-examples.

Two-Fold Approach- Analysis and Synthesis

Construe the Constitution, a Sciensation event, used a two-fold approach, so does Design Thinking. The first three steps are acquired via benchmarking/literature review. However the educator must be aware of the three steps and shall perform them incase the student is not clear about an idea.

Evaluation and Analysis are done together in Construe the Constitution while asking questions about a specific part of the Constitution. Evaluation and Synthesis are done together while creating something of their own- let it be a constitution or an ammendment. 

This example asserts that we can simplify the six steps into two simple steps inorder to simplify the process for the learner. However, the educator must be aware of the other four processes in order to troubleshoot and handhold the student while working on projects/problems.

Why process and not content

* Every child is unique

* New use cases and perspectives of the content emerge

* The child internalizes the concepts and absorbs it into his worldview

* Inlines with the constructivist learning paradigm

Sciensation Pedagogy Program

Problem Statement: How do redesign our curriculum/pedagogy/assessments so as to induce a philosophical understanding of the subject.

Requirements:

1. Insights/Universal Principles: Insights over information, universal principals derived out of the inventory of facts.
2. Connecting the dots: How does the student apply this knowledge in an other context?
3. Assumptions- more from less for more: Fewer laws which can produce more logical predictions which could in turn explain a lot of phenomenon.
4. Intuitive Presentation: An analogy/metaphor to implant the abstract formalism into the students' worldview.
5. Strategy: Improve the child's understand of strategy and decision making. 
6. Discovery Thinking: The context of the discovery can be presented so that the child learns the process of a discovery and can experience the eureka moments and the elegance of the concept.
7. Research Questions: The student can be exposed to research questions, explored by the academia.
8. Problem Solving: Analysis of the curriculum material can be followed by a synthesis project where the student solves a problem or creates something.
9. Academic Rigor: The student shall be asked to present and all his arguments shall be critically questioned for evidence/proofs. Questions shall reveal the conceptuals gaps  of the child's understanding.
10. Inquiry Based Learning: The curriculum can be transformed into questions through which the child discovers the concepts himself. Assessments can utilize higher order questions which test the understanding of the thought process rather than the content (open book assessments could be preferred).
11. Philosophy of X: The educators can be provided material which helps them in understanding the Philosophy of the discipline, which could promote an elegant, simple and appliable understanding of the discipline.
12. Worldview: The lesson plan must foreshadow how the class could evolve it's worldview.

Examples:

Insights/Universal Principles

1. "Second largest kindgom chooses aggressive warfare while the number one player chooses defensive warfare. The next few empires can choose flanking warfare while small groups are better off engaging in guerilla warfare"
   
   This is Jack Trout's retelling of Claussewitz's strategies as described in the book "On War". This idea can be applied in a variety of contexts. It explains how a player can attack other players, basis the amount of resources he has. Veerappan would be better confining himself inside Nallamalla forests whose terrain remains his strength and his adversary's adversary. Google better focus on defending its user base from invaders, they needn't attack any competitors head-on, which only gives them mileage.
   
2. "Constitution: A body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed."
   
   This could be presented through inquiry based learning/discovery thinking approach. Discussion starts off with questions around why we need to live in a society and why we need collective action. We then discuss need for permanent institutions and procedural convictions to establish authority and hence the constitution. The various aspects of the constitutions can be defined by brainstorming a constitution for governing hobby classes.
   
   A problem solving activity could be handed out at the end of the session, with students working on ammendments/ appendices or may be a constitution of their own.
   
3. "To introduce the concept of electron delocalization from the perspective of molecular orbitals, to understand the relationship between electron delocalization and resonance, and to learn the principles of electron movement used in writing resonance structures in Lewis notation, known as the curved arrow formalism"
   
   Middle monkey game could be used to introduce students to the idea of delocalization. An analogy could be constructed- ball: electron, boys: atoms and middle monkey: electrophile. The students could then appreciate why electron charge delocalization is essentially, keeping in mind the subatomic electro-magnetic interactions which govern the electron dynamics.